Doctorate student teaching robots how to move objects
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: With the push of a button, months of hard work were about to be put to the test. Sixteen teams of engineers convened in a cavernous exhibit hall in Nagoya, Japan, for the Amazon Robotics Challenge.
The robotic systems they built were tasked with removing items from bins and placing them into boxes. For graduate student Maria Bauza, who served as task-planning lead for the MIT-Princeton Team, the moment was particularly nervewracking. “It was super stressful when the competition started,” recalls Bauza. “You just press play and the robot is autonomous. It’s going to do whatever you code it for, but you have no control. If something is broken, then that’s it.”
Robotics has been a major focus for Bauza since her undergraduate career. In one project, she hacked the controller of a toy remote control car to make it drive in a straight line. In another, she developed a portable robot that could draw on the blackboard for teachers. The robot was given an image of Mona Lisa and, after going through an algorithm, it drew that image on the blackboard. “That was the first small success in my robotics career,” says Bauza.
For her doctorate thesis, Bauza is developing machine-learning algorithms and software to improve how robots interact with the world. MCube’s multidisciplinary team provides the support needed to pursue this goal.
“In the end, machine learning can’t work if you don’t have good data,” Bauza explains. “Good data comes from good hardware, good sensors, good cameras
— so in MCube we all collaborate to make sure the systems we build are powerful enough to be autonomous.”
It was super stressful when the competition started. You just press play and the robot is autonomous. It’s going to do whatever you code it for, but you have no control. If something is broken, then that’s it.
– Maria Bauza, doctorate student