A New Century and a Modest Prediction

This is the first issue of AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS of the 21st Century. I predict that this will be the century of the autonomous robot, and that increasingly intelligent and remarkable robots will be found in many areas of our society. An American humorist once said predictions are dangerous, especially predictions about the future. Nevertheless, I feel very confident that the research in mobile, autonomous, intelligent robots during the past several decades will bear fruit abundantly during the coming century. Let me give a few examples from this journal. The cover illustration on this issue shows an autonomous harvesting machine developed at the Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. The previous issue showed the remarkable humanoid robot developed in the Honda Research Laboratories in Japan and six months earlier the cover showed the equally remarkable robot pet developed by one of the Sony laboratories in Japan. These three examples illustrate trends in the field of autonomous robots: agricultural robots as an example of human service robotics, entertainment robotics and “pure” robotics which attempts to imitate life without an immediate application. I expect major development in all these areas. In the near future this Journal will publish several special issues devoted to various aspects of human service robotics, from assistance to persons with disabilities to house cleaning. We also expect to publish papers on the use of robots in construction, excavation, road building, and agriculture. In all these areas the new robots will work with humans, as helpers and team members. Sometimes they will work alone, like the harvesting robot, but even here this robot will be a member of a farming team that includes both machines and people. Entertainment robotics is already a large and important activity. Films now show a variety of robots from dinosaurs to mechanical monsters, and these too will be increasingly autonomous. I believe that the major change in this area will be in personal entertainment. Pet and companion robots in a bewildering variety of shapes, from animal to quasi-human form will become available to our children. They will be surprisingly intelligent; they will interact with us by speech, gesture and movement; they will display emotion; and they will watch over the children. I also believe that we will see increasing numbers of robots constructed to test hypotheses of behavior in living creatures. We have already seen some robot insects which attempt to model portions of the insect sensory system. There are robots designed to simulate the inverse kinematics of human movement. Increasingly sophisticated humanoid robots, like Cog at MIT, will learn from interaction with humans and give us new insights on the learning process. The above examples, stimulated by cover pictures in this Journal, give me the confidence that indeed this will be the century of the autonomous robot. So, I recommend that you look carefully at the cover pictures: they not only illustrate major accomplishments in robotics, but they may give you a hint of what is coming next! So, I believe that my prediction is indeed modest. Of course, I could make a really safe prediction, as stated by another humorist: “The future lies ahead!” Yes, and there are robots in it.