The researchers at Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have created an Humanoid robot called iCub. After being instructed how to hold the bow and release the arrow, the robot learns by itself to aim and shoot arrows at the target. It learns to hit the center of the target in only 8 trials.

It learns to hit the center of the target in only 8 trials. The learning algorithm, called ARCHER (Augmented Reward Chained Regression) algorithm, was developed and optimized specifically for problems like the archery training, which have a smooth solution space and prior knowledge about the goal to be achieved.

This research will be presented at the Humanoids 2010 conference in December 2010 in USA.