This robot can follow rules of pedestrians

New York : Engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed an autonomous robot that can keep pace with foot traffic while observing the general social codes that pedestrians follow to avoid oncoming obstacles while keeping up a steady walking pace.

In drive tests, the robot, which resembles a knee-high kiosk on wheels, successfully avoided collisions while keeping up with the average flow of pedestrians, said the researchers who have detailed their robotic design in a paper scheduled to be presented at the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems to be held in Vancouver, Canada, in September.

In order for a robot to make its way autonomously through a heavily trafficked environment, it must solve four main challenges -- localisation (knowing where it is in the world), perception (recognising its surroundings), motion planning (identifying the optimal path to a given destination), and control (physically executing its desired path).

The team also incorporated social norms into this offline training phase, in which they encouraged the robot in simulations to pass on the right, and penalised the robot when it passed on the left.