This robot learned how to cook by watching YouTube videos

It’s only a matter of time before robots start to take over even the more complex human jobs and it looks like chefs will be the first to go. Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a robot that can essentially learn how to cook by watching YouTube videos.

Robots? Learning from YouTube videos? We sure hope they don’t check out any of the thousands of (possibly fake) prank videos on the giant video site; or, worse, that Chocolate Rain guy. The last thing we need are robots trying to sing in a rich, quasi-pop bass. Researchers at the University of Maryland are currently working to train robots to act on visual stimuli, and their research has achieved some interesting early results. The project, funded by DARPA’s Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation, and Execution program, initially concentrated on the most important robot task of them all—teaching machines how to cook.