Research

Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and head of the Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL) envisions new ways for design and manufacture of robots — including the potential for one robot per child in schools. She and members from the DRL group received multiple prizes at the Ultra-Affordable Robot competition particularly for the group's printable, origami-inspired Segway robot, called SEG, which won first place.

Marvin Minsky, a faculty member in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1958 and co-founder (in 1959) of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), has been recognized the the BBVA Foundation for his lifetime achievements in establishing the field of artificial intelligence as well as his contributions to mathematics, cognitive science, robotics and philosophy.

Self-assembling robots were dismissed even by Daniela Rus, professor of computer science and engineering and director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), until she worked again with former MIT EECS senior John Romanishin, now a research scientist in CSAIL and the one who was convinced (since his undergraduate days) that it could be done. They will present their work on the new self-propelled robots at the IEEE RSJ International conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Read more.

Three CSAIL roboticists have been named to IEEE Intelligent Systems' 2013 list of "AI's 10 to Watch", which celebrates 10 rising stars in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The CSAIL members named to the list are: Nora Ayanian, Finale Doshi-Velez and Stefanie Tellex.

Building tomorrow's robots that can handle changing environments and unknowns will require designing a system that constantly calculates these uncertainties. EECS professors and principal investigators with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano Perez have recently submitted their work on this area of artificial intelligence for publication in the International Journal of Robotics Research.

At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, students in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a pair of papers showing how household robots could use a little lateral thinking to compensate for their physical shortcomings. EECS senior and SuperUROP student Annie Holladay has designed an algorithm that allows a robot to use both hands to avoid the bad, error-prone track so that it can successfully place an object in what might be up to a 16-dimensional space.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has elected EECS professors Rodney Brooks and David Perreault to IEEE Fellow status. Professors Brooks and Perreault are among a class of 297 selected for the class of 2013 IEEE Fellows.

A new flexible robot that moves like an earthworm, called "Mesworm," has been devised by researchers from Harvard University, Seoul National University and MIT including EECS professor Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). The robot, designed to stand up to tortuous conditions and still keep on moving in its earthworm-like manner, may prove useful under hazardous conditions that are tight and/or unreachable.

With the goal of developing an aircraft that can fly like a bird, quickly darting around fixed and moving objects, EECS Associate Professor Russ Tedrake as lead of a five-year multi-research initiative, has created a new autonomous flying aircraft that is coming very close to this reality. This work, carried out in Tedrake's lab by his group, the Robot Locomotion Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) is featured on the CSAIL website.