How advanced will robots be in 10 years?
Singularity Hub’s latest post is of some pretty impressive robots doing assembly work. Similar in body shape to humans, they are able to manipulate small parts with sub millimeter precision, use complex tools, and cooperate with each other. Any thoughts on what they will be capable of in 2020-2025?
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Total Comments: (14)
Date Started: December 16, 2011 - 7:51 am
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Comments
One thing missing in the discussion is the military, which in many ways is on the cutting edge of robotics (read Wired for War, although it’s already a little dated). Aerial drones have been wildly successful, and in 10 years they will be able to be patrolling 24/7 and advanced software will allow one human to monitor/control many semi-autonomous drones. Police departments will adopt some of this tech, as we already see NYPD and LAPD interest in drones. Ground combat drones, like SWORDS, will stop being prototypes and we will have legit mechanized infantry. Also, the sentinels that guard borders like the DMZ in Korea will be guarding more benign borders and even shopping malls. Some will be more deadly then others, but all will be vastly more effective than today.
Telepresence robots will be big within 10 years. Also, I think the utility of autonomous cars will eventually overwhelm the legal/social obstacles and I think be somewhat adopted in leading economies by 2020, definitely 2025.
NASA and space drones will be bitchin’ — everything from explorers capable of extreme speed to, my great hope, a permanent robot presence on the moon, building colonies fit for basic human habitation. It could be in conjunction with a human visitation, but I think any permanent human presence outside of orbit will have to be proceeded by a robotic presence preparing the way.
All we’ve gotta do is duct tape an iphone to a mannequins head and place it on petman!
But seriously, in ten years we will see a melding of the strengths of technologies present in things such as siri, petman,asimo and the nao robot. Siri is in “beta” now, but it seems to be the kind of technology that evolves and refines itself as it gets more and more input from human users.In a few years siri will be just like IBM’s Watson.
The technology required for a “housebot” seems to be pretty much there. All we have to do is put the pieces together like voltron.
By 2025 I think butler/companion/babysitter/teacher robots will be in the price range upper middle class people can afford.
I think that in 10 years, Robots will be like these awesome little guys made out of cat fur. And they will run around fixing stuff for everyone – especially cats. And then they will get kind of angry because everyone has ellergies to them, so then it will be like in that movie – Indiana Jones – where he has to fight that guy.
Looking forward to it!
I think there is a tipping point for many technologies, especially consumer electronics. The application of capacitive touch screen, tablet, (small) AMOLED screens, voice recognition all show similar trend: a long period with progress but without widespread application, followed by a period with rapid adoption in real-life products. Once the technology is mature enough and the society is ready for it, the tipping point is reached. I think it is the same for personal robotics. I am not sure whether the in next 10 years we’ll see this tipping point for robotics, but I’m 90% confident it will come before 2030. In the next 10 years we’ll see wide adoption of flexible automation in manufacturing and also a drastic improvement in capabilities of robots.
There are several breakthroughs possible in the next 10 years that might revolutionize robots usage (and whole industry in fact):
1. Autonomous mining – robots that excavate and drill raw materials with very little human supervision.
2. Autonomous transportation – robots that transport materials and goods with very little human supervision.
3. Autonomous manufacturing – robots that process raw materials and produce goods with very little human supervision. In particular able to produce solar cells, industrial machines and other robots.
Imagine all these inventions simultaneously. You will have industrialization that is not dependent on human labour, which means that you are on an exponential path to utilize all resources of our planet. In a handful of years all industrial products might become ridiculously cheap, including robots, space rockets and autonomous military robots.
1. For certain types of mining this might work, but mountain top removal and other forms where they just blow mountains up and take shovels I dont see robots having a big impact. And the fact of the matter is unless those machines out produce humans there’s no need to upgrade because labor is really cheap now. I just see no incentive at that price point to have mining robots in 10 years.
2. Transportation? sure. It would be cheaper, and more reliable, and more secure (air) to ship things autonomously if laws are in place. These trucks might require specialized refueling stations though since the guy can’t go out and pump it.
3. A lot of manufacturing is already autonomous. It will only increase. With Foxxcon’s initiative this will really make a difference, but IMO the best thing will be the creation of very capable industrial 3-D printers. Think of it like what the internet did for information. What once required huge factories to produce will only take a single machine. that machine will be slow, but will allow custom products. once it advances a 1000 times I imagine pirating materials will be as big a problem as pirating software and music and videos.
