Page 14 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

PREFACE

We humans are good at moving around in this world of ours. If we are serious
about the ubiquity of robots’ help to humankind, we must pass this skill to our
robots. It also turns out that in some tasks, robots can find their way better than
humans. This suggests that it is time for humans and robots to join forces.
Imagine you arrive at a party. You are a bit late. The big room is teeming with
voices and movement. People talk, drink, dance, walk. As you look around, you
notice a friend waving to you from the opposite side of the room. You fill two
glasses with wine, glance quickly across the room, and start on your journey. You
maneuver between people, bend your body this way and that way to avoid colli-
sion or when shoved from the side, you raise your hands and squeeze your shoul-
ders, you step over objects on the floor. A scientifically minded observer would
say that you react to minute disruptions on your path while also keeping in mind
your global goal; that you probably make dozens of decisions per second, and a
great many sensors are likely involved in this process; that you react not only to
what you see, but also to what you sense at your sides, your back, your feet. In
a minute’s time you happily greet your friend and hand him a glass of wine.
You may be surprised to hear that in your trip across the room you planned
and executed a complex motion planning strategy whose emulation in technology
is a yet unachieved dream of scientists and engineers. Providing a robot with a
seemingly modest skill that you just demonstrated, an ability to move safely
among surrounding objects using incomplete sensing information about them
would be a breakthrough in science and technology whose consequences for
society is hard to overestimate. This would be the beginning of a new era,
with a great number of machines of unimaginable variety moving quietly and
productively in the world around us.
The main reason that we desire such technology is not, of course, the conve-
nience of a wine-serving automatic maid. A machine’s ability to safely operate
in a reasonably arbitrary environment will lead to our automating a wide span of
tasks that have eluded automation so far—from the delivery of drugs and food
to patients in hospitals and nursing homes, to a robot “nurse” in the homes of
elderly people, and to such indispensable tasks as cleaning chemical and nuclear
waste sites, demining of old and new mine fields, planetary exploration, repair of
faraway space satellites, and a great number of other tasks in agriculture, under-
sea, deep space, and so on. Equipped with this skill, the recent Mars rovers Spirit
and Opportunity would have accomplished in hours what took them weeks.
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