MIT News: C3.ai DTI cybersecurity researcher Chuchu Fan, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has developed a general-purpose optimizer to speed up the development of a wide range of autonomous systems, from walking robots and self-driving vehicles, to soft and dexterous robots, and teams of collaborative robots. Her team presented their findings at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference in June.

“If your system has more parameters to optimize, our tool can do even better and can save exponentially more time,” Fan says. “It’s basically a combinatorial choice: As the number of parameters increases, so do the choices, and our approach can reduce that in one shot.”

According to the article, the team has made the general optimizer available to download, and plans to further refine the code to apply to more complex systems, such as robots that are designed to interact with and work alongside humans.

Read more here.