Humans and robots work better together if they can swap roles
and learn from each other, a finding that may pave the way for
the use of more robots on assembly lines, in space, on farms or
in any kind of dangerous, dirty or boring operation. “Cross-
training,” or switching jobs, improves efficiency, as well as
robots' confidence and the trust of human masters, researchers
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found. “We want
robots to work alongside people,” said Julie Shah, assistant
professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and head of the
Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “There’s a trend of removing
the cages around robots and integrating them with manual work.
That’s coming around with greater computation and sensing. We
don’t want the robots to do the same task over and over again.
They can’t if they are going to work in this dynamic
environment. What we're interested is how we can make them smart
enough to assist people.” Shah and gr