For humans, finding a lost wallet buried under a pile of items is pretty straightforward — we simply remove things from the pile until we find the wallet. But for a robot, this task involves complex reasoning about the pile and objects in it, which presents a steep challenge. MIT researchers previously demonstrated a robotic arm that combines visual information and radio frequency (RF) signals to find hidden objects that were tagged with RFID tags (which reflect signals sent by an antenna). Building off that work, they have now developed…
