The robots are now coming for your childhood games.

In a significant breakthrough for robotic manipulation of real-world objects, MIT researchers have created a robot that can play Jenga.

If you’re thinking that Jenga isn’t nearly as hard as chess – which robots have been doing for a while now – you’d be wrong.

While chess relies on visual cues and cognitive functions, Jenga requires that, as well as mastery of physical interaction.

Here’s The Guardian:

“Playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces,” said Prof Alberto Rodriguez from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You can see the machine in action here:

The robot touches the tower to learn how and when to move blocks.

The researchers placed a two-pronged industrial robot arm with a force sensor in its wrist by the Jenga tower and allowed it to explore rather than using traditional machine-learning techniques that could require data from tens of thousands of block-extraction attempts in order to capture every possible scenario.

The robot learns in real time by interacting with the structure.

The next step? Conquering a human player.

So far, thankfully, we are still beating the robot.

[source:guardian]