CHAPTER 9
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
Robotics is a young but fast-growing technology. Today, millions of robots in factories, professional settings, and homes free people from performing repetitive, dangerous, and dull tasks. In factories, robots build high-quality industrial parts and assemble cars with high precision at a lower cost. In the military, robots save lives by participating on the battlefield, disposing of bombs, and searching inside buildings and caves for enemy combatants. On farms, robots efficiently harvest crops and milk cows, reducing the need for the human workers. In homes, robots vacuum floors, clean pools and gutters, and mow lawns. In hospitals, robots assist physicians in performing less-invasive operations by enabling surgeons to perform complex procedures through small incisions.
With advances in robotics technology and the emergence of faster and smaller computers, robots will become cheaper, more intelligent, more flexible, more reliable, and more robust. This will enable robots to engage in many new tasks that previously could be performed only by humans. Once robots show they can reliably perform a task as well as a human can (or even better), their use will grow. People will not go back to the old way of doing things. In this chapter, you will look at how robotics technology is likely to grow in the near future and how this will affect cultural and societal aspects of people’s lives.
EXTENDED AUTONOMY
Today, robots are capable of autonomously making decisions. If, however, the task the robot is performing is a critical one, the robot will be closely monitored and controlled by a human operator. For example, surgical robots are completely controlled by human surgeons. Also, although Mars rovers are capable of avoiding obstacles and protecting themselves against many undesirable situations, due to the criticality of their mission and many unforeseen conditions on Mars, all actions performed by Mars rovers are conservatively planned and closely monitored by humans on Earth.
In the future, as robots become more intelligent, flexible, and resilient, they will be able to operate more independently for longer periods of time without human intervention. More autonomy will require robots to detect and correctly respond to different events and situations in their environment. In addition, if robots operate for long periods of time, it is highly probable that the environment will change considerably during their operation. For example, a fully autonomous robotic astronaut might transition from a flat, sandy desert to a mountainous or volcanic region during its lifetime. In addition, it might encounter a faulty radio transmitter or have sensors that need to be repaired. Such situations require robots be able to detect their situation, take their current circumstances into consideration, and autonomously make necessary changes to their course of action to successfully complete their mission.
PEOPLE AND ROBOTS GET CLOSER
During the early years of robotic technology, industrial robots were isolated in their work environment for safety reasons—for example, to avoid collisions with people and other robots. The invention of mobile robots created the opportunity for robots to leave structured factory environments and coexist with people. Today, robots such as robotic vacuum cleaners and a large variety of robotic toys operate in homes and interact closely with people.
In the near future, as robots become more intelligent and reliable, more robots will share living and working spaces with people, entering people’s everyday lives. There will be more robots in hospitals, retirement homes, offices, schools, department stores, and homes performing professional and personal services.
To enter people’s daily lives, robots will need to be able to operate in environments designed for humans and deal with clutter and constant changes in the environment. For example, robots should be able to use stairs and elevators; work in cluttered kitchens; watch for children, pets, and adults moving about in the surroundings; and detect when furniture, utensils, books, and other objects in the environment have been moved while trying to interact with them. Safety will also be a major issue. A robot that can carry an elderly person out of his or her bed will be strong enough to hurt that person if it makes a wrong move due to a software or hardware failure.
Allowing robots to enter into people’s everyday lives will expand the research and development that goes into designing new robots that can safely operate in the presence of humans, pets, and other robots.
INTUITIVE INTERACTION WITH ROBOTS
Today, most robots are programmed and operated by robotics experts. To enter into people’s everyday lives, robots must be able to be easily used and operated by everyone. For example, robots should be able to naturally communicate with and take direction from elderly people, children, and others. Robots should also be able to initiate communication if necessary. For example, if an elderly person forgets to take his or her medicine, the robot should remind the person or facilitate the taking of the medication by bringing the medicine and perhaps some water to him or her. A companion robot might even need to be able to detect the feelings of the person with whom it is interacting and respond accordingly. These applications require robots to have extensive knowledge about humans—about how people live their lives—and to be able to correctly apply their knowledge in relevant situations. In other applications, such as personal assistance, robots may need to be able to coordinate and cooperate with humans to complete a task. For example, a human and a robot might need to lift a heavy table together to carry it.
