When people work in pairs or teams, they can often solve a wider range of problems, completing some tasks faster and more efficiently than they would alone. To assist users similarly to how other humans would, robots should be able to rapidly interpret human behaviors and commands, using their predictions to plan and precisely execute helpful actions.

Researchers at GenerativeBionics, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and University of Manchester recently introduced a framework that could guide the design of robots that interact with humans more safely, efficiently and adaptively. Their design strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, was already used to create a new humanoid robot called ergoCub.

“Our work grew out of many years of experience developing different generations of humanoid robots,” Carlotta Sartore and Daniele Pucci, the paper’s first and senior authors, respectively, told Tech Xplore. “During this time, we repeatedly observed that robot hardware was often treated as fixed, while the control system was expected to compensate for its physical limitations.