The Ultimate Robot

Ever since the introduction of the first industrial robots half a century ago, researchers, film and book writers, and the general public have envisaged and pictured robots with all possible and different capabilities, with all kinds of embodiments and a never ending variety of applications. These range from the robot taking over all our household chores to fighting hostile armies to accompanying space travellers into the universe. At the same time, the development of robot technology has been dramatic in terms of accuracy, speed, dexterity, pricing, and other useful applications. However, the gap between what people expect from future robot systems and the progress that robot technology has made has been widening.

This session will try to make an inventory of the state of the art in advanced robot systems, identify technological, and psychological hurdles as well as theoretical limits to the development of advanced robots for innovative applications. Such applications could be the "conscious robot", the "growable robot", the "disappearing" robot, and many others. They could find their way into standard applications like home management, environmental or medical care. But they could also replace humans in totally new fields like space mining, automatic construction of infrastructures, autonomous resource detection or the like. The session looks at the big questions in robots such as - what is a robot? Do engineered and 'bio-engineered' smart prostheses make us more robot or more human? How smart can a robot be without having to be self-aware? What would artificial consciousness mean in a robot? What does building robots tell us us about ourselves as human beings? In the future, as robot devices become more and more sophisticated and available what do we want them to do?

So, the question arises: given our broad knowledge about technology, expected advancement of the technology, what could the development of the use cases of robot systems look like over the next, say, fifty years? And what are the obstacles on the way of getting there that we can identify today?

Links and Documents

• Speaker Presentations (5 MB)

Featuring

Aaron SLOMAN (University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, United Kingdom)

Owen HOLLAND (University of Essex, United Kingdom)

Tomohiro SHIBATA (NAIST, Japan)

Tom ZIEMKE (University of Skövde, Sweden)

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