AI that can follow a person seems like a simple enough task. It’s certainly a simple thing to ask a human to do, but what if people or objects get in the way of the robot following behind a person? How do you navigate an environment that’s in a constant state of change?
About a year ago, at a robotics conference TechCrunch held at UC Berkeley, AI startup founders explored solutions for common problems encountered when trying to automate construction projects. Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau called attention to the challenge of moving machines in an unstructured environment filled with people.
“[The] typical construction site — it’s chaos, and anyone with a robotics background who knows anything about robotics knows it’s really hard to make robots work in that kind of unstructured environment,” she said.