Chinese Factory Robot Can Read Human Coworkers’ Minds With ‘96% Accuracy’

Seemingly even more intuitive and attentive than some significant others, a robot at an assembly factory in China has learned to read people’s minds with 96% accuracy, according to a report by South China Morning Post (SCMP), via WION.

Built by a team at the Intelligent Manufacturing Innovation Technology Center in China Three Gorges University, the collaborative robot (or “cobot”) is able to both tap into a human coworker’s brain waves and gather electric signals from the latter’s muscles when assembling a complex product, negating the need to communicate deliverables with the machine.

After “hundreds of hours of training,” it could apparently pick up a human worker’s intentions and respond by carrying the object and placing it on the assembly line, as well as hand him a tool or part without being told. Yuanfa Dong, the experiment’s lead scientist, described in the peer-reviewed China Mechanical Engineering journal that such advancements could significantly speed up the production process.

While it is said to have done its job with 96% success, the robot sometimes failed to pick up cues due to the nature of humans being easily distracted, unhelped by the repetitive tasks of factory work. As such, according to SCMP, it only followed 70% of mental commands.

In addition, human workers would have to concentrate pretty hard for the robot to understand them.

For now, the bot has only been tested in a lab, and further experimentation in factories would be required to test the scalability of the technology.

[via South China Morning Post and WION, cover photo 91432354 © Kittipong Jirasukhanont | Dreamstime.com]