Teaching robots to cooperate
Ming Cao is Professor of Networks and Robotics at the University of Groningen. Cao is a pioneer in the development of bio-inspired operating systems, enabling groups of robots to carry out tasks independently.
In the future, autonomous cars and robots that will need to take each other’s actions into account will be becoming more common. Cao is working on this development with colleagues from sociology, mathematics and biology. The algorithms that have been developed for the robots, for example, are partly inspired by how animals move, particularly fish and birds, which also operate in formation. ‘We used to design robots that were simply instructed to cooperate’, explains Cao. ‘It now turns out that robots that can make decisions themselves do not automatically cooperate if they have conflicting interests. We can change that using insights from sociology about how humans cooperate.’
University of Groningen videos
The weekly online video magazine Unifocus highlights topics related to the University of Groningen in the fields of research and society, student life, teaching, policy and internationalization.
You can find more videos in our video portal.
| Last modified: | 01 October 2021 08.46 a.m. |
More news
-
20 December 2021
Departing dean Knoester on Recognition and Rewards
Jasper Knoester, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering and deputy rector of the UG, reviews the importance of the Recognition and Rewards programme.
-
16 December 2021
Veni grants for seven Groningen researchers
The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has decided to award Veni grants to seven researchers from the UG and the UMCG: Yingying Cong, Max Fürst, Lisanne van Dijk, Esther Metting, Felix Poppelaars, Simon Pouwels en Gwenny Verstappen . With the grant...
-
14 December 2021
S-DISCO, the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master connecting The Netherlands, Belgium, France and Poland
This programme originates from longstanding informal discussions between some of the partners on the need to train students in drug discovery, the challenging phase in the life cycle of a medicine that precedes first-in-human studies and clinical...