When we walk down the street, we know what we need to pay attention to -- passing cars, potential dangers, obstacles in our way -- and what we don't, like pedestrians walking in the distance. Robots, on the other hand, treat all the information they receive about their surroundings with equal importance. Driverless cars, for example, have to continuously analyze data about things around them whether or not they are relevant. This keeps drivers and pedestrians safe, but it draws on a lot of energy and computing power. What if there's a way to cut that down by teaching robots what they should prioritize and what they can safely ignore?

That's the principle underpinning "lazy robotics," a field of study championed by René van de Molengraft, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He believes that teaching all kinds of robots to be "lazier" with their data could help pave the way for machines that are better at interacting with things in their real-world environments, including humans. Essentially, the more efficient a robot can be with information, the better.

Van de Molengraft's lazy robotics is just one approach researchers and robotics companies are now taking as they train their robots to complete actions successfully, flexibly, and in the most efficient manner possible.

Teaching them to be smarter when they sift through the data they gather and then de-prioritize anything that's safe to overlook will help make them safer and more reliable -- a long-standing goal of the robotics community.

Simplifying tasks in this way is necessary if robots are to become more widely adopted, says Van de Molengraft, because their current energy usage won't scale -- it would be prohibitively expensive and harmful to the environment. "I think that the best robot is a lazy robot," he says. "They should be lazy by default, just like we are."

Van de Molengraft has hit upon a fun way to test these efforts out: teaching robots to play soccer. He recently led his university's autonomous robot soccer team, Tech United, to victory at RoboCup, an annual international robotics and AI competition that tests robots' skills on the soccer field. Soccer is a tough challenge for robots, because both scoring and blocking goals require quick, controlled movements, strategic decision-making, and coordination.