Knowing the unknown
Robot butlers that tidy your house or cook you a meal have long been the dream of science-fiction writers and artificial intelligence researchers alike.But if robots are ever going to move effectively around our constantly changing homes or workspaces performing such complex tasks, they will need to be more aware of their own limitations, according to researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Most successful robots today tend to be used either in fixed, carefully controlled environments, such as manufacturing plants, or for performing fairly simple tasks such as vacuuming a room, says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. Carrying out complicated sequences of actions in a cluttered, dynamic environment such as a home will require robots to be more aware of what they do not know, and therefore need to find out, Kaelbling says. That is because a robot...