Moving From Supervising Robots To Collaborating With Them

“The crux of the challenge involves making decisions under uncertainty; that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations and incomplete knowledge of the world. Autonomous robots have to observe the current state of the world (imperfect observations), understand how this is likely to evolve (incomplete knowledge), and make decisions about the best course of action to pursue in every situation. This cognitive capability is also essential to interpersonal interactions because human communications presuppose an ability to understand the motivations of the participants and subjects of the discussion. As the complexity of human–machine interactions increases and automated systems become more intelligent, we strive to provide computers with comparable communicative and decision-making capabilities. This is what takes robots from machines that humans supervise to machines with which humans can collaborate.“

That is from Rashed Haq, VP of Robotics at Cruise, and my VP in particular. He wrote an article for VentureBeat entitled, “The lessons we learn from self-driving will drive our robotics future.”