Research

In his research and in other parts of life, Ankur Moitra likes to journey off the beaten path. His explorer mentality has brought him to at least one edge of the unknown — where he seeks to determine how machine learning, used in increasingly diverse and numerous applications, actually works.

MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.

MIT researchers have now designed a sharp-tipped robot finger equipped with tactile sensing to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. In experiments, the aptly named Digger Finger was able to dig through granular media such as sand and rice, and it correctly sensed the shapes of submerged items it encountered.

A team from MIT has been working on a self-driving system that uses machine learning so that custom hand-tuning isn’t needed. Their new end-to-end framework can navigate autonomously using only raw 3D point cloud data and low-resolution GPS maps, similar to those available on smartphones today.