MIT uses 4D maps to help robot teams navigate moving obstacles

It's one thing to keep robots from crashing into fixed obstacles like walls or furniture, but preventing collisions with other moving things is a much tougher challenge. Targeting teams of robots working together, MIT on Thursday announced a new algorithm that helps robots avoid moving objects. Planning algorithms for robot teams can be centralized, in which a single computer makes decisions for the whole team, or decentralized, in which each robot makes its own decisions. The latter approach is much better in terms of incorporating local observations, but it's also much trickier, since each robot must essentially guess what the others are going to do. MIT's new algorithm takes a decentralized approach and factors in not just stationary obstacles but also moving ones.