Teaching robots what humans want

Told to optimize for speed while racing down a track in a computer game, a car pushes the pedal to the metal.. and proceeds to spin in a tight little circle. Nothing in the instructions told the car to drive straight, and so it improvised. Researchers are trying to make it easier for humans to tell autonomous systems, such as vehicles and robots, what they want them to do. (Image credit: Getty Images) This example - funny in a computer game but not so much in life - is among those that motivated Stanford University researchers to build a better way to set goals for autonomous systems. Dorsa Sadigh , assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, and her lab have combined two different ways of setting goals for robots into a single process, which performed better than either of its parts alone in both simulations and real-world experiments.