Researchers design robots that can anticipate and safely avoid people on the move

[Still Waters]

A team of researchers led by University of Toronto Professor Tim Barfoot is using a new strategy that allows robots to avoid colliding with people by predicting the future locations of dynamic obstacles in their path.

The project will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Philadelphia at the end of May.

The results from a simulation, which are not yet peer-reviewed, are available on the arXiv preprint service.

"The principle of our work is to have a robot predict what people are going to do in the immediate future," says Hugues Thomas, a post-doctoral researcher in Barfoot's lab at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies in Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. "This allows the robot to anticipate the movement of people it encounters rather than react once confronted with those obstacles."

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-socially-aware-robots-safely-people.html