HP Labs teams robotics with machine learning

"Machine learning and robotics are a perfect match," suggests HP Fellow Will Allen. Although experts in the one field rarely stray into the other, Allen says, their potential synergies are real. "Machine learning is very applicable to robotics, and robotics--by which I mean working with physical robots--needs some of the things that machine learning is good at," he argues. Now Allen, who has a background as a distinguished innovator in imaging and printing technologies, is co-leading a research team with colleague David Murphy in HP's Emerging Compute Lab that aims to understand, and potentially harness, those synergies to create a new generation of what the team are calling "Smart Machines." One of the main challenges in robotics--where you want electro-mechanical machines to perform specific tasks with some degree of autonomy--is to have the machines move both precisely and efficiently in 3D space.