Moderator: Scott Kirsner, Editor & Co-Founder, Innovation Leader Panelists:
Moderator: Leon Sandler, Executive Director, MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation Panelists:
Moderator: Marcus Dahllöf, Program Director, MIT Startup Exchange Panelists:
As autonomous systems move out of the research laboratory into operational environments, they require ever deeper connections to their surroundings. Traditional notions of full autonomy have led to “clockwork” approaches where robots must be isolated from their human surroundings. Instead, we need precise, robust relationships with people and infrastructure. This situated autonomy appears in driverless cars' dependence on human-built infrastructure, the need for new systems of unmanned traffic management in the air, and the increasing importance of collaborative robotics in factories. How can we best design such systems to inhabit and enhance the human world? In this talk, David Mindell sketches a number of these emerging scenarios, traces new technologies to address the problems they raise, and envisions new approaches to human and robotic interaction that helps people and robots work together safely and collaboratively.