Researchers from MIT and Harvard suggest that applying theories from cognitive science and educational psychology to the area of human-robot interaction can help humans build more accurate mental models of their robot collaborators, which could boost performance and improve safety in cooperative workspaces. Image: MIT News, iStockphoto By Adam Zewe | MIT News Office Scientists …
MIT PhD student Martin Nisser tests self-reconfiguring robot blocks, or ElectroVoxels, in microgravity. Photo: Steve Boxall/ZeroG By Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL If faced with the choice of sending a swarm of full-sized, distinct robots to space, or a large crew of smaller robotic modules, you might want to enlist the latter. Modular robots, like …
Innovative technologies are under development to reduce plastic litter at sea by at least 50% © MOHAMED ABDULRAHEEM, Shutterstock By Gareth Willmer ‘It’s the scale of it – it’s a global problem. You can guarantee that any beach you walk on, you’ll find pieces of plastic,’ said James Comerford, a senior researcher in materials and …
Beach bots, sea ‘raptors’ and marine toolsets mobilised to get rid of marine litter Read More »
The 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. In this post, we give a flavour of the final presentation. The collective intelligence of army ants, and the robots they inspire Radhika Nagpal Radhika’s research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, …
Radhika Nagpal at #NeurIPS2021: the collective intelligence of army ants Read More »
How can we make a robot learn in the real world while ensuring safety? In this work, we show how it’s possible to face this problem. The key idea to exploit domain knowledge and use the constraint definition to our advantage. Following our approach, it’s possible to implement learning robotic agents that can explore and …
Robot reinforcement learning: safety in real-world applications Read More »
Congratulations to Huy Ha and Shuran Song who have won the CoRL 2021 best system paper award! Their work, FlingBot: the unreasonable effectiveness of dynamic manipulations for cloth unfolding, was highly praised by the judging committee. “To me, this paper constitutes the most impressive account of both simulated and real-world cloth manipulation to date.”, commented …
Interview with Huy Ha and Shuran Song: CoRL 2021 best system paper award winners Read More »
AI-designed (C-shaped) organisms push loose stem cells (white) into piles as they move through their environment. Credit: Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman By Joshua Brown, University of Vermont Communications To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now …
Team builds first living robots that can reproduce Read More »
Proteus and sunset with the Swiss mountains in the background at Lake Thun (photo credit: Gallus Kaufmann) In 2018, Christian Engler felt he’d studied enough theory at the ETH Zurich and longed to put it all into practice. It was evident to Christian that the best way to get hands-on experience was to start something …
From a garage to Swiss lakes and rivers: the story of Proteus, an underwater robot Read More »
Diagram of MURAL, our method for learning uncertainty-aware rewards for RL. After the user provides a few examples of desired outcomes, MURAL automatically infers a reward function that takes into account these examples and the agent’s uncertainty for each state. Although reinforcement learning has shown success in domains such as robotics, chip placement and playing …
In this final video of our focus series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist, you’ll meet Dennis Hong speaking about the robots he and his team have created (locomotion and new ways of moving; an autonomous car for the visually impaired; disaster relief robots), Star Wars …
Real Roboticist focus series #6: Dennis Hong (Making People Happy) Read More »
