A robot asking for directions

People are getting more and more used to rely on technology and getting walking or driving directions using their GPS devices in the car or their mobile phones. I know few people who prefer asking for directions to using their phones in an urban setting.

Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) on the other hand is a robot that has to rely on successful collaboration with humans. According to thefollowing video ACE successfully navigated from the origin to its destination (a distance of about 1.5 kilometers) in about 5 hours – and by asking 38 pedestrians and interpreting their hand signals along the way.

This projects seems like a nice venue to explore a big collection of different problem areas, such as collision avoidance, gesture interpretation, detecting of people, route planning, and many more. I wonder what this project will teach us about the nature of collaboration itself, particularly between humans and machines.

Fascinating stuff.