Remember that pancake flipping robot we posted about last year? The same researchers are still investigating upper-body kinesthetic teaching in robots and a reader let us know about the latest results:

The team of researchers from Italy and Japan, lead by Dr. Petar Kormushev, has taught a Japanese humanoid robot how to clean a whiteboard. The approach that the team developed is called "upper-body kinesthetic teaching", and can be applied to a wide variety of vertical surface related tasks, such as window cleaning, wall painting, wallpaper fitting, drawing on a wall, etc.

The new research will be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May of 2011 in Shanghai, China. If you just can't wait to read the research, you're in luck because the paper is already online: Upper-body Kinesthetic Teaching of a Free-standing Humanoid Robot (PDF format).