Mythra Balakuntala, a graduate research assistant in Purdue Polytechnic’s Collaborative Robotics Lab, has been working on making robots easier to program for everyday working people, either on the manufacturing floor or helping out around the home of an elderly person. Balakuntala works in the field of programming robots by human demonstration that is very similar to how humans learn from each other — they watch an “expert” do something and then try to do it.
Balakuntala’s particular expertise has been the use of artificial intelligence and “reinforcement learning” to improve performance of a task by practice. Richard Voyles, the Daniel C. Lewis Professor in Purdue Polytechnic and Balakuntala’s doctoral advisor, has been encouraging him to incorporate coaching actions by a human watching the practice to learn from the coach.