Learn Robotics While Reading on the Beach During Spring Break

Spring break! It’s time to hit the beach or the mountains or have a staycation. No matter, spring break is about guilty pleasures and the We, Robots anthology of short stories compiled by Allan Kaster (not to be confused with the We Robot novella by Susan Lange) is definitely a delicious guilty pleasure. And in nice, short bites, like a chocolate truffle, which makes it easy to find time to read without committing to a War and Peace or Ulysses investment of effort. Fortunately, taking time to read for pleasure can also count as learning about artificial intelligence and robotics! The seven excellent short stories in the collection cover real-world topics such as robots as team players, lifelong learning, teleoperation, bounded rationality, and facial expressions in social robots. The stories also help answer questions like: Why does progress seems much slower in robotics than medical research? and Are some people better at controlling robotics than others? So to help make your spring break more enjoyable AND a learning experience, check back each day for a discussion of a short story from We, Robots.