”Currently in manufacturing, robots are kept from people because the robots are essentially unsafe,” said Dmitry Berenson, assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s robotics engineer program. “We are now developing robots that can be coworkers, not cordoned off in different cells.”

To that end, Berenson is helping develop a lab for Archie specifically suited to testing real-world collaborative scenarios, from building equipment to helping disabled individuals pick up dropped remote controls. The robot, a PR2 model from Willow Garage, features two arms with grippers, a rolling base, and a host of sensors to help navigate and manipulate in a variety of settings.

Maneuver research has been the focus of Berenson’s work, much of which he’s shared freely.

“I study motion planning, how the robot looks at the world, perceives people in the world, objects in the world, and then planning how to move and act,” he said. “We want to make the robots more capable on a cognitive level, so that the robot is not only capable of understanding what humans want, but also to physically understand how the world works.”

The new addition continues the school’s focus on the field of robotics: Started in 2007, it’s now the third most popular major at WPI with 240 undergraduates in the program, a graduate program that started in 2009 and a robotics doctorate program beginning last year.

For Berenson, the ultimate goal is to develop the software to the point where robots integrate seamlessly with modern society, particularly to help the disabled.

”These are somewhat intuitive things for most people to do, but very difficult for robots,” he said. “We want to program that intuition.”