At a crowded student center, people toting backpacks hurry to class.
Among them is a robot on wheels. It moves left to pass a column blocking its way. Then it veers right to make room for an oncoming group of people. Crowds are no problem for this robot, which obeys human social rules to get around.The robot’s name is Jackal. It gets where it’s going at a brisk walking pace without bumping into anybody. Jackal can “plan paths around people in a way that makes them feel comfortable and makes our robot stay safe,” says Michael Everett. He’s part of a team of students who helped design the robot. Yu Fan Chen led the team. The students attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
You probably walk through crowds without thinking much about it. But robots are just starting to learn how to do this. “Navigating a crowd is a difficult thing to do,” says Everett. The people in a crowd move in many directions and at different speeds. A robot has to try to predict where these people will go, then plan its own path around them.
A robot uses a set of rules called an algorithm to calculate how it should move. Sometimes, robots that are around lots of moving people get stuck. This is called the “freezing robot” problem. Their algorithms might find no way to move without bumping into someone.
But a robot that could make its way through a crowd without freezing would be very useful. For example, “I could send a robot to pick up a pizza and drive it back,” Everett says. Ford Motor Co. sponsored the MIT team’s research. Ford hopes to one day turn Jackal into a product it can sell. Such robots could help deliver packages. They might even be able to carry people who need help getting around.
Ready, set, go!
Chen and Everett thought they could help make this robotic assistant a reality. They decided to use a new computer-programming technique. Called deep learning, it lets an algorithm learn by practicing. For example, a deep-learning system might practice finding faces in photos by looking at millions of pictures where the faces have first been labeled. Later, it can find faces in photos it never saw before.
Computer scientists used deep learning to write an algorithm called AlphaGo. It plays a board game called Go. Like chess, it’s a game of strategy. But the board is bigger and…
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