Wandering Robots in the Wild
21st July 2022
In order to better understand how people will interact with mobile robots in the wild, we need to take them out of the lab and deploy them in the real world. But this isn’t easy to do.
Roboticists tend to develop robots under the assumption that they’ll know exactly where their robots are at any given time—clearly that’s an important capability if the robot’s job is to usefully move between specific locations. But that ability to localize generally requires the robot to have powerful sensors and a map of its environment. There are ways to wriggle out of some of these requirements: If you don’t have a map, there are methods that build a map and localize at the same time, and if you don’t have a good range sensor, visual navigation methods use just a regular RGB camera, which most robots would have anyway. Unfortunately, these alternatives to traditional localization-based navigation are either computationally expensive, not very robust, or both.
The problem with engineers is that they think that the world is full of people like them, i.e. intelligent and honest.
The first thing that will happen when they ‘deploy their robot in the real world’ is that some crook from the ‘hood will throw it in the back of a van and you’ll never see it–or its contents–again (except as small parts sold out of the back of a bodega).