So that’s where I think the world is heading in 10 years. The digitizing of everything. There is no way to stopping it because it is cheaper and faster. Governments may try to stop it but they will be overthrown. the end.
Autonomous cars. They should start showing up in two to three years. First as a driver-assist feature that works only in less-demanding conditions like limited-access highways but then in all circumstances. A side benefit that’ll put smile on the face of the radical environmentalists will be that autonomous cars will finally make electric cars practical. Without the need for a driver autonomous taxis will be more cost-effective for many around-town trips then a personal internal combustion car and many people will aschew ownership of a personal car as a result.
Internal combustion engines will still be the dominant form but vehicle autonomy will provide the economic niche from which electric vehicle usage can expand without resort to coercion or subsidies.
Autonomous agricultural robots.
In ten years robotic technology will have completely displace stoop labor and perform many other functions that substantially enhance agricultural productivity allowing more to be grown on less land with much less in the way of pesticides and other agri-chemicals. That change won’t come about because of the Whole Foods crowds need to be catered too but due to the fact that autonomous agricultural robots will have grown sophisticated enough and cheap enough to attend to plants individually. It’ll be as if each celery or tomato plant has its own, individual gardener who never gets tired, bored, inattentive or clumsy. There will be a similar degree of sophistication in the handling of livestock although by the time ten years has past I expect we’ll be seeing factory-made meat showing up. That development won’t immediately obviate the need for robotic livestock handling but it will make livestock-derived meat a premium product compared to factory-produced.
Autonomous package delivery.
That’ll also start out as a premium service for outlying areas since it’ll rely almost completely – initially – on autonomous flying vehicles of some sort. I’m inclined towards something along the lines of a quad-copter due to the flexibility of the planform and its structural simplicity. As robotics becomes increasingly sophisticated some of the challenges of a more urban environment – apartment buildings, locating the right door for deliveries, out-sized or fragile packages – will be overcome with a combination of autonomous delivery vehicles and a subsidiary delivery-bot that’ll handle those “last, fifty feet” challenges.
Autonomous robotic medical care.
Not all at once but a phasing in of capabilities. Most of the annual check-up type stuff like height, weight, blood pressure, temperature, eye, ear, nose and throat exam, blood draw but also stuff at the doctor’s end. Robotic diagnostic review and robotic interpretation of test/scan results at least to the level of highlighting areas for further review. Increasing emphasis on robot-assisted surgery with the human surgeon taking on more and more a supervisory role over the actions of the robot. More home robotic medical technology along the lines of Lifeshirt to provide continuous monitoring of vital signs but also home-testing technology that’ll and, quite possibly, medical advice systems that’ll help people who are so inclined stay on top of their health goals without the discipline now required to consistently enter appropriate data.
I could go on but I don’t want the future to be entirely anti-climactic.
10 years from now the robotic revolution will be on; not in the way the public think of robots however, like Why06 said, personal in-home robots doing chores will still be very expensive. The robotic revolution will be taking place in the streets and skies.
Automated Vehicles… cars, taxis, trucks, big rigs, planes, drones, helicopters, quad copters, trains, farm equipment, construction, and every shape and size of military vehicles… An innovation explosion not unlike the advent of the web will be unleashed upon every type of vehicle out there. Eventually (20, 25 years) all types of machines will be turned into robots and be given the capability to do what they were designed to do without a person controlling it. The economical and social benefits will be tremendous.
The age of intelligent machines is at our doorstep.
No less than cooking, cleaning, wisecracking, rosie from the jetsons. you heard it here first.
Umm… Robotics in 10 years huh? Will we see walking talking robots w/ the capabilities of Asimo, the balance of BigDog, & the human like motion and range of PETAMAN? Yes, and several times better then that. Perhaps not all in one robot, but the AI for certain capabilities can be put in the cloud, like Apple’s Siri is not on any1 iphone, but exists in the cloud and monitors all phones at once.
Will that robot be cheap enough to displace human workers? No. It will be very expensive, It might be looked into by the military. Speaking of the military Robotic planes will be in full steam by then. Army will be planning to drastically cut back human pilots. Robotic pilots r better. Robotic planes r more efficient and there’s more control and less liability. Prepare to hear about a lot of civilian bombings labeled as malfunctions if they did not hit their intended target. Robotics will be hitting the public sector too, but not in a walking talking robot. Collision avoidance systems, self parking, really advance cruise control systems standard that can drive on the highway.
