In the last 30 years, we have seen a revolution in a cluster of technologies built around IT: computers, the Internet, mobile gadgets and so on. I believe that in the next 30 years we will see an equally profound revolution in robotics. I full expect that when I am an old man, robots will be as much a part of every day life as the Internet is today. Here are some of the major factors which wll drive this change:
Global demographics: Ageing is going to be a global phenomenon taking place in OECD countries and even countries like China and later India. In many of these countries the elderly will have a lot of political power in addition to being quite wealthy. They will generate a huge global demand for products which make their lives easier and robots will be high on the list taking care of them and helping them with their everyday life.
The military: Any technology which is useful to the military is always likely to see the big bucks when it comes to R&D dollars and the research ends up percolating to the private sector. Rich world militaries are always looking for ways to deliver fire power without risking soldiers. In the future, robots could complement drones in doing this and at the least the military is going to spend heavily in technologies like machine vision and machine movement which could come in useful in robots.
Modularity of technology: Building decent robots is a formidable task but much of the technology is modular. For example voice/language technology developed for mobile phones and computers can be easily adapted to robots. Better battery life, machine vision, self-cleaning fuctions are other technologies which could be transferred from other products to robots. Essentially modularity allows R&D costs to be spread around many different products and sectors.
Global supply chains: Existing global supply chains are well suited to building robots on a massive scale. Japan and Germany are leaders in high quality manufacturing and engineering. China excels at low-cost manufacturing. The US is the leader in software and UI design. India excels at producing low-cost software. The robotics industry could be a major driver of job growth in all these countries and others. I expect Japan in particular will be very important: it is already the leader in industrial robots, faces an especially severe ageing problem and is strongly averse to taking in immigrants. Robots are an obvious solution and the Japanese seem to have a strong cultural affinity to them as well.
What do you think? This is a topic I am interested in exploring in detail so any recommendations for good web-sites, books etc. are welcome.
I’ve seen TED talks where speakers basically say robotics today are at about the same stage of development as personal computers were in the early 80s.
So if that trend continues, within 10 years they’ll be common and within 20 years hard to live without.
It could go either way, but my gut feeling is that robotics is going rise - figuratively - from the ground up. The Roomba, for instance. A robot that vacuums the floor. Sometime soon someone’s going to build one with a separate socket for water and soap, which’ll be drawn from the house supply of water and a 10-gallen tank of soap, and wham, no more cleaning floors. Then a robotic loader for dishwashers. Then a washing machine with a robotic sorter and loader which will read and sort by bar-codes on the clothes’ washing tags.
Then someone finally gets a power/cost breakthrough on powered exoskeletons and with the major funding from military and health-care projects that’ll pull in, we’ll have legless vets back up on their new legs in no-time. (A project that combines military and health technology research budgets? I’m shocked it hasn’t been accomplished already.)
Sure, there are hurdles and problems still to overcome. Power sources, for one. A safe software platform is another. (Robotics software being one of those things I’d prefer not to get from the lowest bidder.) And there’s the fact that large amounts of our lives are already dominated by robotics, although human-operated or rigidly pre-programmed ones, like CNC and CAD machines.
But robotics really isn’t one of those things that need a leap forward, just lots of tiny solutions to tiny problems. If I could find a company with ambition that does good work in prototype robotics and had the money, I’d consider them as safe a bet for the future as Microsoft in '90.
If you mean an increased refinement of smarter and smarter machines for use in manufacturing as already exists, then certainly. Better and more intelligent home appliances, cars that can drive themselves and such, oh yeah. Smarter tools.
But if you are talking about android type artificial humans as companions, servants, soldiers, nurses etc. then no, I don’t think so, at least as anything beyond a novelty.
Yes this is a major constraint though recently there have been robotswhich use fuel cells. This is another technology which should be fairly modular; if there are big advances in fuel cells it should be fairly easy to adapt to robots. Again you have strong linkages with a sector, i.e. energy, where we will see huge investment in the next few decades. Also there is a lot of effort being put into making mobile computing devices more energy efficient and I expect some of that technology will also be useful for robots.
