Machenta let the public teach its robot at King's Cross
Edward Johns took a Machenta robot into a London train station and handed the teaching over to strangers.
Machenta put a robot in the middle of London's King's Cross station and let strangers teach it. Edward Johns, posting for the company, says members of the public walked up with their own objects and taught the robot on the spot. He calls it a first for them.
The pitch behind the company is that a robot learns a new task from a single human demonstration rather than from a large pile of collected data. A station concourse is about the least forgiving place to try that. Random objects nobody picked in advance, random people doing the teaching, lighting and crowds nobody controlled, and no second take.
What the post actually shows
Johns posted a video of what they saw and framed the trip as "just to see what would happen". He does not give a success rate, a number of attempts, a number of people, or a list of the objects people brought. So the honest read is that the demo happened and the clip is the evidence, and the hit rate across the day is unknown. Nothing in the post says how many teaching attempts failed, and nothing says they all worked.
That matters because public, uncontrolled demos are the interesting kind and also the easiest to edit down. A video from a station is still a video chosen by the company. Until somebody reports attempt counts, treat it as a promising field test rather than a measured result.
Why the timing is loud
This lands one week after Machenta announced itself. Johns says as much in the post, "Last week, we announced @Machenta_. This week, we brought a robot to the middle of London's King's Cross station." The company came out of stealth days earlier and has already shown robots taught a packaging line in a controlled setting.
Going from a staged line to a train station in a week is the right direction. The number that would settle it, how often a stranger's single demonstration actually took, is not in the post.
For the first time, we let members of the public walk up with their own objects and teach a robot on the spot.
Just to see what would happen.
Sound like you were at the demo
One email a day. Under three minutes. The demos, the deployments and the part the press release left out.