VOA常速英语:美科学家将机器人训练地更像人类

The robot is called Jackrabbot, and it is the one of the most popular students at Stanford University.

“I honestly thought it was really cute.I didn’t know what it was, but, like I saw the hat and the tie and I thought it was really cute.”

One of Jackrabbot’s teachers is research scientist Alexandre Alahi.

“We basically want to develop a more polite robot that will understand how people behave.”

Alahi says a robot with social skills can have many applications,such as helping the blind, or the elderly, or even offering drinks at a party, a skill some say can work if done correctly.

“If it works, yeah, then it becomes kind of invisible.It’s just like a service to me, but if I see it doing weird things and like kind of getting in my way of getting that drink or whatever then I start to think I could just get it myself.Why do we have this robot slowing me down?”

Alahi says seamlessly interacting with humans is what Jackrabbot is trying to learn through what’s called a data-driven approach.Instead of following pre-defined rules,Jackrabbot is learning by collecting data or experiences to understand human behavior so it can predict what humans will do next and even discern cultural differences.

“The way we interact in the U.S. is different than the way we interact in the U.K. or in Asia or in Iran,and therefore if you have a software that can automatically learn from all these data without having humans in the loop,it will therefore make the machine smarter and adapt quickly to the new environment.”

There are sensors attached to Jackrabbot that help it learn.

“I think it’s really interesting.The fact that we’ve always seen robots as not necessarily autonomous, but the idea that we’re trying to teach it social cues and, like human give that human quality, I think that’s really cool.”

By studying human behavior to become more human, robots may one day, become more integrated into the everyday lives of humans.

Elizabeth Lee , VOA news, Palo Alto, California.