Berkeley researchers have developed a mobile robot called BADGR, which learns to navigate independently. "Most mobile robots think purely in terms of geometry; they detect where obstacles are, and plan paths around these perceived obstacles in order to reach the goal," says doctoral electrical engineering and computer sciences student Gregory Kahn, one of the study's co-authors. "This purely geometric view of the world is insufficient for many navigation problems." Kahn worked on the robot with electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, and assistant electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Sergey Levine. With just 42 hours of autonomously collected data, BADGR outperformed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approaches in a test, and it had less data to work with than other navigation methods, according to the researchers. Link to video.