Robots can play Angry Birds, too — and help kids with disabilities

Researchers at Georgia Tech are enlisting humanoid robots to play Angry Birds with the help of kids suffering from motor-skill and cognitive disabilities.

Kids rehabilitating from these types of disabilities generally perform a series of repetitive and often boring motions as a part of their treatment. To make this task less of a chore and to gather information about social bots, researchers paired kids with a humanoid robot and a tablet and asked kids to teach the robot how to play the one-time mobile hit.