Robots That Known Their Way Around

“Even though the applications seem very different, from self-driving cars to underwater robots and aerial drones, there is a lot of commonality between them when it comes to mapping, navigation and also what we call perception – in which the robot builds a meaningful model of the environment and kind of ‘understands’ the world around it through perceptive data,” says Dr. Eustice. “Much of the mathematical work we do in my lab is actually a general framework that, essentially, can be applied across different domains.”

Those fearing a robot revolution need not worry, yet. Computers are not at the point of posing their own problems. Humans still pose the problem, give the robot any needed associated data sets and tell it the structure of the model; the advance is that the machine itself learns the parameters of that model and works to make the best fit, in the input/output relationship (that is, the machine equivalent of a human trying to harmonize ideals with reality).