In drive tests performed inside MIT's Stata Center, the robot, which resembles a knee-high kiosk on wheels, successfully avoided collisions while keeping up with the average flow of pedestrians. The researchers have detailed their robotic design in a paper that they will present at the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in September.
"Socially aware navigation is a central capability for mobile robots operating in environments that require frequent interactions with pedestrians," says Yu Fan "Steven" Chen, who led the work as a former MIT graduate student and is the lead author of the study. "For instance, small robots could operate on sidewalks for package and food delivery. Similarly, personal mobility devices could transport people in large, crowded spaces, such as shopping malls, airports, and hospitals," World Econimoc Forum reports.
The proposed method is shown to enable fully autonomous navigation of a robotic vehicle moving at human walking speed in an environment with many pedestrians. Read more here.