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A day in the life of Robotina

A humanoid robot from MIT lab

Robotina is a sophisticated research robot. Specifically, it is a Willow Garage PR2 designed to work with people. But around the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory it is often called Robotina. Robotina has been in the interactive robotics lab of engineering professor Julie Shah since 2011. In her National Science Foundation-supported research, Shah and her team study how humans and robots can work together more efficiently. Hers is one of dozens of projects supported by the National Robotics Initiative.

Credit: Claudia Perez D'Arpino at MIT


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animated gif showing humanoid Robotina from MIT

In an experiment where it and a student worked together to sort Lego pieces and build models, Robotina was able to guess in only 400 milliseconds where the human would go next based on the person's body position.

Credit: NSF


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animated gif showing humanoid robot Robotina of MIT picking legos

he researchers found that when Robotina organized the tasks, they took less time--both for scheduling and assembly. The humans trusted the robot to make impartial decisions and do what was best for the team.

Credit: NSF


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In her NSF-supported research, Julie Shah and her team at MIT use Robotina to learn how to build better robotic cooperative assistants, as envisioned by the National Robotics Initiative, an multi-agency effort to advance fundamental robotics research to ultimately help give people a better quality of life and benefit society and the economy.

Credit: NSF


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