Next Generation
To help bring the dream to life, labs around the world are busily working on the robotic parts--feet and knees for walking, hands for grasping, versions of eyes and ears--that will someday be stitched together into a fully functional humanoid robot.
In addition to the jointed metal or plastic frames that serve as a skeleton, robots today also have sophisticated sensing machines, packed with cameras, microphones and even "haptic" sensors that mimic the sense of touch. Big engineering challenges still remain to make the robots human, including finding a practical way to power the energy-hungry machines.
Yet, most researchers believe the physical obstacles can be easily worked out in the near future.
At the MIT Media Lab, researcher Cynthia Breazeal has been working to create robots that are socially savvy. Her creation, dubbed Kismet, is learning to recognise human emotions, and has a primitive face that can express its own moods, from happy to sad to angry. The goal is not just for Kismet to learn to think, but also for it to understand that actions have consequences, just like a child learns how to behave through interaction with other children and adults.
Still, Kismet is far from relying on its own senses. The robot relies on a bank of 15 external computers to control its social abilities and facial expressions.
Robots that walk, talk and think like humans--but have extensive memories, computational skills and physical strength--can have a lot of applications in the business world, MIT's Brooks says. Heavy industry could use robots for labour in hazardous environments, and the military could use them on the battlefield.
In 1993, Brooks created Cog--a robot with a humanoid torso. Cog's eyes are cameras that track moving people, and the robot has been learning to interact with its surroundings and people. Cog is still in its infancy, but Brooks predicts that with the ever-increasing power of today's computer chips, smart robots are inevitable.
Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, sees a future in which humans and robots are so alike it's difficult to tell them apart. Within 20 years, he says, computers will not just be intelligent, they will be conscious, feeling beings deserving of the same rights, privileges and consideration people give each other. Kurzweil has created his own cyberspace alter ego, named Ramona.
Robotics applications will also start showing up in computers, according to Michael Dertouzos, professor and director at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Dertouzos says that today's computers should act more like robots and adopt more human-like qualities, so people will be able to interact with them more easily. For example, advances in speech software will open up the Internet to an estimated 2 billion people worldwide who cannot read or write, helping to harness the power of the Internet to tap workers in foreign countries, he says. "We are not exploiting this technology revolution," Dertouzos says. "We're hardly scratching the surface."
Brooks says the seeds of a human-centred computing revolution have already been planted in the robotics field. The vaguely human look of the typical robot has encouraged an entire generation of robot engineers who intuitively design and program robots on a human scale.
Even simple consumer robots such as Tiger Electronics' Furbys, sophisticated dolls that learn words that are taught to them via repetition, help educate people about the potential of robots.
"We are talking about the emotional coupling between the robot and the human," Brooks says. "It's inevitable".
