Play 'Mars Escape' and help the MIT Media Lab develop robots that collaborate with humans
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April 13, 2010
The ways in which you interact with another human may serve as the basis for developing robots that can interact smoothly with us in the future. In a new game called Mars Escape, designed by researchers from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, anyone is invited to take on the role of either an astronaut or a robot on Mars to fulfill a mission. The object of the game is to work together to complete the mission before oxygen runs out.
Sonia Chernova, a postdoc in the Personal Robotics Group who is working on the project, explained that the purpose of the game is to study how two humans interact with each other and use teamwork to solve problems. The researchers' long-term goal is to create robots that can assist and work with humans in a natural way, which could be useful for a variety of applications.
The MIT researchers are encouraging as many people as possible to play Mars Escape so that they can gather a variety of examples of human behavior from many interactions. Then, the researchers will use this data to generate a computational behavior model that can guide an autonomous robot in performing the same task.
And for players who really like the game, they will have the chance to perform the mission in real life this summer at the Boston Museum of Science. In the real-life version, museum visitors will be able to play the game not with another human, but with the autonomous robot Nexi.
To help MIT gather data for this project, you can download and play the game here. You will be randomly paired with another person, and the game takes about 10 minutes to play.