News/Research

Ken Goldberg Interview in the Sloan Review

17 Sep, 2018

Ken Goldberg Interview in the Sloan Review

In an interview with Frieda Klotz, correspondent for MIT Sloan Management Review, Ken Goldberg talks about multiplicity in the future of robotics.

Multiplicity is the concept that new technologies and people can work together toward human goals — in fact, Goldberg argues that we have already entered a partnership of sorts with artificial intelligence. He rejects singularity, or the idea that robots will ultimately end up replacing humans in the workforce.

Goldberg also discusses his lab's current research on robotic technology.

From the interview:

We’re developing robot software for tasks as wide-ranging as warehouse order fulfillment, home decluttering and robot-assisted surgery. What’s common to all the work we’re doing is the idea of algorithms and learning for robots, improving our ability to analyze data and examples and then use that to build control policies — or models — for how robots can move.

The area I’ve been working on for 35 years is robot grasping — how to reliably pick up objects. It’s easy for humans, but it’s a problem for robots. Basically, every robot is still a klutz, and that’s a big challenge if you want to develop one that will declutter a home or pack boxes in a warehouse.

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