When robots come across unfamiliar objects, they struggle to account for a simple truth: Appearances aren’t everything. They may attempt to grasp a block, only to find out it’s a literal piece of cake. The misleading appearance of that object could lead the robot to miscalculate physical properties like the object’s weight and center of mass, using...

Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use.Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some include color images while others are composed...

The internet is awash in instructional videos that can teach curious viewers everything from cooking the perfect pancake to performing a life-saving Heimlich maneuver.But pinpointing when and where a particular action happens in a long video can be tedious. To streamline the process, scientists are trying to teach computers to perform this task. Ideally,...

Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Google Research may have just performed digital sorcery — in the form of a diffusion model that can change the material properties of objects in images. Dubbed Alchemist, the system allows users to alter four attributes of both real and AI-generated pictures:...

The School of Engineering welcomes 15 new faculty members across six of its academic departments. This new cohort of faculty members, who have either recently started their roles at MIT or will start within the next year, conduct research across a diverse range of disciplines.Many of these new faculty specialize in research that intersects with multiple...

“I'll have you eating out of the palm of my hand” is an unlikely utterance you'll hear from a robot. Why? Most of them don't have palms.If you have kept up with the protean field, gripping and grasping more like humans has been an ongoing Herculean effort. Now, a new robotic hand design developed in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence...