Roboticist Ashutosh Saxena and his colleagues at Cornell University’s Personal Robotics Lab reasoned that people are likely the most important factors for robots to keep mind in the places where they work, since those environments are typically designed around human use. As such, when people are not actually there for reference, hallucinating their presence could help provide key context for the machines.

Ref: Robots can learn by imagining the existence of people – io9