Robotics – a realistic future view

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Robotics in Asia, Europe and North America

We have something about robots in the western world. Robots are dangerous. We can accept that they will do the boring and maybe difficult jobs that humans can’t do or avoid to do. Robots is a threat and they will eventually take over. The Terminator! This is not at all the case in the developed Asian countries.The perception of the robots is much more playful and there is even a strong belief in the future of robots. This playful interest in robots is likely to give Asia’s robot development an even greater advantage.

Robots have been around for a long time. Especially in assembly environments. These robots are very specialized in only one task and let’s leave them for now. As you will see even the movable robots that this post mainly is talking about, will eventually  do work in both the assembly line and in the office.

Robotics, state of the art

The Global Robotics Market is $17.6 billion in 2009. According to this article it will increase to $21.4 billion in 2014. I think they are wrong. It is based on a 4% annual growth rate. A more probable scenario is an increased growth rate and not a fixed one. We can see an accelerated interest in robotics and the home market will suddenly make a jump in robotic sales.

Right now there is a wide range of different ongoing robotic projects. A few will be mentioned here. They show the Asian playful perception of robotics development.

Without doubt (IMHO), the most advanced humanoid robot today is Asimo from Honda. The video here is of course just fun but it gives us a hint about what is coming.

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How will this look like 15 years from now? What do you think?

A little funny teaser is the robot on the cat walk:

Not the most elegant woman I have seen, but wait another 20 years!

Another example of how far ahead robotics is in some Asian countries. South Korea officials are planning to build two robot theme parks for $1.6 billion by 2013. The park will be a combination of Amusement park and a scientific center for robot development.

The following one has a striking resemblance to humans but it is still easy to see the difference:

Maybe 15 years from now you need to talk to “her” before you know for sure.

Here follows two types of “Robot suites” (Exoskeletons):

The first one is a full suit that soon can be ordered in Japan.

Read about it

The second one is a prototype from Honda. It looks a bit uncomfortable but I suppose it will be better!

Read about it

A future view of robotics

There are at least two development lines that are interesting for robotics.

  1. Robots that can move around in an unstructured environment. That means that they must interact with the environment and take some kind of decisions, recognize the surroundings and act according to that. This leads to the next point.
  2. Robots are being more intelligent. If not they can not move around doing something “meaningful”.

They don’t have to look like humans but if you think about it for a while. Everything around us is built for humans. Imagine a robot cleaning your house. It will probably do a good job with a size and function similar to us. Another possibility is an army of smaller robots but they have to be coordinated in some way that i don’t understand how it can be done. Cleaning is a quite complicated task. Was it my wedding ring on the floor or was it just a piece of metal or maybe it was the little screw that I lost the other day. Is it the cat sleeping on the bed or is it a pillow? To answer these questions there is a need of some kind of understanding  and intelligence. A very specialized robot can look in any way suitable but a general moving and intelligent robot will likely resemble human beings.

This will lead to development of humanoids, robots looking and acting similar to us. (See humanoids – the next generation)
An aging world population and global military conflicts will drive the robotics development in the coming years. The number of people older than 65 year will increase by something like two billion worldwide during the next 40 years. How can we deal with that? Robots will help with all sort of things, a combination of a servants and a nurses. Despite our fears in the western world this solution, wisely used, is probably better than all the alternatives.


There are many types of robots

  1. Military robots
    Let’s use US Department of Defense plans as a hint:

    • 2015 — to have one third of its fighting capacity provided by robots
    • 2035 — to have first completely autonomous robot soldiers on the battlefield
  2. Industrial robots
  3. Entertainment robot and toys
  4. Educational robots
  5. Surgery robots
  6. Robots doing typically human tasks:
    • Reception work
    • Office work
    • Assembly work
    • Bell boy
    • A guide robot, escorting you in a hospital or in a big office to the right room. You will not have people walking around unattended
    • Caring tasks at hospitals and in the home
    • Guiding blind people instead of dogs
    • Restaurant waiter
    • Home work. See household robots. It will take 5-10 years before we “all” have them doing work at home.
    • Golf caddy :-)
    • and much more

    More or less intelligence is needed to do these tasks. They all have in common that the robot must be moving and have intelligence. In some cases, reception work for instance, they can do part of it but not all at least to start with.

  7. Robots capable of doing all possible works there are. Will this happen and when? First of all they need to be at least as intelligent as we are, The singularity point. Maybe 30 years from now. Secondly, they need to have mechanical parts that can resemble fingers, eyes, ears and other human features. As an example, to grip and get feedback from the touching is very complicated and need to be solved. These things are of course solved at the time for singularity point.
  8. Cyborgs, Robots and parts of robots as a part of the human body. This scenario is very likely to be quite common.
    See more in my article Cyborg – Human or machine?
  9. Robot suits (exoskeleton) and other “external” equipment. This could be seen as a type of Cyborg as well. They are already starting to come to the market and will get the boom until more advanced Cyborg and Humanoids are here. People with reduced capacity to move will have great help from these suits. They can also make us much stronger even if we have no problems with health.
    Maybe you can rent one when you are going to move out from your apartment!

Talking about personal robots (remember Personal Computing? PC), first will the exoskeleton arrive to the market. Eventually (5-10 years) we will see more and more moving robots in our homes. As they get more intelligent they can do more complicated things in our homes, at hospitals, offices, industry production and of course for military usage. Eventually we will see robotic concepts that is hard to imagine at this time. The whole range from almost invisible nano-robots up to huge macro-robots and all sorts of combinations. Now we are talking of more than 20 years ahead and if we also combine this with  genetic engineering, we are starting have a weird world!

The links in the text to my previous posts connected to this subject:

Some other links:

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