Play Mars Escape: Help Develop MIT Robots!

Just in from postdoc Sonia Chernova from the Personal Robots Group:

"The Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab has released an online game designed to make robots smarter! Mars Escape is a two-player online game in which each player can take on the role of an astronaut or a robot on Mars. The players must work together to complete their mission before oxygen supplies run out.

"The purpose of the game is to study human teamwork, coordination, and interaction, with the long-term goal of creating robots that are able to assist and work with humans in a natural and robust way. The Mars Escape game is being used to gather examples of human behavior from thousands of interactions. This data will then be used to generate a computational behavior model that can be used to enable an autonomous robot to perform the same task. Researchers will recreate Mars Escape in real life this summer at the Boston Museum of Science, where visitors will be able to perform the mission in real life alongside the autonomous robot Nexi.

"Help gather data for this project by playing Mars Escape!"