Chelsea Finn wants robots to get better at learning

Robots and AI agents are still limited when it comes to learning new things. That’s exactly the problem that fascinates Chelsea Finn, a Stanford computer science and engineering professor. Her research focuses on giving autonomous systems frameworks to reason through complex tasks. Robots, for example, can be trained to break large problems into smaller steps. Even when they know the subtask, “translating that into low-level motor commands is incredibly difficult to achieve in robots,” Finn says. “I’ve actually spent more time on the low-level motor control because in many ways it’s harder....