From Vacuums to Taxis: What Makes a Routing Problem Hard for Robots

Vacuum robots and self-driving taxi robots navigate physical spaces and avoid obstacles. That&rsquo;s a super broad characterization. The more interesting question is why everything else about them is so different. My friend was telling me recently about riding in a Waymo in Los Angeles, and we started discussing how they gathered data to know where to go. I mentioned that I&rsquo;d been writing a…