CAMBRIDGE, MA—Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are attempting to make robots smart enough to work effectively with people. They believe the key may be cross training.
“People aren’t robots; they don’t do things the same way every single time,” says Julie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “And so, there is a mismatch between the way we program robots to perform tasks in exactly the same way each time and what we need them to do if they are going to work in concert with people.”