THIS CRAFTY ROBOT CAN WRITE IN LANGUAGES IT’S NEVER SEEN BEFORE

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Researchers at Brown University just got a robot to do something as linguistically improbable as it is beautiful: After training to hand-write Japanese characters, the robot then turned around and started to copy words in a slew of other languages it’d never written before, including Hindi, Greek, and English, just by looking at examples of that handwriting. Not only that, it could do English in print and cursive. Oh, and then it copied a drawing of the Mona Lisa on its own for good measure.

Like walking on two legs, handwriting is one of those seemingly simple human charms that is in fact elaborate. When you write a word, you have to know where to put down your pen, how long to draw a line and in which direction, then pick up your pen, sometimes mid-letter (like with a capital A), and know where to put it down again.

Their learning system is split into two distinct models. A “local” model is in charge of what’s going on with the current stroke of the pen—so aiming in the right direction and determining how to end the stroke. And a “global” model is in charge of moving the robot’s writing utensil to the next stroke of the character.

To train the robot, the researchers fed it a corpus of Japanese characters, and provided information about how the component strokes of a character are supposed to work. “From that, it basically learns a model that looks at pixels of the image and predicts where it needs to go to start the next stroke, and then where it needs to move while it’s drawing the stroke to reproduce the image,” Tellex says.

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