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7/28/2019 Past 50 Yers of Robotics
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Lessons from the Past 50 Years of Robotics
Chair: Bernard Roth
Participants: Ruzena Bajcsy, Georges Giralt, and Takeo Kanade
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, versatilespecial 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.
Lessons Learned over 50 Years in Robotics
By Ruzena Bajcsy
Director CITRIS and Professor Electrical Engineering & Computer Science University
of California, Berkeley, CA
The way I like to evaluate what happened over time in Robotics and Intelligent
Systems in general, is to compare how the theoretical ideas of the time matchedexperimental evidence.
In the early 1950's the most prominent theoretical ideas relevant to Robotics
came from control theory, that is understanding feedback, (Kalman, Wiener),
information theory (Shannon) and behavioral psychology represented by Skinner.
Modeling of systems was performed by analog computers. The best realization of
these systems was based on electromechanical principles, modeling homeostatic
behavior (Ashby). Of course, there were those who thought more digitally, as a
paradigm for intelligent behavior and models of the brain circuitry (Turing,Rosenbluth, Pitts and MCoulagh, Minsky and McCarthy).
In the late 60's six degree of freedom manipulators and their controllers were
built (Scheinman, Roth, Paul). Measurements of position drove the control.
Digital formulation of kinematical transformations of the position of each joint
had to be invented; this in turn enabled control of these mechanisms. Other
sensors became available, such as force sensors, which enabled control of
P. Dario and R. Chatila (Eds.): Robotics Research, STAR 15, pp. 587592, 2005.
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005
7/28/2019 Past 50 Yers of Robotics
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dynamics. Simultaneously, mechanisms with a higher degree of freedom were
developed and controlled (Inoue and others).
A great revolution in Computer Vision was afforded by charge-coupled devices
in the mid 70's. While visual information was studied independently of robotics(pattern recognition is a good example), robotics required from the beginning the
recovery of depth information, which is naturally lost during the data acquisition
via video cameras.
Hence, in the early 70's structured light was invented (Will) together with a
camera system, using triangulation principle to recover the depth information.
Later other principles for recovery of 3D were utilized, such as stereo pairs of
cameras, motion, monocular depth cues, and so on.
What has changed?
On the theoretical side, the realization that robotics needs both continuous and
discrete models led to the new field of hybrid systems. Furthermore, the
tremendous advances in both computational and storage capacity have supported
new advances in developing algorithms. Perhaps even more importantly,
completely new approaches to robotics have evolved.
Because of the limitations of computer and storage power in the past, theapproach to sensor based control was driven by data reduction mechanisms from
sensors. Today it is possible to use large data sets for control; hence learning data
driven algorithms is becoming very popular. Also again for the same reasons as
above, many more sensors distributed spatially can be considered; hence many
more complex systems can be observed and controlled. Distributed and
cooperative robotics is now a reality, challenging the current theoretical models
which are by and large still more local.
Another great advance comes from new materials and miniaturization ofsensors, processors and the means of communication, especially wireless
communication. These systems are complex, challenging our current theoretical
understanding. Here we have an example in which theory is lacking the
experimentation. The recent advances from Japan in complex mechanisms, asthey are exhibited in humanoids, are an excellent example of the most complex
systems mentioned above.
What are the lessons?
While in the past the theoretical ideas were ahead of experimental verification,
today the technological advances are challenging the current theoretical
understanding of these built systems. What I mean is that we do not have good
predictive models of the complex systems that we built.
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Although advances have been made in several areas, such as decision making
under uncertainty, partial Markov models and their derivatives and game theoretic
approaches, there is still quite a bit of unknown in the distributed systems acting in
natural environments.The technology (both in hardware and software) changes very rapidly. There is
not enough time or effort to study the performance of these systems, with respect
to their robustness, reliability, maintenance, power consumption and utility under
varied conditions. Part of the reason is that academic environments reward
novelty at the expense of studies of the integrated system performance. On the
other hand, the complexity of these systems is such that to develop a
comprehensive predictive theory requires a larger group effort and stability in
such a system. However, if these systems should penetrate our society, their
performance will have to be guaranteed with some limits, so that the user will
know how much to expect from such a system. This is our challenge!
In conclusion, the most important lesson to me is to understand complex
robotic systems. These systems are at least the same or more complex as large
software systems. Yet, if a large software system has bugs, we may reboot thecomputer, in robotic systems, such a failure may have catastrophic consequences,
hence the debugging and understanding of its bounds of performance are essential.
Thoughts and Views on Robotics, the Field Status and Perspectives
Georges Giralt
LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
1. Robotics at the turn of the Century
Robotics opens today, at the turn of the Century, a large perspective for seminal
scientific and technical achievements well articulated to a highly challenging
broad host of novel applications.
At the theoretical level, Robotics emerges as a scientific body of concepts,methods and algorithmic tools, in fact the most challenging field in Machine
Intelligence, which effectively interplays with a current stream of developments
that pave the way, at the practical level, to a very large domain of novel
applications ranging from Outer Space to Assistive and Personal Robotics.
Industrial Robotics will pursue as a well established domain, in constant
progress, with a large variety of market products whose development trend will
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rightly blend research developments within the framework of Shopfloor
Automation.
