Artificial intelligence has made great strides in many areas lately, yet it has had comparatively little success in general-use robotics. We believe one of the reasons for this is the disconnect between traditional robotic design and the properties needed for open-ended, creativity-based AI systems. To that end, we, taking selective inspiration from nature, build a robust, partially soft robotic limb with a large action space, rich sensory data stream from multiple cameras, and the ability to connect with others to enhance the action space and data stream. As a proof of concept, we train two contemporary machine learning algorithms to perform a simple target-finding task. Altogether, we believe that this design serves as a first step to building a robot tailor-made for achieving artificial general intelligence.

Operating vehicles in adversarial environments between a recurring origin-destination pair requires new planning techniques. A two players zero-sum game is introduced. The goal of the first player is to minimize the expected casualties undergone by a convoy. The goal of the second player is to maximize this damage. The outcome of the game is obtained via a linear program that solves the corresponding minmax optimization problem over this outcome. Different environment models are defined in order to compute routing strategies over unstructured environments. To compare these methods for increasingly accurate representations of the environment, a grid-based model is chosen to represent the environment and the existence of a sufficient network size is highlighted. A global framework for the generation of realistic routing strategies between any two points is described. This framework requires a good assessment of the potential casualties at any location, therefore the most important parameters are identified. Finally the framework is tested on real world environments.

Passengers' experience is becoming a key metric to evaluate the air transportation system's performance. Efficient and robust tools to handle airport operations are needed along with a better understanding of passengers' interests and concerns. Among various airport operations, this paper studies airport gate scheduling for improved passengers' experience. Three objectives accounting for passengers, aircraft, and operation are presented. Trade-offs between these objectives are analyzed, and a balancing objective function is proposed. The results show that the balanced objective can improve the efficiency of traffic flow in passenger terminals and on ramps, as well as the robustness of gate operations.