Jackal’s abilities could be applied to tasks like delivering goods, operating in malls or working in hospitals — delivering medicine or even moving patients. — Screen cap of Reuters video

BOSTON, Jan 4 — Meet Jackal.

MIT scientists have created this robot to ‘go with the flow’ when moving through a crowd.

Robots are logical, humans largely not.

So the challenge for MIT Aerospace Controls Lab researchers was to design and programme a robot to act like a human when moving through pedestrian areas.

“Socially aware navigation to us means a robot that plans paths that account for what people want to do. So instead of the robot trying to do the best thing for it or, that’s going to lead to a very aggressive robot,” Michael Everett, PhD student and robot project lead researcher at MIT, said.

“And if the robot just accounts for what everyone else wants to do, all the people, it’s going to be a really conservative robot. So we want to blend the two ideas together and come up with a robot that operates just like people do, as so we fit in with the flow of traffic. Some of our algorithms are designed so that if a person’s coming towards us, we’re going to follow the social rules that people follow, like passing him on the right side.

“If there’s a slower person in front of us that’s walking we should pass them on the left and go around them. Now these things, that’s how we programme it and that’s what we would expect, but people don’t do that every time.

“So we need to be able to account for that randomness. And so we may not see that every time out of the robot, but we’re hoping that it will be choosing the best thing to do.”

To help Jackal navigate the physical world among unpredictable humans, the team outfitted the robot with a combination of sensors and cameras.

“This robot has a lot of the sensors that you’ll see on full-size autonomous cars, but we’ve scaled it down. We have three webcams pointing out front so we can identify people and then a LIDAR which gives us a point cloud of the world. We get a 3-D picture of the world and we use the cameras to tell us what things in the world are,” he said.

Jackal’s abilities could be applied to tasks like delivering goods, operating in malls or working in hospitals — delivering medicine or even moving patients. — Reuters