Page 15 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

xiv PREFACE

We do not have such automation today. Today, humans are not even allowed to
share space with serious robots, though a good number of the tasks above would
require this. The only reason for this constraint is that today’s robot bodies are
too insensitive, too oblivious to their surroundings, and hence too dangerous to
themselves and to objects and people around them.
Looking ahead to the near future, however, there are at least three good reasons
for optimism. One is social: The problem will not go away and so the pressure
on scientists and engineers will stay strong. The need for machines capable of
working in our midst or far away with little or no supervision will only grow with
time. The value of human life and the increasing costs of human labor combined
with ever riskier undertakings in space, undersea, and in rough places on Earth
will continue the push for more automation. A very good example of this trend is
the recent unique “attempt for on attempt” for a robot mission to save the ailing
Hubble Telescope.
One may say that having a painful problem is not enough to find a solution.
True, but then there are the other two reasons. The second reason for optimism is
the successes of robot systems in recent years. Almost 1,000,000 highly reliable
industrial robots are doing useful, sometimes quite complex, work worldwide.
True, almost none of these robots can operate outside of their highly specialized
man-made environment, and those few that do are too simplistic to be taken
seriously. Hence the third reason for optimism: Research laboratories around the
world report more and more sophistication in robot systems operating outside the
“sanitized” factory environment. Robots have been shown to be as good as or bet-
ter than humans in some tasks that require spatial reasoning and motion planning.
Systems have been demonstrated where synergistic human–robot teams operate
better, even smarter, than each of them separately. This trend is bound to continue.
It is the ability to plan its own motion that makes a robot qualitatively different
from other machines. After all, the mechanical parts, electronics, computers,
some functional abilities, and sophistication that robots possess are present in
many other digitally controlled machines. Thus the half-humorous debates of the
1960s and 1970s when designers of digitally controlled factory machinery were
accusing specialists in robotics of inflating the prestige of their field by calling
their machines robots—aren’t these just slightly modified digitally controlled
machines? There is truth to it. Now we are approaching a time when the field
of robotics will be able to say that it is the ability to plan its own motion that
makes a robot a robot.
Doesn’t such technology already exist? Haven’t we read about robots that paint
and weld and do assembly in automotive and computer manufacturing factories?
For factories, yes, but for tasks outside the factory floor—hospitals and outer
space and mine fields—no, not really, except perhaps in a few simplistic cases.
What is the difference?
For you and me, the success of, say, returning a bottle to the refrigerator
depends little on whether at this very instant the arrangement of objects in the
refrigerator differs from what it was half hour ago when the bottle was taken out.
This is not so for today’s robots.