Designing Robots That can Reason and React

May 29, 2003 | Source: SpaceDaily

Researchers at Georgia Tech Research Institute are creating machines that can make complex decisions, using
a variety of techniques such as “learning momentum” — teaching a robot that if a behavior is working well, it should continue doing it — and reinforcement learning, using computer-generated “rewards” to tell the robot it has made good decisions and should continue doing so.

The researchers are also developing a colony of 100 small robots to simulate a large-scale system with humans, robots and other machines. By making many simultaneous measurements and communicating the values between robots, the colony will be able to combine a large amount of imprecise information to produce a more accurate map of the entire region the colony occupies.