Apr 13, 2010 11:00 pm

Simon the robot, who has the ability to learn new tasks, got his first public outing at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta Monday.

To view a full video report click here.

Prior to the show he was a project of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Socially Intelligent Machines lab for three years.

"We're interested in machine learning algorithms where you don't need to necessarily be an expert in machine learning to interact," said Andrea Thomaz. She and her team of researchers are working on robots that could be installed in the home and don't need to be preprogrammed with a set of tasks.

At the CHI conference Simon's job was identifying a few colorful items: a blue book, a green plastic case, a red flower and several others, and putting them into the corresponding color's bin.

To begin teaching Simon, a researcher asks him, "Simon, can you hear me?" He responds in the ubiquitous text-to-speech voice, "Yes." The researcher then asks him if he wants to learn something and he reaches out his robotic arm and grabs whatever the researcher is holding. He brings it towards his face and looks at it. In one demonstration he was given a blue book and told to put the book in the blue bin. He rotated, dropped the book in the bin and said, "There you go."