Robots taught to move safely, but not too safely

On the road to an increasingly autonomous future, robots and AI systems will need to be programmed to instinctively avoid collisions when they take the wheel. But if bots are designed to be too careful, performance may suffer. A team at Georgia Tech has created new algorithms that aim to strike a balance between the two extremes, allowing robots to move in a swarm safely and efficiently. Collision avoidance is one of the most important considerations of autonomous vehicles and robots, but some researchers have pondered the ethics of allowing self-driving cars to break minor laws to keep things running smoothly. It follows that autonomous robots may need to relax their own "bubbles" of personal space a little, too.