Absolutely and this is why I think you will see huge progress in robotics; it’s fairly easy to see an incremental path driven by the private sector unlike say space exploration. So there is already a market niche for crude robots like the Roomba and then competition and technological progress keeps making them better and better just as has happened with personal computers over the last 30 years.
Another trend that should help robotics is Moore’s law which IIRC is expected to continue for a decade at least. It’s not clear all that power is going to be of much use in personal computers but it should come in very handy in robots which will require ungodly amounts of processing power to combines vision, language and movement.
And finally yes I know that robots are heavily used in manufacturing but I wouldn’t say they are a part of everyday life like computers and mobile phones. Again the analogy with computers which were already fairly important in 1980 but became central to everyday life only in the last three decades.
A robot that loads the dishwasher… How would that work? Would it clear the table for you? Because if not, I don’t see a big difference between a human clearing the table and putting the dishes into the dishwasher, and a human clearing the table and putting the dishes in the staging area for the robotic loader.
I am not a copyright specialist by any means, but for older works, don’t they run 95 years from creation? If so, that means the real transformation won’t take off until Powerhouseis out of copyright and Chronos is free to invent his dishwasher contraption and entrepreneurs everywhere are free to follow suit. Until then, I think Acme has the market locked up.
Actually it could be a big difference if you are an older or handicapped person. That is how the industry will evolve. Crude robots will be still useful enough to be profitable in particular niches especially for people who have trouble with simple tasks. As they become more sophisticated they will spread to the general population. So I could imagine early models where you have to put the dishes in a staging area and then a decade or so for more sophisticated models which can clear the table. It is exactly this kind of profit-driven incrementalism which can lead to enormous progress over a period of decades just as with personal computers.mobile phones and so on.
BTW if you haven’t seen it already, hereis a video of the DARPA-funded Big Robot. The bit at 1:30 where it recovers its balance is quite extraordinary. This is the kind of military-funded technology I expect we will find in homes 20-30 years from now.
You’re a bit late on the floor washing robot.. I suspect it doesn’t fill itself yet, but the infrastructure isn’t there. Our cheapo Roomba got choked on dog hair, I’m about to order one meant for houses with dogs, which also is clever enough to go back and charge itself when it is done…
I don’t think a robot dishwasher makes sense. Single serving portions in recyclable microwave safe containers is the way to go. You could have an auto kitchen that would be like a vending machine that would load the meal automatically into a microwave and cook it based on instructions on an RFID chip or bar code. It’s possible that some of the containers may be edible, like a waffle cone, so there is no rubbish at all.
The other alternative is a assisted living situation where robotic carts deliver prepared meals directly to your apartment.
Actually, the robotic dishwasher concept in my head was basically just a robotic arm that would clear the dishes from the bench, analyze it (for crystal, wooden shafts on cutlery, etc), put it in the dishwasher, select the appropriate program and put them in the cupboards after. (Hell, in my kitchen it wouldn’t need to be more than four feet long to do that. :p)
The robot butler would clear the tables, of course.
The suggestion that it’d be a boon for the elderly is a good one, though it wasn’t on my mind when I wrote it. Actually, the big winner in the Youth Enterprise program back when I was in highschool was a small, two-wheel handcart for fire extinguishers, marketed to the elderly. It had over 25,000 Registered Interested Consumers and sold over 4,000 direct pre-orders. (Everything over 500 pre-orders got manufactured and sold by the companies sponsoring the event.)
ETA: Hey, thanks, Voyager. I should have known someone’d already got there. I’ll have to keep an eye on that one, my grandma’s already got the Roomba and the lawn-mower model, she might be interested.
The pop-cultural understanding of “robot,” as it features in so much SF, is something with strong AI; and as I understand it, that’s one of those things that always seems to be ten years away, like controlled nuclear fusion.
That’s because in practice, the definition of “strong AI” is “able to do something that we won’t be able to do for at least another decade”. Every so often, folks come up with examples of something a computer wouldn’t be able to do without “real AI”, and then, once computers start doing it, it’s no longer cited as an example.
I think we’ve moved past the Asimov/EandO Binder definition of robot as humanoid. i think people are very comfortable calling Roombas robots - even a lot of the ones in Star Wars were small non C3P0 (or even R2) bots.