This blog post has been re-posted from the X Blog.

Meet the team teaching robots how to learn

The solitary inventor, the genius tinkering away in a garage alone to create a world-changing product is a myth. It also could not be further from the reality of working in robotics. One of the things that I love most about the robotics project I lead at X is how our work is a team sport, bringing together people with varied and sometimes surprising skill sets. It’s a daily occurrence to see a former Mars Rover engineer partnering with an ex-Marine helicopter mechanic; a machine learning PhD in deep conversation with a battle bot EMT; and a puppeteer in dialogue with a chocolate maker. Our team comes from all kinds of backgrounds and from all over the world.

Drawing on these and many more diverse backgrounds and disciplines, our team is investigating how machine learning can help us teach robots new skills so they can become useful one day in our unstructured world. Creating robots that can learn in different ways — for example, from human demonstration, from shared experiences or simulating robots in the cloud — involves tackling some of the hardest challenges in robotics today. It’s an ambiguous and iterative process, so we’ve worked hard to create a team environment where collaboration and creativity can flourish, and where people always feel comfortable bringing their unique perspectives and expertise to the table.

We believe that machine learning and robotics could one day help us find new solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the world, from finding new ways to live more sustainably, to caring for loved ones. Learn more about what it's like to work at X, hear from some of our roboticists and catch a few glimpses of our prototypes in the video below.

If this mission and team looks like something you’d like to be part of, check out our open roles.