Robotics

Prof. John Hansman speaks to Scientific American reporter Peter Hall about the development of self-flying cargo planes. “We’ve been flying unmanned air vehicles, or drones, of reasonably large size,” for a while, says Hansman. “A small quadcopter drone doesn’t have to have the level of redundancy that a large vehicle that could hurt people on the ground or carry people needs.” However, “there will always be some level of human supervision,” even if the safety pilot is taken out of the cockpit in the years to come, Hansman adds.  

Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20 speaks with CNN’s Amy Gunia about her work developing TESSERAE, a space architecture project involving magnetic, self-assembling tiles that could one day be used to create structures in space. “The tiles can be stacked on top of each other inside a rocket and released in space, where they can autonomously attach to each other—employing electro-permanent magnets, cameras and AI—to create a predetermined shape,” Gunia explains. The tiles “can self-assemble into something way bigger than the size of the rocket that they came up in,” Ekblaw shares, which could allow humans to build “science-fiction-worthy, big, grand structures” in space. 

BIOSENTER, a soft, snake-like robot developed by MIT researchers, could autonomously snap photos, administer drugs, and take small biopsy samples within cramped and difficult to reach areas of the body such as the small intestine, writes Mack DeGeurin for Popular Science. “BIOSENTER has four inflatable chambers arranged along either side of its tubular body. These chambers inflate and deflate in alternating combinations, which is how it moves [forward] and bends to change directions,” explains DeGeurin. “Keeping with the snake theme, the robot’s exterior is fitted with a textured, scale-like coating that improves its traction.”  

Prof. Sanjay Sarma speaks to Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai about the difficulty of developing dexterous robots for use in the home versus developing factory machines for use in standardized plants. “Heavy work, hazardous tasks have long been the focus of automation,” says Sarma. “Robots seem to be following an evolutionary path–the finer the motor or cognitive skills required, the harder to automate.”  

MIT researchers have developed BIOSENTER, a soft robot inspired by the movement of snakes, “designed to navigate the twists and turns of the small intestine [that] could perform real-time imaging, deliver drugs, and take biopsies deep within the digestive tract,” reports Inside Precision Medicine. “The robot’s tube-like body contains four inflatable chambers that can expand or contract in different combinations, allowing the robot to move forward and bend in different directions. A hollow central channel allows the robot to carry endoscopic tools, including a camera for imaging, a fluid sprayer for drug delivery, and clips for collecting tissue samples or removing small polyps.” 

Instead of giving AI agents a specific task, MIT researchers put 13 agents, named Eko, alone on a digital desert island for 30 hours, and witnessed the technology playing instead of simply wandering around, writes Fast Company’s Jude Cramer. “The researchers compared Eko’s behavior to common elements of play in animals, including humans,” notes Cramer. “These signs of play include creating their own rules, repeating behaviors with slight variations, setting goals for themselves, and transforming objects and events through make-believe.” 

After observing the behavior of 13 AI agents on a simulated desert island, MIT researchers suggest that allowing agents to explore “without a goal” could be an effective way to teach AI agents new skills, reports Aditya Mehta for TechCrunch. “We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.” 

Eka Robotics, a startup cofounded by Prof. Pulkit Agrawal, has developed a robot with  a force-sensitive gripper that can “pick up about 1,500 objects that weigh up to 1 kg in an hour, compared to about 600 for a human” with 95% accuracy, reports Tim Fernholz for TechCrunch.  “We are starting off being very pragmatic, and saying here are two verticals in pick, arrange, place, and wire handling, let’s make them be home runs,” says Agrawal. “Once we have made home runs on them, the sky is the limit in how much we can do with the approach we are developing.” 

MIT researchers gave 13 AI agents, named Eko, free rein, on a simulated desert island for 30 hours, and observed as the agents played and learned from their surroundings like humans, writes Gizmodo’s Webb Wright. “We had this mindset to have as [few] constraints as possible, because we really wanted to see what the behavior of these autonomous agents is when you don’t really tell them what to do,” says graduate student Nathan Cloos. “Play is really about curiosity or novelty-seeking behavior, and this is essentially what Eko does,” Prof. Daniela Rus adds.  

Forbes’ Lisa Chambers highlights MIT as one of the “12 top colleges reinventing education for the AI era.” “At Forbes’ No. 1-ranked college in the nation—and one of the world’s leading technology schools—AI is hardly confined to a single degree,” writes Chambers. “MIT’s undergraduate offerings range from machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to robotics, deep-learning hardware and AI applications in biology and medicine.”  

MIT researchers have developed a paper-thin biohybrid robot “capable of swimming that is powered by living muscle cells instead of a traditional motor,” writes Forbes’ Conor Murray. The muscle cells are engineered to respond to flashes of light, allowing the robot to swim through mazes. The researchers believe that in the future biohybrid robots could eventually be used for everything from precision microsurgery to exploring fragile environments.  

Jeffrey Riley, executive director of MIT RAISE’s “Day of AI” K-12 program, speaks to WBUR’s Suevon Lee about the importance of teaching school-aged children AI literacy skills. “Kids need to know about voice clones and deepfakes and plagiarism,” says Riley. “We need to teach kids so that they're healthy skeptics of this technology, that they mistrust and verify the information they're getting from it.”  

Prof. Max Tegmark joins Fox Business's “The Claman Countdown,” to discuss warning lawmakers about the risks of rogue AI at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. “It’s very obvious that if you make these things [AI] vastly smarter than humans in the next few years, give them robotic bodies, have millions and billions of them all over earth, and don’t understand how they work, we could lose control over them. So, let’s not do that,” says Tegmark. “We have very clear ideas for how we can control AI that cures cancer and [fuels] all sorts of other powerful tools. We want to build tools, not beings that are going to replace us.” 

Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Fox Business about the need for government regulations on AI. AI agents “have goals; they’re actively pursuing them and being incredibly creative about getting things done, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted,” says Tegmark. “Put that together with robotic bodies, and you’ve got yourself a species. If they’re vastly smarter than us, which is the goal of these companies, then they can not only do hacking, they can go online and hire a bunch of humans to work for them.”  

In a video, Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw speaks to NBC News about floating, magnetic tiles that could be used to build structures in space. “We could self-assemble these [tiles] on the Moon,” says Ekblaw. “We could make habitats for the Artemis program. Once we have this idea of modular space tiles, there’s so many different things that we can do with self-assembly.”