As robots move into the real world, they’ll need to become more adaptable. But right now, it’s hard to transfer skills from one machine to another. A new system makes this possible. One of the most popular ways to teach robots is to have a human show them what to do—either by physically guiding the robot’s joints, using remote control, or even drawing the desired motion. But those skills are indelibly tied to each specific robot. If a company upgrades to a new robot with a different design, the skill breaks, and the robot has to be trained from scratch. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne have now sidestepped this challenge by teaching robots to understand the limits of their own joints. In a paper published in Science Robotics , the new approach allowed multiple robots to complete a task based on a single human demonstration. “With new designs come different capabilities and constraints,” Durgesh Haribhau Salunkhe, a co-author of the paper told Ars Technica .…