Scientific American January 2007 issue features an article by Bill Gates titled A Robot in Every Home [1]. Is domestic robotics industry going to reach critical mass in the short term? Robotics applications in manufacturing are a reality. However, practical application of robotics in the residential market is another story. In his article, Bill Gates talks about the challenges of this domain, and remarks the need for a standard framework (although he doesn’t mention it initially, obviously he is referring to the newly released Microsoft Robotics Studio).
Gate’s vision of robotics is based on an evolution of the PC. From personal computers in every home, to personal robots in every home. It is like endowing the current PCs with the features of typical science fiction robots. But, is this likely to happen in the short term? Is Microsoft powerful enough to drive such a change in the market? Do we actually have the required technology? I wouldn’t answer these questions yet, but I’d say that the time of NS-5 type robots hasn’t come yet.
Polymorphic Robotics, self-adaptive, self-organizing, and generally self-* properties of robotics are usually related to the field of machine consciousness. Basically, some degree of self-consciousness is required to self-repair or self-heal a robot. The SASO 2007 Conference covers this discipline (First IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. Boston, Mass., USA, July 9-11, 2007) [1].
Related topics are: self-organization, self-adaptiveness, self-management, self-monitoring, self-tuning, self-repair, self-configuration. There is no doubt that integrating these kinds of techniques with higher cognitive models requires a machine consciousness like model.
Some examples of polymorphic robots are available from the Polymorphic Robotics Lab at University of Southern California [2].
Researchers from Cornell University (Hod Lipson and colleagues) built a robot than can reproduce. Self-replication and self-reparation are desirable properties of robots for some environments. The following video shows the proof of concept robot (2005) made up of "molecubes":
It's a shame that Sony decided to discontinue their robotics projects. The Sony QRIO humanoid would had been a nice platform for machine consciousness research... Here we can see four prototypes in the dance floor:
There are many problems where the application of machine consciousness would be a valuable advantage. Even in robot wrestling competitions, let's have a look what is the state of the art in this field:
miel
continental
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