Although it’s not a question that will come up in many trivia games, two researchers decided to find out how many attempts it takes for a robot to learn how to flip a pancake.
The answer: 50
What’s more interesting about this experiment is the techniques used to teach the robot to flip in the first place. Kinesthetic teaching is used to begin with, this involves someone actually holding the robotic arm and performing the action of flipping. Then Policy learning by Weighting Exploration with Returns (PoWER) algorithms are employed to slowly get the action right.
The experiment was carried out by Dr. Petar Kormushev and Dr. Sylvain Calinon of the Italian Institute of Technology.