The future of robotics?: Humanoid machines with the ability to express genuine emotions.
Credit: Blutgruppe/Zefa/Corbis
Intelligent machines are already making a considerable impact in everyday life. One job in 10 in the car industry is done by a robot, while in Iraq, U.S. forces employ 4,000 robots to help defuse bombs, fly drones over enemy lines and carry out other dangerous work. U.S. military chiefs have now decreed that a third of ground vehicles will be driverless by 2015.
The worlds of writers such as American sci-fi luminary Isaac Asimov, who envisaged robots as clever, compassionate companions, may soon be upon us. Not everyone relishes the prospect. Machines could just as easily turn against their creators, as seen in movies such as The Matrix, Westworld or The Stepford Wives, in which humans are enslaved, killed or replaced by robots.
But are we really likely to be hunted down by The Terminator robots or pursued by androids like those in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner? Or will our lives be easier thanks to servile Star Wars droids like C-3P0 and R2- D2? Is the robot envisaged in science fiction realistic at all?
Today's robot cars look impressive but they fall a long way short of the intelligence of HAL, the brilliant but malfunctioning supercomputer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. What is the potential for robots and computers in the near future?
"The fact is we still have a way to go before real robots catch up with their science fiction counterparts," Gates says.
So what are the stumbling blocks? One key difficulty is getting robots to know their place. This has nothing to do with class or etiquette, but concerns the simple issue of positioning. Humans orient themselves with other objects in a room very easily. Robots find the task almost impossible. "Even something as simple as telling the difference between an open door and a window can be tricky for a robot," says Gates. This has, until recently, reduced robots to fairly static and cumbersome roles.
For a long time, researchers tried to get round the problem by attempting to recreate the visual processing that goes on in the human cortex. However, that challenge has proved to be singularly exacting and complex. So scientists have turned to simpler alternatives; the new generations of sensors that can identify smells, chemicals and acids; that measure temperature; and – most importantly – that use infrared beams and laser rangers to pinpoint objects. These are now providing robots with sensing arrays that can give them far clearer ideas of their orientation and position.
"We have become far more pragmatic in our work," says Nello Cristianini, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol in England and associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. "We are no longer trying to recreate human functions. Instead we are looking for simpler solutions, with basic electronic sensors, for example."
