A fascinating experiment from ITP on getting a robot from point A to point B in New York City. A highly successful approach is to have a simple robot that just goes straight but with a cute external appearance and a clearly visible statement of its goal location. Bottom Line: Strangers intervene to get the robot to where it needs to go. In one case, 29 random people helped a robot cross a park.
More here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/tweenbots-cute-beats-smart.html
Equally amazing is that in multiple runs, the robots always succeeded in reaching their goal and were never damaged.
