Researchers collaborating rom Nanyang Technology University in Singapore and the University of Sussex, Imperial College London aims to bring robots and humans together by utilizing Game Theory, mainly adaptive control and Nash equilibrium.
In using adaptive control and Nash equilibrium, researchers try to make the robots better respond to human behavior and anticipate the humans’ movements.
Due to the technology still being in the early stages of development, it is not deemed safe for usage, but researchers aim to improve this so that in the future, the robot can be intuitive enough to assist humans is sports training, physical rehabilitation, and shared driving.
Researchers published a paper today on Nature Machine Intelligence, and the paper outlined how game theory was adapted for interactions between humans and robots, and how it can be used in certain cases of physical rehabilitation, such as helping impaired stroke survivors.
This is a groundbreaking usage of game theory, as game theory is usually used for economics and maximizing one’s own gain within a certain situation. A inhibitor to the research was that the robot does not know the intentions a human subject has, and they solved this problem by developing a way for the robot to identify the human and in that way, safely interacting with the humans, also known as reactive robotic programming.
In reactive robotic programming, the robot constantly updates itself on information about the human user, and constantly makes adjustment according to that. Efficiency is a key factor here, and therefore, it is programmed to successfully undergo tasks without much effort.
“Game theory has had important impacts in economics during the last century and lead to several Nobel prizes such as Nash’s one. to apply it for human-robot interaction, it was necessary to understand how the robot can identify the human user’s control goals simultaneously to smoothly interacting with them,” Professor Etienne Burdet, chair in Human Robotics in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London says.
The future for game theory and its applications to other areas is bright, where many are discovering new applications for game theory that no one has thought of yet.
Reference: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190107112953.htm
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