The Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab has developed Mars Escape, a downloadable game intended to be played cooperatively by two players. One player acts as an astronaut who has landed on Mars, cooperatively working with the other player acting as a robot to complete missions.

As the players interact with each other throughout the game, the program collects information on elements of teamwork and coordination in the background, building a database of interactions generated from all players of the game worldwide. From the raw data collected over a number of months, the MIT will build a computational behavior model informed by human game interactions; the model will power the Nexi autonomous robot this summer at the Boston Museum of Science, where visitors will be able to perform Mars Escape missions in real life.

Read the original post here on PSFK