Non-Manufacturing Robotics concerns a wide spectrum of research-driven
real-world cases pertaining to Field, Service, Assistive, and Personal Robotics.Machine Intelligence is here in its various themes the central research direction
endowing the robot to act:
(a) as a human surrogate in particular for intervention tasks in remote and/or
hostile environments,
(b) in close interaction with humans and operating in human environments in
all applications encompassed by Human-Friendly Robotics, also termed
as Human-Centered Robotics,
(c) in tight synergy with the user, expanding into Human Augmentation.
The subjects implied by (b) have emerged as a forefront research domain
opening to the Grand Challenge of the Personal Robot or Robot Assistant and
Companion.
2. Robots and Machine Intelligence: the Intelligent Robot Paradigm
Machine Intelligence themes encompass Advanced Sensing and
Perception,Task Reasoning and Planning, Operational and Decisional Autonomy,functional Integration Architectures, Intelligent Human-Machine, Interfaces,
Dependability.
Consequently, Intelligent Robots are thus categorized in a solely computational
capacity way as Bounded Rationality Machines, expanding on the 80's third
generation robot definition: " (robot) . operating in the three dimensional world as
a machine endowed with the capacity to interpret and to reason about a task and
about its execution, by intelligently relating perception to action ".
The above paradigm captures Machine Intelligence aspects and appears as anoperational integrated-system concept present, at various levels, in all non-
manufacturing application domains: extreme environments and field robotics,
public safety, unmanned vehicles and professional service robots, teleoperation
and networking, microrobotics,., human-friendly robotics.
Hence, we can consider a working framework which can be termed as
Constructive Robotics where research themes are realistically instantiated andimplemented leading, as a positive step, to interesting solutions tailored to specific
cases. Thus, it is worth to note that the integrated-system constructive approachprovides an interesting R&D setting:
- leaves open the key basic themes and issues thus keeping right the overallresearch perspective,
- brings in critical challenges and issues related to real world mid-termapplications and their societal and economical impact,
- keeps a positive and reasonably effective link with industry.
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3. The Personal Robot: a Grand Challenge
Human-friendly robotics encompasses several front-line application domains
where the robots operate in a human environment and in close interaction withHumans (Entertainment and Education, Public-Oriented Services, Assistive and
Personal Robots). Right at the core of the field, emerges the forefront topic of
Personal Robots for which three general characteristics are to be underlined: (i)
operated by a non-professional user; (ii) that may be designed to share high level
decision-making with the human user; (iii) that may include a link to environment
devices and machine appendages, remote systems and operators. The shared
decisional autonomy concept (co-autonomy) implied here, unfolds in a large set of
cutting-edge research issues and ethical problems.
The Personal Robot concept expanding to Robot Assistant and/or Universal
Companion, opens a true Grand Challenge to Robotics as a scientific and technical
field offering a mid/long term perspective to achieve a paramount societal and
economical impact. It brings in, and questions, front-line topics encompassing
cognitive aspects: User tunable Human-Machine Intelligent Interfaces, Perception(semantics), Learning (understanding the universe of action, user tuning),
Decisional Autonomy, Dependability (Safety, Reliability, Communication andOperating Robustness)
4. Mid and long-term future: expectations and looming dangers
Some issues, perspectives and critical comments that were implied in previous
sections:
(i) Robot Assistant/Companion wireless links:
- positive: operating and technical assistance, possibly distributed
machine appendages, access to powerful remote information andexpertise sources;
- danger: privacy issues and loss of user control on the robot,.(ii) Cognition extensions:
- positive: compels research to address properly key issues related toperception, human-machine co-existence, learning,.
- danger # 1: over-claiming: as usual, some of it can play a positive role
but too much is negative and leads to damaging backlashes.
- danger # 2: the "thinking machine" syndrome with the sequel to confuse
wishes and "given names" with reality.(iii) Robot autonomous actions and decision-making autonomy:
- positive: emphasizes the importance and place to implement efficient
Machine-Intelligence in Bounded Rationality schemes and control
processes.- danger: unwanted and, possibly, unsafe Robot actions.
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Dependability: the development of the capacity for a machine to act, in some
way, independently of the control of an user, besides any other philosophical
question, brings in the necessity to define and to implement system constraints to
prevent unwanted, unpleasant or even dangerous behaviors (a realistic/operationalsubstitute to "Asimov's laws"!). This could be in part included as one of the main
factors characterizing dependability for Intelligent Autonomous Robots, thus
pointing out to the importance of this subject as a forefront research theme.
5. Conclusion
From Human-frontier applications such as outer-space and undersea to
Humanoid shaped home assistants we are seeing a wide spectrum of embedded
Machine-Intelligence Robots with currently the paramount role of two salient
emerging vectors:
(a) Medical Robotics as the fastest expanding field.
(b) A Grand Challenge: the Personal Robot (Assistant, Companion)
Paradigm.
We shall once more emphasize the scientific aspects and the economical and
societal impact entailed by the development of Machine-Intelligence centered
Personal Robots. Forefront research issues range from new materials andmicro/nanotechnologies to open learning and robot dependability.
As a concluding comment, it can be contended that we are confronted to the
real Birth of Robotics with both the ethical and pragmatic necessity to properly
assess the current state of the field and to clearly distinguish reality from m
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