Computer Vision News - September 2021

31 Dorsa Sadigh they don’t think about interactions with other agents. If you think about building an autonomous car: for the longest time building an autonomous car was about the functionality of the vehicle perception. It wasn’t as much about how this car was going to drive next to other drivers. That is understandable. At the beginning, you want to think about the functionality of the system. Whereas at some point, people realize that they can’t forget about the interaction. The interaction problem is one of the key challenges of having autonomous cars. People started worrying about the interaction between autonomous cars and human driven cars. I’d argue that a lot of interaction problems these days think about one step or few steps short term interactions. We need to think about long term, repeated interactions and what sort of behaviors emerge when we have, let’s say, an autonomous car interacting with other drivers over long periods of time, or a robot interacting in peoples’ homes over repeated, long-term interactions. How did that mistake come about? It’s not a mistake. When you think about repeated interaction problems, you imagine things working. Maybe things are not working yet. Maybe it’s a next step type of problem. Like we saw in autonomous driving, we weren’t able to make progress until thinking about interactions between autonomous cars and human driven cars. Repeated interactions fall into the same category. If you put a robot in people’s road, it guides the system towards behaviors that are undesirable. That can be pretty challenging. That is something that we really need to study. We need to worry about it now. You are mainly working towards applications? Yes, we are working on a spectrum of things. We are doing some more theoretical things. We are also very interested in real applications. I’m personally very driven by real applications and some of the challenges that exist in real robotic systems today. One problem that we are looking at, which is another favorite that I didn’t talk about yet, is the problem of assisted feeding. We’re looking at how we can have a robot bring food to a person’s mouth, to put it inside of a person’s mouth in a way that is safe and interactive and easy.