Politeness isn't enough if you are programmed to go from A to B. However, robots will play an increasing role in human society. This raises questions about how they'll interact with us.
Boris Katz, MIT CSAIL research scientist, stated that robots will soon be part of our world and need to be able to communicate with us in human terms. This statement was made in response to a new research paper. They must be able to recognize when it's time to help and when they need to look at what they can do to stop it from happening.
The paper is a first serious attempt to understand how humans and machines interact socially. This is something that the team claims the paper will be able to address as roboticists become more involved in everyday life.
To develop predictable and realistic interactions between robots, researchers conducted simulations in a controlled environment. One robot observes another perform a task and attempts to figure out the goal. Then it attempts to assist or hinder the other in the task.
Ravi Tejwani, a fellow project leader, stated in a statement that we have created a new mathematical framework to model social interaction between agents. If you're a robot and want to travel to location X and I'm another robot, I can help you get there faster. This could mean moving X closer or finding another better X. Or taking any action that you needed to at X. The plan can be formulated in a way that allows for the discovery of the how. We also specify the what mathematically by defining social interactions.
The current model is a simple 2D simulation. The team is currently working on a 3D version and adding a neural network-based robot planning tool to speed up the robots' learning from these actions.
