According to the Sina Technology News on June 19, 2013, researchers at Cornell University have developed a mind-reading robot that can predict what people want to do next. With this technology, you could achieve your dreams of having a cold drink magically in your hand on a hot summer day or your cup got refilled magically when it gets empty.

Like Us on Facebook

The mind-reading robot is a PR2 personal robot, designed by Willow Garage. There is a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera on the robot, so it is able to analyze your body movements. After identifying your movements, it starts to search through its database of various household activities and decides which action will likely follow.

For instance, when you're done with your dinner and you want to place the leftovers into the fridge. The robot sees that you are picking up a container, then it will goes to the fridge and opens the door for you, as that action is very likely to happen next. In addition, the robot could also pour your beer or coffee, put the dirty dishes away as well as a number of other menial tasks.

Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research, said: "We extract the general principles of how people behave. Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it. The robot builds a vocabulary of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities."

Scientists from Cornell claim the robot made correct predictions 82% of the time when looking one second into the future, 71% for three seconds and 57% for 10 seconds.

"Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time," Saxena said. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action.  Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond."