The first public robotics school

The method is ingenious

The robots are in school and with human teachers using virtual reality glasses to teach everything from simple tasks to refined motor skills.

China created the first public robotics school, where machines learn not only to execute commands, but also to adapt, improvise and act autonomously. And the goal is to create general-purpose robots ready to work in homes, factories, even in commerce.

The training center located in Hefei in Anhui province is officially called the training environment for intelligent embedded robots, but in practice it is a real school for robots. A simulated factory floor where robotic arms receive hands-on classes.

The human instructor puts on virtual reality glasses and with motion sensors teaches the machine step by step, and in one example, the robot learns to hold a wrench and tighten a screw precisely, and with each gesture, the system captures physical data from the real world, not digital simulations that are used to train the machine's learning algorithms.

The generalization of education

What makes the difference here is the massive repetition of tasks with unpredictable variables, each robot receives about 200 action sequences per day directly from its instructors, this means that it not only memorizes movements, but develops situational understanding, learning, for example, to identify different types of screws or adapt to the environment if something falls to the ground or is out of place.

This approach helps robots generalize learning and operate more accurately in the real world, where improvising is the norm. Instead of relying exclusively on AI models generated in virtual environments, the center uses data from the physical world as fuel for the robots' neural networks, making learning more robust, more human.

Artificial intelligence adapts to reality by learning to deal with textures, angles, and unexpected objects, and since the system is open to associated companies, each robot acquires knowledge from different sectors, logistics, home care, customer service, inventory management, among others.

It is a true paradox, humans who today have jobs teaching humanoid robots to work and who could one day be replaced by them.