For the immediate future I think we are going to be seeing robots which are either directly programmed to perform tasks (expert systems on wheels) or which are taught by direct human supervision.
In the human supervision scenario the robot is "walked through" a series of steps which it has to perform to complete a task. This could mean manually guiding its actuators, but the most practical way to do this is via teleoperation. So, after a a few supervised examples the robot is able to perform the same task autonomously, abstracting out variations in human performance. This type of training already goes on for industrial applications. Seegrid have a technology which they call "walk through then work". Within the next ten years or so I think what we're going to see is this type of automation gradually moving into the consumer realm due to the falling price/performance ratio. This doesn't necessarily mean AGI in your home, but it does mean a lot of things will change. The idea that robotics is only about software is fiction. Good automation involves cooperation between software, electrical and mechanical engineers. In some cases problems are much better solved electromechanically than by software. For example, no matter how smart the software controlling it, a two fingered gripper will only be able to deal with a limited sub-set of manipulation tasks. Likewise a great deal of computation can be avoided by introducing variable compliance, and making clever use of materials to juggle energy around the system (biological creatures use these tricks all the time). Some aspects of the problem are within the realm of pure software, such as visual perception, navigation and mapping. Also, the idea that you can suspend real world testing until the end of the project is a recipe for disaster, unless your environment simulators are highly realistic, which at present involves substantial computing power. For more intelligent types of learning by imitation you really have to get into the business of mirror neurons, and ideas of selfhood. This means having the robot learn its own dynamics and being able to find mappings between these and the dynamics of objects which it observes. However, this can only be achieved if good perception systems are already developed and working. On 10/02/2008, J Storrs Hall, PhD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hmmm. I'd suspect you'd spend all your time and effort organizing the people. > Orgs can grow that fast if they're grocery stores or something else the new > hires already pretty much understand, but I don't see that happening smoothly > in a pure research setting. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=94603346-a08d2f