A natural way of interacting with robots could be to use human natural language and gestures. In the future, robots will be able to understand and respond to human language and gestures. In addition, robots will be able to understand and respond to the cultural and contextual aspects of conversations and language. For example, robots will understand idioms, jokes, and references to places and past events. They will also recognize and take into consideration the social aspect of their conversations, such as the age and gender of the person with whom they are conversing. Emotions play an important role in human interactions. To have natural and intuitive interactions with humans, robots should be able to recognize and express feelings and emotions.
ROBOT LEARNING
Fully autonomous robots cannot be preprogrammed ahead of time for all possible situations in which they may find themselves or for all possible tasks they may perform in their lifetime. There will always be new tasks or changes to previously performed tasks. Therefore, robots should be able to learn new tasks and be able to adapt to changes in previously performed tasks. For example, someone might want to teach its assistant robot to play table tennis with him or her, or want his or her service robot to learn to cook a new recipe.
In general, robot learning can be thought of as the capability of a robot to autonomously extend or modify its control software to enable the robot to perform new tasks or to perform existing tasks differently. Robots should be able to learn new tasks in easy and natural ways. For example, a robot should be able to learn a new task by observing a human performing that task or guiding the robot through the steps of the task. This type of learning is called “imitation learning”—the robot learns by imitating the human or another robot’s actions.
Imitation learning is one of the methods by which humans learn new tasks. This type of learning requires the trainee and the trainer to actively participate in the learning process. For example, the robot might learn to play table tennis by watching two humans playing. At the beginning, the robot may not have a complete or correct view of playing table tennis—specifically, what needs to be accomplished or what the rules are. Therefore, the robot might ask questions about the game if it detects ambiguity. The humans can then answer them. Then the robot will start performing the task based how it has learned it. If it makes mistakes, the human teacher can correct them by showing the robot the right way of doing things. This can continue until the robot gets better at performing the tasks—perhaps even outperforming the human!
HUMAN-LIKE ROBOTS
Today, most people think of robots as looking like machines consisting of wheels, legs, wires, metallic or plastic pieces, motors, and cameras. This view is mostly influenced by robots having historically been designed for specific applications such as vacuuming floors or working in industrial settings. As more general-purpose and intelligent robots enter people’s everyday lives, this view will change.
Research shows that the look of a robot can be an important factor in some applications. Imagine a companion robot for an elderly person. The look of this robot will certainly influence whether the elderly person will be interested in interacting with it and will be able to trust it. Also, the look of a robotic receptionist or a robotic doctor might affect whether people feel comfortable interacting with them.
One idea that robotics researchers have is that people will better respond to human-looking robots. Figure 9.1 shows two human-like robots and their human counterparts, made by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. The first image shows Professor Ishiguro with a robotic replica of himself.
© 2014 Hiroshi Ishiguro, All Rights Reserved.
It is still not clear if people feel more comfortable around fully human-like robots or prefer that robots keep a sense of machine-like personality. As more robots enter people’s homes and work environments, there will be more data available on how people feel about robots’ appearance. In addition, different people may have different preferences. For example, an adult might find a human-like robot comforting, but it might look disturbing to a child (or vice versa).
MILITARY ROBOTS
The use of robots in the military is on the rise due to the valuable services they can provide on the battlefield. The U.S. military envisions having 10 robots per soldier by 2023. Robots save lives by allowing soldiers to remotely gather information about the enemy in the battlefield, including inside buildings and caves. Robots also allow soldiers to remotely perform actions that could potentially be dangerous such as neutralizing mines or removing wounded soldiers from the battle zone. Due to the sensitivity of military robots’ tasks, most military robots are currently either controlled remotely or closely monitored by humans. However, this requires too much of the soldiers’ attention, which is not usually practical in battle.
