Cynthia Breazeal and the Personal Robots Group

Cynthia Breazeal directs the Personal Robots Group at the MIT, being a pioneer of social robotics. She develops socially intelligent robots interacting and communicating with people. She wishes to help people of all ages contributing to their quality of life, in aspects such as health or learning and education. 

Socially aware robots require a broad range of capabilities in order to work together with human beings. These robots must be able to recognize intent and action supposing a challenge to the robotics community. It is a very difficult task to examine highly complex environments in the number of states, transitions and interactions. Machine learning methods like Reinforcement Learning or POMDPs do not scale to high-dimensional state-action spaces. Breazeal and her group think to endow the robots with human-like behaviour through generating functionally capable data-driven behaviours sourced from human behaviour. For it, they use of plan networks and case-based planning simulating crowdsourcing behaviour. So it is harnessed the wisdom of the crowd. They evaluate the resulting autonomous robot behaviours using a real-world reproduction of an online game environment and obtaining interesting results which optimize the results  about social interaction between humans and robots, obtained by traditional methods