Robots get around by mimicking primates

By mimicking how primates visualise an unfamiliar environment - a process called mental rotation - researchers are building a new kind of guidance system for robots.

Many species of animals perform mental rotation - a poorly understood aspect of spatial reasoning that is nonetheless an integral part of high-level cognition.

"If I tell you to turn left, you will probably ask whose left, mine or yours?" says Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who is leading the effort to incorporate this technique into software for controlling robots. "You have to transform your frame of reference," he says.

The team is now testing their software in a lab setting. The researchers first supply the robot with a destination - a simplified image of how objects in their environment will look from a given perspective. The robot then uses depth information from an on-board Kinect motion sensor to establish how objects look in its surroundings.

Once it has built a picture of where it is, the robot “mentally” rotates the orientation of objects to match its destination, and then plots a path. As it trundles along, it continues to take images of its surroundings and compare them to its destination, just to make sure it is on the right track. In tests, a small four-wheeled robot used this method to find its way 6 metres across a lab floor to the right spot.

It’s a humble beginning, but Arkin says it’s the first time a robot has demonstrated the ability to receive visual instructions and act on them without a map. The work will be presented in December at the ROBIO conference in Guangzhou, China. “When the world isn’t as you expect it to be, this will help you,” he says, adding that the system could also be adapted to use speech recognition software to understand voice commands and use them to build a picture of the destination being described.