The autonomous city explorer robot

It is not every day that you see robots traveling long distances around a city without GPS and with the help of perfect strangers. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the tweenbots project which used the kindness of strangers to guide the robot to its destination. But that project used a very simple kind of robot not capable of much more than moving on a straight line.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have been developing a city exploring robot that is capable of interacting with strangers using speech, hand gestures and a touch screen to get information from them. The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project has successfully demonstrated the robot navigating 1.5Km around Munich.

ACE is a very complex robot using a number of advanced sensors and algorithms to sense the surrounding environment, move without colliding with obstacles and, of course, interacting with other pedestrians who stop to help the robot find its way. The robot which comes equipped with both stereo vision and laser sensors stands 178cm tall and weighs 160Kgrs. A total of 3 onboard computers provide the necessary processing power for navigation and interaction. Lastly, the robot can move at a maximum speed of 1.4m/sec and slopes of up to 6 degrees but obviously at a much slower speed.

ACE navigates by constructing topological maps of its environment as it moves along. It uses specially designed modules to detect the traversability of regions used for path planning and following. It is capable of detecting people using skin color detection and tracking them as they move. The interaction interface using speech and gestures can be a bit crude as it requires people to stand in a way that is easy to interpret but it is a step ahead anything else out there.

The video below describes the system details and shows the robot in action interacting with other pedestrians and safely navigating in an urban environment.