Tongue twister

Right now, some if not most of you are accusing me of playing with words. You are right, up to some point. After all a navigation device made by TomTom is not commonly considered a robot, although formally they are identical. The portable navigation gizmos sense the environment, do some processing on it and execute actions based on the processing results. Nothing else, nothing more than the operation of a Turing machine. It is fed symbols on a tape (sensing), changes the state (processing) and also the symbols on the tape (acting).

I would like now to point my illustrious audience (Google's spider robot and mummy) to this most curious fact. A TomTom gadget, a robot (humor me) without self-locomotion capabilities is able to reach an arbitrary point in the city park. But replace the human by a mobile base such as a Pioneer P3-AT, and you are lucky if it makes pass the rosebuds.

Notice that the problem is not the estimation of the position, it is the same in both cases. It is also not a problem of mechanic locomotion, since you can also build robots with humanoid kinematics. It is also not a problem in the thinking part, since it the TomTom gadget that in both cases computes the path and the actions to reach it. The only difference is that humans are able to ignore the GPS directions while the mechanic mobile bases are not. It is as if sometimes the instructions of the TomTom can/should be ignored.