Robot can help you get to your plane on time

We've all been there. You shuffle out of a plane in a foreign airport and get lost finding your way to a connecting flight in a jet-lagged haze. By the time you reach your gate, the plane has left. Soon missed flights might be a thing of the past thanks to a friendly new robot that will help guide you through the airport.

Starting on Nov. 30, the robot will begin a test run in Schiphol Amsterdam Airport. It's part of the EU project SPENCER (Social situation-aware perception and action for cognitive robots), a collaboration between researchers and businesses in five different countries.

Over the course of one week, the robot, which is equipped with a face and a rectangular body with an interactive screen, will guide passengers through the international airport. The robotic body also has front and rear visual and depth sensors, laser scanners, a stereo camera and five onboard computers. It was taught to navigate its surroundings by researchers at Örebro University in Sweden.

"Navigating an airport is challenging, there is a lot of glass and a constantly changing environment in terms of temporary obstructions, such as parked luggage trolleys and people everywhere," Achim Lilienthal, professor of computer science and project leader of Örebro University said in a statement. "Objects that are temporarily permanent, so to speak, are the most difficult to work around. We do not know, for instance, how long that luggage trolley will be parked in a particular spot, which makes it harder for the robot to determine its own location. We are working on a general map representation that includes and allows the robot to handle temporarily permanent objects."

After the trial, researchers will use the test data to make improvements on the design before its premiere run in March 2016, which will be attended by representatives of the European Commission and prominent guests.

The idea for the project came from Dutch airline KLM because so many of its customers were getting lost in the airport and missing flights.

Lilienthal believes that the robot could be used for a number of other applications in and out of the airport.

"This technology can be used in all robots intended to interact with humans. Autonomous trucks for example, would be more widely accepted if they functioned better in their interaction with humans," he said in a statement.