Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA), a robot that would act as a helpful companion for drivers. The robot would be capable of picking up a driver’s usual routes and regular destinations, monitoring facial expressions for signs of fatigue or agitation, using visual clues such as winking and smiling, and communicating verbally to make suggestions about alternate routes, fuel level, energy efficiency, safe behavior, and gas stations with the lowest prices. AIDA would be embedded in the dashboard and use the Internet to provide real-time information about traffic, businesses, and gas stations along the driver’s route. “With the ubiquity of sensors and mobile computers, information about our surroundings is ever abundant,” says professor Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. “AIDA embodies a new effort to make sense of these great amounts of data, harnessing our personal electronic devices as tools for behavioral support.” The MIT team is working with Audi and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab on the project.

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The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

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A Harvard University-led, multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists have received a $10 million National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing grant to develop small-scale robotic devices based on the biology of a bee and the insect’s hive behavior. The researchers hope to advance the field of miniature robotics and the design of compact, high-energy power sources, as well as create new ultra-low-power computing and smart electronic sensors, and improve coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. “Nature has bred astonishing solutions to complex real-world challenges,” says Harvard professor Robert Wood, the principal investigator of the project. “This research aims to understand the biology of bees and use this understanding to advance multiple topics in computer science and engineering.” Wood and his colleagues say that nature-inspired research could lead to the development of novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system capable of sensing and adapting to changing environments, and advance the field of small-scale flying mechanical devices. The five-year project could lead to technological advances in robust, bio-inspired computer systems that coordinate complex behavior using input from multiple independent parts, smart materials, and novel, miniature power sources that could be used in a variety of devices. The researchers also will work with the Museum of Science in Boston to create an interactive exhibit to educate and inspire future scientists and engineers.

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