Learning a language can be difficult for some, but for babies it seems quite easy. With support from the National Science Foundation, linguist Jeffrey Heinz and mechanical engineer Bert Tanner have taken some cues from the way humans learn to put words and thoughts together, and are teaching language to robots. This innovative collaboration began a few years ago at a meeting at the University of Delaware. One goal for this project is to design cooperative robots that can operate autonomously and communicate with each other in dangerous situations, such as in a fire or at a disaster site.