Wikipedia for robots

Robots have become an essential tool in manufacturing and slowly but surely they are becoming part of our households as well. The vacuum cleaning robot is available in any self respecting house hold appliances store, robotic pets are a reality and children (and adults!) learn to program robots with their Lego Mindstorms sets.

But it seems that the production of robots is still somewhat of a case by case affair. Every robot is made for one purpose and in many cases its programming is a case of reinventing the wheel. A group of European scientists have plans to change this. They are setting up RoboEarth. RoboEarth is essentially a database of knowledge about real world situations that robots can use to quickly adapt to changing environments. This will help the field of robotics to advance much faster. If I understand it correctly, RoboEarth will function as a collective memory for robots. It's not yet a hive mind but it's getting there.

The stuff of classic science fiction is getting more and more real every day. The phrase "I for one welcome our new robotic overlords" may be slightly premature but robots capable of learning to interact with new environments from robot-wikipedia is compelling stuff. No matter how you define intelligence, knowledge is an intrinsic part of autonomous operation. An animal can survive autonomously because of the knowledge it has about its environment. Allowing robots to tap into a fount of information about a multitude of environments is another step in the direction of creating autonomous artificial creatures that can operate outside their designated environment. The robots of Asimov may become an everyday reality. It may be a while yet, but they seem less a figment of the great science fiction writer's imagination than they used to be.


More on RoboEarth in this BBC news article.

Robots with feeling

In an article in PCWorld an artificial 'E-skin' is described that may soon help robots feel. It can also be used to make prosthetic limbs with feeling abilities. The skin consists of semiconductor nanowires and works with low voltages. It can detect pressures low enough to be able to wash your precious China cups.

This is science fiction coming to life. Finally all those Asimov robots can become reality. Although Philip K. Dick's 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' (basis for the film 'Blade runner') paints a much darker future of course.

So robots will be able to feel in the near future. Or at least in one sense. In the other sense, the sense of feeling emotion, they are still wholly lacking. For how long though? It seems there is a drive towards trying to recreate life. Mary Shelley proved to be more than a little prescient when she wrote 'Frankenstein'. Mankind is trying very hard to recreate a being that can be called living. We have mechanical devices taking over heavy labour, building the objects that we crave. And robotic research is constantly striving to construct robots that are ever more self sufficient. Artificial Intelligence seems to be the hardest stumbling block but there is little doubt that with the advances in computer processor power and ever smarter algorithms a thinking computer is only decades away. If that.

And yet, and yet... Will we allow robots to become our overlords? Will robots want to be our overlords? Science fiction is full of stories that paint a dark future. I even write them myself. But is that picture a true one?

For a dark future ruled by malicious robots to come true we will have to create robots that either have no feeling and act purely on logic principles or robots that have actively malicious intend towards us. So as long as roboticists have read the Robot series by Asimov to learn the Three Laws of Robotics and have read 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' for the warning it contains, we may be safe. The only thing we need then is enough compassion and tolerance to accept our new earth-citizens. In that regard it may be that the greater problem lies with us, not with the robots.