Collaborative learning -- for robots

Machine learning, in which computers learn new skills by looking for patterns in training data, is the basis of most recent advances in artificial intelligence, from voice-recognition systems to self-parking cars. It's also the technique that autonomous robots typically use to build models of their environments. That type of model-building gets complicated, however, in cases in which clusters of robots work as teams. The robots may have gathered information that, collectively, would produce a good model but which, individually, is almost useless. If constraints on power, communication, or computation mean that the robots can't pool their data at one location, how can they collectively build a model? At the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence conference in July, researchers from MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems will answer that question.