• MIT researchers have incorporated social interactions into a framework for robotics, allowing robots to understand what helps or hinders one another.
• The robots have been primed to learn social behaviors on their own.
• This could help create a more caring environment when robots are working in certain sectors such as health and social care.
• Scientists are currently working on making robots' social interactions with humans even more sophisticated.

Robots can deliver food on a college campus and hit a hole-in-one on the golf course, but even the most sophisticated robot can’t perform basic social interactions that are critical to everyday human life.

MIT researchers have now incorporated certain social interactions into a framework for robotics, enabling machines to understand what it means to help or hinder one another, and to learn to perform these social behaviors on their own. In a simulated environment, a robot watches its companion, guesses what task it wants to accomplish, and then helps or hinders this other robot based on its own goals.

The researchers also showed that their model creates realistic and predictable social interactions. When they showed videos of these simulated robots interacting with one another to humans, the human viewers mostly agreed with the model about what type of social behavior was occurring.

Enabling robots to exhibit social skills could lead to smoother and more positive human-robot interactions. For instance, a robot in an assisted living facility could use these capabilities to help create a more caring environment for elderly individuals. The new model may also enable scientists to measure social interactions quantitatively, which could help psychologists study autism or analyze the effects of antidepressants.

“Robots will live in our world soon enough, and they really need to learn how to communicate with us on human terms. They need to understand when it is time for them to help and when it is time for them to see what they can do to prevent something from happening. This is very early work and we are barely scratching the surface, but I feel like this is the first very serious attempt for understanding what it means for humans and machines to interact socially,” says Boris Katz, principal research scientist and head of the InfoLab Group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM)...

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