Cooperation is key to any successful team undertaking. Increasingly, such teams involve not just human team members, but also digital ones, from computers to AI to robots. 

In the Interactive Machines Group laboratory on Yale’s engineering campus, human subjects have teamed up with a robot to build a toy pizza: the robot is in charge of passing ingredients to the human, and then the human takes those ingredients and places them on the pizza. It’s the kind of task that calls for the same fundamental cooperative skills required in many settings, from homes to factories and restaurants. 

On the surface, the experiment looks like a game, but it’s backed by cutting-edge computer science.

“This is a project about being able to, in a natural and quick way, adapt the behavior of a robot to human preferences during a collaboration,” said Marynel Vázquez, assistant professor of computer science and Yale’s lead researcher on the project. Chayan Sarkar, a senior scientist with Tata Consultancy Services and a Tata Visiting Scholar at Yale, is the project’s co-leader.

Read more about this collaboration between Tata Consultancy Services and Yale, part of a greater Tata-Yale alliance that also includes Tata Sons and Titan.