By Patricia Waldron
For delivery robots, not all sidewalks are created equal – some are uneven or clogged with people and bus shelters – so researchers at Cornell Tech developed a “robotability score” and rated every street in New York City on how hospitable it would be to robots.
Their rating system is the first of its kind, researchers said, and may help urban planners and robotics companies plan for future robot deployments that won’t disrupt existing sidewalk environments.
“I don’t know that everybody wants robots in their neighborhood, but if they do, the robotability score can help them think about, what are the features that we’ve built in to help welcome robots?” said senior author Wendy Ju, associate professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the multicollege Department of Design Tech. “We’re just trying to make those things a little bit more visible.”
Read more at the Cornell Chronicle.
Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
