Stanford's 'Jackrabbot' robot will attempt to learn the arcane and unspoken rules of pedestrians

It's hard enough for a grown human to figure out how to navigate a crowd sometimes -- so what chance does a clumsy and naive robot have? To prevent future collisions and awkward "do I go left or right" situations, Stanford researchers are hoping their "Jackrabbot" robot can learn the rules of the road. The team, part of the Computational Vision and Geometry Lab, has already been working on computer vision algorithms that track and aim to predict pedestrian movements. But the rules are so complex, and subject to so many variations depending on the crowd, the width of the walkway, the time of day, whether there are bikes or strollers involved -- well, like any machine learning task, it takes a lot of data to produce a useful result. Furthermore, the algorithm they are developing is intended to be based entirely on observed data as interpreted by a neural network; no tweaking by researchers adding cues obvious to them ("in this situation, a person will definitely go left") is allowed. Their efforts so far are detailed in a paper the team will present at CVPR later this month.