An easier way to teach robots new skills

With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it […]

Joystick-operated robot could help surgeons treat stroke remotely

MIT engineers have developed a telerobotic system to help surgeons quickly and remotely treat patients experiencing a stroke or aneurysm. With a modified joystick, surgeons in one hospital may control a robotic arm at another location to safely operate on a patient during a critical window of time that could save the patient’s life and […]

MIT’s FutureMakers programs help kids get their minds around — and hands on — AI

As she was looking for a camp last summer, Yabesra Ewnetu, who’d just finished eighth grade, found a reference to MIT’s FutureMakers Create-a-thon. Ewnetu had heard that it’s hard to detect bias in artificial intelligence because AI algorithms are so complex, but this didn’t make sense to her. “I was like, well, we’re the ones […]

Manipulating the future

As robots evolve, society’s collective imagination forever ponders what else robots can do, with recent fascinations coming to life as self-driving cars or robots that can walk and interact with objects as humans do. These sophisticated systems are powered by advances in deep learning that triggered breakthroughs in robotic perception, so that robots today have […]

Solving the challenges of robotic pizza-making

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is […]

How to help humans understand robots

Scientists who study human-robot interaction often focus on understanding human intentions from a robot’s perspective, so the robot learns to cooperate with people more effectively. But human-robot interaction is a two-way street, and the human also needs to learn how the robot behaves. Thanks to decades of cognitive science and educational psychology research, scientists have […]