Robots at Work

Many Robots Make Short Work

1. Holding a meeting At the SRI Artificial Intelligence Lab, we have a long history of building autonomous robots, from the original Shakey (remember the STRIPS planner?) through Flakey [Congdon 1993] and more recently, the Pioneer class of small robots. Our current research focuses on realtime vision for robots, and multirobot planning using an agent-oriented architecture. For the AAAI contest...

Robots that Work in Collaboration with People

Developing robots with social skills and understanding is a critical step towards enabling them to cooperate with people as capable partners, to communicate with people intuitively, and to learn quickly and effectively from natural human instruction. These abilities would enable many new and exciting applications for robots that require them to play a long-term, supportive, and helpful role in ...

Making Reinforcement Learning Work on Real Robots

The Problem: Reinforcement-learning (RL) [1] techniques have elegant theoretical foundations and have proven useful in learning a variety of off-line tasks, such as playing Backgammon. However, they are still much too inefficient to be of use in the majority of robot-learning domains. In this project, we seek to make reinforcement learning effective for real robots. We are particularly interest...

Fixed-term work and violence at work.

OBJECTIVES This study investigated the effect of a fixed-term job contract on encounters of violence at work. We assumed that fixed-term employees encountered more violence or threats of violence at their work than permanent employees. METHODS This study is based on 3 large statistical data sets: (a) the Work and Health surveys carried out by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in 19...

Coparticipation at work: Knowing and work practicer