With aims of bringing more human-like reasoning to autonomous vehicles, a team led by researchers at MIT CSAIL have created a system that uses only simple maps and visual data to enable driverless cars to navigate routes in new, complex environments.

MIT CSAIL unsealed a special time capsule from 1999 after a self-taught programmer Belgium solved a puzzle devised by MIT professor and famed cryptographer Ron Rivest.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) held a special workshop with Microsoft Research to explore key challenges in creating trustworthy and robust artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The effort focused on addressing concerns about the trustworthiness of AI systems, including rising concerns with the safety, fairness, and transparency of the technologies.

In the field of self-driving cars, algorithms for controlling lane changes are an important topic of study. But most existing lane-change algorithms have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyze on the fly; or they’re so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as never changing lanes at all.

Current approaches to construct road network maps from GPS trajectories suffer from low precision, especially in dense urban areas and in regions with complex topologies such as overpasses and underpasses, parallel roads, and stacked roads. This paper proposes a two-stage method to improve precision without sacrificing recall (coverage).

We demonstrate how a sequence model and a sampling-based planner can influence each other to produce efficient plans and how such a model can automatically learn to take advantage of observations of the environment.

MIT researchers describe an autonomous system for a fleet of drones to collaboratively search under dense forest canopies. The drones use only onboard computation and wireless communication — no GPS required.

This work presents the design, fabrication, control, and oceanic testing of a soft robotic fish that can swim in three dimensions to continuously record the aquatic life it is following or engaging.