Folks from University of Pennsylvania have achieved a great step when it comes to robotics. Engineers using the Willow Garage PR2 robot have manged to teach the PR2 robot to read.

The PR2 robot utilizes an onboard camera that is placed in its head, a special method to identify and separate texts, its also equipped with a Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) software for words identification. As for this robot, its named Graspy because it has been developed in the University's GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) lab, at the moment, it can recognize printed or handwritten text. In addition, it can even read the text aloud, but this option doesn't work all the time. Could the PR2 be a be potential application for use for reading captchas in the future?

[via Ubergizmo]