Matt Franchi*, Maria Teresa Parreira*, Frank Bu*, Wendy Ju
*equal contribution
CHI '25: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
https://robotability.cornell.edu/
The Robotability Score (R) is a novel metric that quantifies how suitable urban environments are for autonomous robot navigation. Through expert interviews and surveys, we've developed a standardized framework for evaluating urban landscapes to reduce uncertainty in robot deployment while respecting established mobility patterns.
Streets with high Robotability are both more navigable for robots and less disruptive to pedestrians. We've constructed a proof-of-concept Robotability Score for New York City using a wealth of open datasets from NYC OpenData, and inferred pedestrian distributions from a dataset of 8 million dashcam images taken around the city in late 2023.
Read the paper
Explore the spatial distribution of Robotability Scores across New York City's diverse urban landscape.