Lessons from the Past 50 Years of Robotics

In this session the three participants presented a short overview of what they believe to be key issues and milestones that have brought us to the present. They then give their perspective as to the major issues for the future. Personally, I feel the major lesson from the past is that the notion of general purpose robotic devices proved to be too ambitious, and flawed as a generating principle. Instead, versatile special purpose devices have proved to be the key to successful robot development. I believe this is the major lesson from the past 50 years, and it will continue to be the case into the foreseeable future.