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Robot Uses Human Vision Tricks To Navigate

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 10 of February , 2009 at 6:33 am


[Direct Link to Video]

It’s not something that you think about consciously, but there are a bunch of little tricks that humans use when moving around that robots have no clue about. Italian researchers hooked a brain scanner up to people and monitored their brains while they walked to try and figure out what information our eyes feed to our brains, and then emulated that with a robotic vision and navigation system. The result was a robot that was able to navigate around obstacles, giving them a wider berth when moving quickly than when moving slowly.

On the face of it, it’s a totally intuitive thing. But remember that robots don’t have faces or intuition, and generally, tricks like this have to be specifically programmed in. Unlike robots, when we humans encounter unfamiliar obstacles in an unfamiliar environment, our brains and our eyes team up to use this unconscious set of rules to help us get around. This type of research will hopefully help robots navigate in new environments in much the same way, with general rules instead of an endless amount of tediously specific programming.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

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Category: Artificial Intelligence,Research

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