Combining engineering and linguistics leads to new discoveries
1:20 p.m., April 12, 2011--Babies learn to talk by listening
intently to those around them. They observe which sounds come
naturally together, intuitively building rules as to what fits
and what does not. Herbert Tanner believes similar rules exist
in robotics, when it comes to deciding the sequence of actions a
robot can execute. Sensor on a chip Tanner, an assistant
professor of mechanical engineering at the University of
Delaware, and fellow researcher Jeffrey Heinz, are applying
formal language theory and linguistics algorithms to design
robots that can “think for themselves.” “Amazingly, we can use
insights from how children learn language to design robots which
can likewise learn from their experience,” said Heinz, an
assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science. This
is accomplished through a theoretical modeling and analysis
framework that uses a combination of logic (the language of
computer science) and differential equations