Making Robots Navigate Like Humans

A stuff.co.nz
story tipped us off to some interesting research being done by Albert
Yeap at the Centre
for Artificial Intelligence Research at Auckland University of
Technology. Yeap has created a robot, named Albot, that navigates much
like people and other biological creatures. It uses symbolic
reasoning rather than precise distances and coordinates. For example, as
we walk around, we might notice an obstacle such as a wall but, "We
don't care if the wall is 1 metre, 1.2 metres or 0.9 metres away from
us. It's somewhere out there roughly at that distance." So Albot is
able to navigate successfully using the same type of error-ridden data
that animals use. To learn more about how Albot navigates, see the
research paper, Using
a Mobile Robot for Cognitive Mapping (PDF format).

Source: http://www.netchain.com