We can program robots not to get all up in our personal space

FOR robots to coexist amicably with us, they need to learn about personal space. A software upgrade could help droids navigate crowded places like malls without jostling people around them. Harmish Khambhaita and Rachid Alami at the University of Toulouse in France wanted to programme a robot to mimic human manners like stepping around one another, yielding to groups and respecting personal space. "The robot has to reason what the human would like to do and react," says Khambhaita. This may seem akin to what driverless cars do, but humans are tougher to predict than traffic.