Data storage capacity and the development of
greater autonomy will be key to the increasing use of
robots in businesses and homes, an expert from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the audience at this
year's BCS/Royal Signals Institution Lecture.
There are 2.5 million robots being used in homes in the US,
whereas in 2002 there were no ground robots in the US military or
in US homes, said Rodney Brooks, director of the
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
He said demand for household robots was being driven, for the most
part, by ageing populations in technologically advanced
countries.
Brooks said robots were not yet completely autonomous, relying
on supervision via teleoperation or direct human intervention. To
get robots into more homes he said the machines must move closer to
autonomy.
In the military, Brooks said robots had been deployed
successfully in places too dangerous for people. In
war zones, they are sent ahead of troops to locate hostile
forces and to detect and disable explosives. In industry, they
are increasingly used to replace manual labourers in farms and
factories.
He said that the main obstacle to developing more accomplished,
autonomous, robots was the storage capacity for data and
information. For robots to accomplish more tasks, he said they
would need the ability to assimilate greater amounts of stored
information more quickly.
Brooks said that present storage capacity growth trends
indicated that storage capacity would not be a problem in the
future. Taking the iPod as a storage marker, and our knowledge of
storage growth within that platform, Brooks said that educated
estimations of the future could be made.
If 10Gbytes of memory was available in 2003, 40,000Gbytes would
be available in 2015, which meant that by 2009 a person would be
able to store a million books on their iPod. Putting this into
context, Brooks said this would mean that every robot would be able
to store a highly detailed map of the Earth on a solid state
disc.
Pre-empting the question he is asked most, Brooks concluded by
saying that he did not think robots would ever take over from
humans. He said it was more likely that as robots become more
similar to humans, we will become more robotic through medical
developments, such as artificial tissue.
Computer scientists and neuroscientists look to collaborate on
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