A whole new profession is coming up thanks to all the science experiments being done to make robots more intelligent. At the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab in Georgia Tech there is a teacher who teaches a one of a kind student, a robot! Andrea Thomas is helping to train a robot nicknamed Curi, who incidentally has light up ears.

Andrea’s lab is working on possible personal robots who will have to learn to navigate through the human world without much aid or direction. So they are working on robots being able to ask the right questions and collect the right information to answer these questions.

It could be something quite as mundane as Curi scooping pasta in the kitchen from the cooking pan to the plate, or something more complex like identifying a book and bringing it to Andrea from another room. Once a task has been conducted successfully the robot is then asked to repeat it and reinforce what new things Curi picked up.

The science project sort of like training a child, but in this case the robot does not have to relearn a task that has been perfected once. Andrea also studies how people respond to robots and how they interact together. This gives her more information to perfect her algorithms.