Mobile robots are the future of this world but beset with interference issues, scientists are currently working on avoiding possible collision with humans. A group of scientists from the Institute of Automatics of the National University of San Juan in Argentina are giving mobile robots a crash course now.
The research on the task given to mobile robots has been published in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica (JAS). A Ph.D. researcher from the university in Argentina and the author of the study, Daniel Herrera, wrote, "Humans respect social zones during different kind[s] of interactions... When a robot follows a human as part of a formation, it is supposed that it must also respect these social zones to improve its social acceptance."
Researchers said that they have tried to regulate the social dynamics between a robot's movement and the connection of the robot's environment. Researchers first observed and analyzed how a human leader and a human follower interact with each other to proceed on any project and set a well-defined border.
The programmed robots then followed a human, while maintaining the same borders but without obstructing the 'social forces,' which is a consensus on the part of sufficient number of the defined society's members to bring about some kind of social action.
"Under the hypothesis that moving like a human will be acceptable to humans, it is believed that the proposed control improves the social acceptance of the robot for this kind of interaction," Herrera said.
The researchers further said if these robots can be programmed to respond and respect like other humans, then this robotic technology will be accepted by others soon.
"The results show that the robot is capable of emulating the previously identified impedance and, consequently, it is believed that the proposed control can improve the social acceptance by being able to imitate this human-human dynamic behavior," pointed out Herrera.
Though some robots like Mortimer can compose music responsively to human pianists in real-time and post pictures of the sessions on Facebook, there are still some flaws which require to be fixed by the scientists to let these robots function alongside the humans without disturbing their personal space.
