Some hypes and missed opportunities in robotics | Robotics - Innovation Origins

Prof. Herman Bruyninckx (KU Leuven) presented a critical view on the robotics industry during the seminar in High Tech Campus Eindhoven, says Olga Koltsova, writer. 

Photo: Innovation Origins

Bruyninckx delivered a talk on the hypes and missed opportunities in robotics pointing out the key issues that robotics should tackle nowadays.

Does more computing power lead to better robot systems? 
Herman Bruyninckx believes that what robots lack nowadays is the awareness of the users’ intentions and the ability to use abstraction. “50 years after the “first robot” Shakey you can still you go to a robotics conference and understand everything there – because the context and the mathematics are exactly the same. Intention and abstraction of the robots are still very underdeveloped. We need higher-order logic to make the robot aware of why it should be doing something but there is no formal language to represent that. We cannot even formalize what we humans know about the intentional context,” says Bruyninckx...

Where is the state-of-the-art in robotics?
According to prof. Bruyninckx, making an academic career in robotics has become too easy. “Too many old simplistic ideas are coming back again and again. It’s popular to have simplistic solutions but they won’t work,” says the KU Leuven professor.

Another problem of robotics in the academic system is the lack of standardization. “Where are you going to look if you want to know the state-of-the-art in robotics? I don’t know where to find it. There are hundreds of thousands of papers claiming that they are state-of-the-art. We did an extremely bad job in robotics as an academic system. In many cases, Wikipedia can be by far your best source about the state-of-the-art in robotics is.”
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Source: Innovation Origins