Simon the robot gets an upgrade

Simon the robot is one who is able to learn new tasks as he interacts with his environment, and has just gotten an upgrade so to speak, parading his newfound abilities at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Atlanta on Monday. Over there, he was tasked to identify a handful of colorful items including a blue book, a green plastic case and a red flower among others, placing them in their respective color bin. Simon is capable of facial recognition and sound localization to help him learn, and nice to know there is a panic button to turn him off just in case he loses some nuts. There is no word on commercialization of Simon just yet, so we guess he’ll be confined to a lab in the meantime.