Part 3: Reading Comprehension II Directions: There are four passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice (2 mark each). B Many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to tons of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically, it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other. That’s the theory behind Tellex’s “Million Object Challenge.” The goal is for research robots around the world to learn how to spot and handle simple items from bowls to bananas, upload their data to the Cloud, and allow other robots to analyze and use the information. Tellex’s lab in Providence, Rhode Island, has the air of a playful preschool. On the day I visit, a Baxter robot, an industrial machine, stands among oversized blocks, scanning a small hairbrush. It moves its right arm noisily back and forth above the object, taking multiple pictures with its camera and measuring depth with a sensor. Then, with its two-pronged gripper, it tries different grasps that might allow it to lift the brush. Once it has the object in the air, it shakes it to make sure the grasp is secure. If so, the robot has learned how to pick up one more thing. Tellex and her team have gathered and are now sharing data on roughly 200 items. Other scientists can contribute their robots’ own data, and Tellex hopes that together they will build up a library of information on how robots should handle a million different items. Eventually, robots facing a crowded shelf will be able to “identify the pen in front of them and pick it up.” Projects like this are possible because many research robots use the same standard framework for programming, known as ROS. Once one machine learns a given task, it can pass the data on to others—and those machines can upload feedback that will in turn refine the instructions given to subsequent machines. Such progress might seem incremental now, but in the next 5 to 10 years, we can expect to see “an explosion in the ability of robots,” says Saxena, now CEO of a startup company called Brain of Things. As more researchers contribute to and refine Cloud-based knowledge, he says, “robots should have access to all the information they need, at their fingertips.” 75. To do some routine tasks, robots need to _____.