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Robots 6 Jun 2019

Today I attended a talk on research on robots. The talk was given at HTC Eindhoven by prof. Herman Bruyninckx. He said some things that really surprised me and some things where I was less surprised.

Surprise

According to prof. Bruyninckx, over the last 40 years science made almost no progress in robotics. That means first of all: robots are hardly becoming more smart, they stay dumb. Of course today's robots can do better tricks than their predecessors of 40 years ago. At least, robots are taking over human tasks not so easily as generally thought.

Less surprising statements

Some issues mentioned (in my words):
- Universities and businesses are hiding research, meaning that they hardly make it publicly available.
- Research expects a lot from Artificial Intelligence (AI), but actually AI is not that smart. Often it is not possible to prove that AI methods work under all conditions. A good example is self driving cars.
- PhD students in robotics can often not explain or defend their choices of models. In ordinary English, they hardly understand how their design works.

Drawing from 3D robot models

Do not fear

In my opinion we all should have more courage to address where we lack healthy growth and progress. Thanks professor Bruyninckx!