An international team of scientists are working on a project to increase the autonomy of robots.

The scientists hope to do this by developing mechanisms that can help robots recognize their environments and interactions around them and respond accordingly.

“If robots of science fiction are to become reality they will need to be much more aware of their surroundings and be able to adapt to situations accordingly, to be more human essentially,” says Professor Philippe Schyns, director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, who is leading the University of Glasgow’s contribution to the project.

For example, if the goal is to have robots with deep scene understanding, they need to know how humans do it, and how it is dependent on the task.

The Understanding Scenes and Events through Joint Parsing, Cognitive Reasoning and Lifelong Learning project is being led by University of California, Berkeley with international partners from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois, MIT and Yale in the U.S. and Oxford, Glasgow, Birmingham and Reading in the UK.