The best thing I think in 10 years will be the advancing and production of very advanced 3D Printers. This will allow robotics companies to really get off the ground because of all the hard to find parts for custom robots. Creating a huge assembly line for so many custom parts is just ridiculous. 10 from now, Processing power, batter power, production capability, will be almost in place for it, but prices and things will have to come down. But 5-10 years after that I think we could see an advanced humanoid robot with the bulk of the internal computing power going to internal motion control, senses,et. but a great deal of the more subtle things, talking, high-level thinking going to a data center and being processed there.
Just to add to my previous comment, I don’t think that by 2020 consumer bipedal robots will be the game changer. I do think the world will be changed drastically. Picture a large commercial farm in Iowa.
What if the machine that plants the seeds drives itself, guided by GPS and kinect/laser range finders. Then, another self-driving machine sprays pesticides every so often. Maybe a tracked vehicle with arms can pick fruits (I strongly believe visual recognition will hit its growth spurt in the immediate future.) Farmers are reduced to the role of passive supervisor, like plantation owners in the 19th century.
Picture a factory or warehouse.
Factories already are highly automated. Humans these days are really used only for their superior ability to pick and place irregularly shaped objects, like in Amazon warehouses. Even this task is already given to computers when the task is precise and perfectly repeatable through time as it is in semiconductor manufacture.
Manufacturing will return to the US, but there will be no jobs. Many, many more industries will run ‘lights-off’ factories that run 24/7 and produce goods for the cost of raw materials+energy.
I wonder about in-vitro meat. It will be possible by 2020, but I’m not sure it will be economical. And of couse there will be the luddites that don’t want anything in their bodies not explicitly created by God for the consumption of humans.
I remember reading an article that the owner of Foxconn plans to have one million two-armed robots assembling iPhones and iPads by 2013. So there’s that. Like admin said, Boston Dynamics has made incredible progress, first with BigDog then with PetMan, all in the span of eight years. Then you just have to look at Robot OS and its children OpenCV and Point Cloud Library. Microsoft will inevitably release a Kinect 2 sometime within the decade, further increasing the range of behaviors possible on consumer grade hardware. Next take a look at Siri and Google Translate. Anyone who can’t see the coming pervasiveness of human-computer conversation has a serious dearth of imagination. Finally, Google self-driving cars continue to advance on the periphery of mainstream awareness. And I’m sure readers of this blog don’t need to be reminded of Moore’s law. Looking at Intel, Nvidia, and the dark horse HP with its coming Memrister memory, there is no doubt in my mind that exponential progress in computing will be able to continue for at lease the 2010′s.
How will this all combine? Where does this leave us?
I predict at least two companies offering consumer domestic robots by 2020. Unlike admin, I believe programmers will quickly build on the recently completed foundation in computer motor skills. I anticipate any AI program will have superhuman reflexes and coordination by that time. However, I doubt most (any?) robots built in a measly 9 years will have the body and joint-motors to pull it off. So, humans will still be able to outmaneuver consumer bipedal robots. They will be expensive.
I have more thoughts on this but I guess this is enough for a first post.
Robots are increasingly able to do any task that does not require advanced decision making. When the desired action is premeditated or roughly understood, the robot can achieve great results. Take bipedal walking robots, for example. The latest petman robot shows an incredible ability to walk like a human on a flat treadmill. In 10 years, I think they will have figured out how to get bipedal robots to run faster than humans on flat, well understood terrain. 10 years from now, however, bipedal robots will still have difficulty navigating very irregular terrain. Take a bipedal robot off of the pavement and put it on a bumpy, rocky, hilly patch of land and 10 years from now the robot will still have quite a bit of difficulty navigating the terrain, I believe. The reason for this difficulty has less to do with robotic physical design, however, and more to do with AI. AI and robotics are necessarily dependent on each other, and the AI portion is lagging the physical/mechanical portion. In 10 years sadly we still will have a long way to go on the AI side, but every 10 years we will get better and better. IBM’s Watson is a super example of how far we can go today with AI.
I agree. Bipedal robots still have a long way to go. Maybe the form factor will be a smaller Bigdog like quadraped platform with a torso, arms and head like Asimo. Kind of like the half horse half human mythical creature known as a centaur. I would love to see a seamless sleek version of that thing.