Maja Mataric. Portrait of Maja Mataric, American computer scientist, with the robots used in the largest-ever cooperation experiment. Mataric, a researcher at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA, can program up to fourteen robots to detect coloured pucks while communicating with each other using radios. By transmitting data, such as a puck's position or the results of trying different procedures, the robots learn the most efficient way of collecting the pucks. By cooperating, the robot team avoid congestion and can collect the pucks twice as quickly as fourteen machines acting individually.