Scientists teach robots how to respect human space

London, Dec 24 (IANS) In a bid a to teach robots how to respect personal space, scientists are now giving mobile robots a crash course in avoiding collisions with humans. Using "impedance" control, the researchers at the Institute of Automatics of the National University of San Juan in Argentina aimed to regulate the social dynamics between the robot's movements and the interactions of the robot's environment. The team did this by first analysing how a human leader and a human follower interact on a set track with well-defined borders. The feedback humans use to adjust their behaviours - letting someone know they're following too closely, for example - was marked as social forces and treated as defined physical fields. When a robot follows a human as part of a formation, it is supposed that it must also respect these social zones to improve its social acceptance," wrote Daniel Herrera, and an author on the study.