In the future, it will be highly desirable for intelligent robot soldiers, flying robots, and underwater robots to seamlessly work with human soldiers as companions with minimal supervision. Ideally, robot soldiers will use their high-precision sensors to detect threats such as enemies and land mines, and will communicate these threats to human soldiers through secure and intuitive interfaces. Robots can also be used to carry heavy loads and to autonomously follow human soldiers. The next imaginable step is to give soldier robots firepower ability to replace human soldiers and to allow them to autonomously decide when to use their power. However, this requires a trusted and proven technology, as the consequences of any mistakes will be intolerable.
SMALL ROBOTS
Building and controlling small robots is an emerging field in robotics technology. Depending on their size, small robots are usually divided in different groups. Nanorobots, or nanobots, are robots whose dimensions are of a nanometer scale, or less than a micrometer. Micro-robots, milli-robots, and mini-robots have dimensions at or below 1 millimeter, 1 centimeter, and 10 centimeters, respectively. Small robots offer unique opportunities for a range of new applications.
In medicine, imagine a pill that contains millions of nanobots, each with containers to hold medication. When the patient takes the pill, the nanobots are released inside his or her body and travel through the blood vessels to the infected area, where they release their medication. In this way, a higher dosage of medication can be directly applied to the infected areas without affecting the whole body. After their job is done, they are absorbed by the kidneys and leave the body. Or imagine a group of surgical nanobots released into a patient’s blood vessels, where they can detect clogged arteries through nano-scale sensors and, after finding them, remove plaque to open the blocked artery using nano-scale actuators. Other applications that can be imagined for small robots in medicine include injecting nanobots into the body to support a fractured bone until it heals or monitoring the function of different organs in the body using nanobots that sense and communicate the condition of the organs in real time. These applications and many more might be ready for use in the near future.
Small robots also offer new paradigms in robotic technology, such as modularity and reconfigurability. Instead of building large robots from large parts, it is possible to build them from thousands or even millions of small robot modules. Each small robot module performs as a cell of the larger robot. Depending on how the cells are connected to each other, the robot can take different shapes. For example, the cells can reconfigure themselves to the shape of a hand so that the robot can pick up an object, and can later become legs so the robot can walk. Each module (cell) might not be able to achieve much, but collectively, all cells can perform complex tasks. In this paradigm, if some of the modules fail, the rest of the modules will still be able to continue their work, making the robot fault-tolerant. In other words, the robot will be able to continue its operation despite the failure of some of its parts.
ROBOT ORGANIZATIONS
As intelligent robots acquire more autonomy to operate without human supervision for longer periods of time, organizations of robots will be created in which robots will manage themselves. There will be societies of robots that are independently run and interact with humans to provide services. Robots will work in mines to excavate ores and send them to the surface for refinement. There will be factories that are fully operated by robots. In those factories, robots will manage the delivery of raw material, the operation of the assembly lines, and the delivery of the final products, as well as repairing other robots when necessary. In large warehouses, robots will coordinate with each other to efficiently store and deliver goods. In outer space, robot colonies will help astronauts study different planets, mine asteroids, and send materials to Earth. In cities, teams of robots will build houses, build roads, and collect and dispose of garbage. There will be restaurants, hospitals, and schools that are operated and managed by robots providing services to humans.
THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF ROBOTS
As the number of robots grows in the future, robots will continue to play larger roles in people’s lives. It is very likely that they will change how people live their lives the same way that computers have done in the past 30 years.
As robots become capable of doing work that only humans can do today, people will be able to work less. This might force people to start competing with robots for jobs and social status, or it might encourage them to spend their free time on creative activities such as art or sports or simply hanging out with their family and friends.
The legal issues surrounding robots are another societal aspect of robotics technology. New laws will be required to specify whether robots will have legal rights and who will be responsible for robots’ actions when they do something wrong or cause problems.
SUMMARY
Robots are fun to watch and interact with. They are machines, but look alive. Similar to humans and animals, they can sense their surroundings, “think,” and act in the environment. As robotic technology advances, more and more intelligent robots will perform tasks that previously were limited only to humans. This will affect cultural and societal aspects of people’s lives.
In the future, robots will learn to coexist with humans to help them in their everyday lives and free them from performing repetitive, dangerous, and dull jobs. People will also learn from robots. Someday, robots may give human beings new ideas about who they are and what distinguishes them from machines.