“Real world” is a dangerous phrase to talk about when it comes to robots, because robots very seldom find themselves operating alone out there in wild and forlorn places like your living room or office. Autonomy in unstructured environments is an exceptionally difficult problem to tackle, and it gets even harder when you’re dealing with multiple robots trying to collaborate on tasks in situations where they might not even be able to talk to each other reliably. MIT has been developing a control program that’s able to coordinate multiple robots while dealing with significant uncertainty, and it’s quite creative in how it goes about doing it.
via IEEE Spectrum
