Semester exams are looming, with an extended holiday break on their heels. But before Dr. Andrea Thomaz closes the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the season, the lab hosted a few more visitors last week for the final experiment of the semester. The lab welcomes guests to interact with Simon, a humanoid robot developed with seed funds from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). These interactions allow student-researchers to adjust software models for Simon's learning and behavior generation. And it all starts once Thomaz and her team wake the resting robot.

While "robots in space" might sound like a cliche, the Robonaut 2 (R2), will finally be blasting off into outer space next week aboard the space shuttle Discovery. R2's assignment, at the International Space Station, is to assist the astronauts as they work. GM and NASA created R2 to further vehicle safety systems. Because R2 has advanced sensor capabilities, researchers are able to improve features in vehicles, such as crash avoidance. R2's hands also have incredible dexterity and sensitivity that could some day be used in manufacturing industries.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.

When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer. Brooks s lips are sealed, as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it s going to set a whole new direction in the field. Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

It's not a vulture or crow but a Falcon--a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff's office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon's potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone's flickering images of a nearby highway. Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds.

In 2007, Google unleashed a fleet of cars with roof-mounted cameras to provide street-level images of roads around the world. Now MIT spinout Essess is bringing similar "drive-by" innovations to energy efficiency in homes and businesses. The startup deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that create heat maps of thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in "building envelopes" -- windows, doors, walls, and foundations -- to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, Essess' rig includes several long-wave infrared radiometric cameras and near-infrared cameras. These cameras capture heat signatures, while a LiDAR system captures 3-D images to discern building facades from the physical environment.

For the last decade, scientists have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. In general, such robots are effective at carrying out low-level tasks, specifically assigned to them by human engineers -- a tedious and time-consuming process for the engineers. When deploying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan. Now a new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more "cognitive" capabilities, enabling humans to specify high-level goals, while a robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals. For example, an engineer may give a robot a list of goal locations to explore, along with any time constraints, as well as physical directions, such as staying a certain distance above the seafloor.

Vivienne Sze, a core member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Emanuel E. Landsman (1958) Career Development Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, has received a 2014 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award. Sze's group, the Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems, is working to develop technologies to enable energy-efficient and high-performance systems for visual data processing such as video coding, imaging, and computer vision. The group focuses on joint design across various levels of abstraction, from energy-aware algorithm development for signal processing to efficient architecture design and low-power, very-large-scale integration circuit implementation to enable optimal tradeoffs between power, speed, and quality of result. With the goal of energy-efficient systems for a wide range of applications, Sze's group has designed hardware that performs real-time object detection and video decoding on high-definition video content while consuming less than a nanojoule per pixel. Enabling real-time energy-efficient visual data processing can not only benefit many of today's portable-multimedia applications (phone, tablet, etc.), but can impact a wide range of emerging video-based applications ranging from improved safety through elderly assistance, advanced driver assistance systems, and crime prevention to increased efficiency through structural monitoring, smart homes, unmanned vehicles, and traffic control.

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first round of Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative award recipients, including several MIT interdisciplinary teams. The BRAIN Initiative, spearheaded by President Obama in April 2013, challenges the nation's leading scientists to advance our sophisticated understanding of the human mind and discover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and traumatic brain injury. "The human brain is one of the most complicated structures in the known universe," said NIH Director Francis Collins. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to develop new technologies that will allow us to map the circuits of the brain, measure activity within those circuits, and understand how their interactions maintain health and modulate human behavior." With the NIH Brain Initiative, the scientific community is charged with accelerating the invention of cutting-edge technologies that can produce dynamic images of complex neural circuits and illuminate the interaction of lightning-fast brain cells.

Seth Teller, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT who was well known for his efforts to advance human-robot interactions, died yesterday. He was 50, and he had been a member of the MIT faculty since 1994. President L. Rafael Reif announced the news in an email to the MIT community. "I knew Seth as a person of great human warmth and intellectual intensity," Reif wrote in his letter. "He was a brilliant engineer and a gifted advisor with a passion for new challenges. His loss is difficult to grasp."