10 'grand challenges' facing robotics over the next decade

Robot engineers must develop new materials and long-lasting power sources for the field to maximise its global impact in the next 5-10 years, a panel of experts has said.

The requirements are just two of 10 “grand challenges” for robotics which were identified by the group, including professors from Imperial College London, Harvard University and the University of Oxford as well as many others.

Guang-Zhong Yang from Imperial and his colleagues said seven of the challenges involve technology which will have a broad impact on all robotic applications, including creating new materials and manufacturing methods, developing cost-effective and long-lasting power sources for mobile robots and programming artificial intelligence (AI) to perform “deep moral and social reasoning” about real-world problems.

Two of the challenges represent key applications of robots – medical and social – which involve extensive human interaction and have their own sets of issues in sensing, perception and intelligence.

The final challenge, the experts said, is addressing ethics and security issues of integrating robots into society. This must be done as soon as possible while technologies are still developing, the authors said.

Despite some high-profile figures such as Tesla’s Elon Musk stoking fears of an AI-led robotic takeover, Yang was more cautious: “Humans, not technology, are both problem and solution, and shall remain so for any foreseeable future.”

The paper was published in Science Robotics.