Iuro robot asks humans for help navigating cities

October 16, 2012

Iuro, or Interactive Urban Robot, has  21 actuators inside its head, giving it fully controllable eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, lips, ears, and mouth. Stereo cameras above the eyes and a Kinect sensor in the chest help Iuro to interact with humans it runs into on the street, interpreting speech and gestures to enable it to find its way from place to place without using maps or GPS.

The overall goal with Iuro is to teach robots to navigate. The research will eventually enable autonomous robots to figure out what they don’t know and then ask the nearest human for help, without needing that human to provide information in the form of precise if/then statements.