ROBOTS don’t speak English or understand hand signals, so how do you tell one where to go? Researchers at the University of Missouri, Columbia, have found an answer: show it sketches.
Marjorie Skubic and her colleagues have been using a personal digital assistant (PDA) to sketch out the kind of directions you might give a friend, which they then beam to a domestic robot. She has been running experiments to see how well a robot can follow a rough sketch around a room full of filing cabinets, tables and chairs.
“It’s already succeeding in 50 per cent of routes,” says Skubic. The system, which will be presented at the IEEE conference on…
