Learning repeated tasks through human demonstrations

Samenvatting

An automation solution which is developed to pack oranges cannot be easily transformed to sort pears, or grade grapes. A person can easily be taught to carry out these different tasks. Our automation solutions are not nearly as versatile. What if you could teach a robot to perform a task, just like you would a new employee. At Wageningen we are developing a robotic solution, which can learn to perform new tasks by observing human teachers. Such a robot offers more value per unit, since it can learn to perform multiple tasks, for example, an orange sorting robot can easily be taught to perform banana packaging, or apple grading.

The invited talk was part of the 2023 edition of the yearly Food Technology congress, under the topic Food Processing & Machinery, held in Den Bosch, Netherlands.