Robotkind: on the battlefield and in the home

This event was held on Wednesday 16th May 2007 at the Cavendish Conference Centre, 22 Duchess Mews, London W1G 9DT.

The speaker was Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics.

In the last five years the US military has gone from no ground robots to thousands, and US homes have gone from no mobile robots to millions. Both technology exponentials and demographics are driving these trends and we are most likely at an early stage of exponential growth for robots in our lives across the board.

There are difficult problems in Artificial Intelligence that robots bring to the fore. Researchers around the world have made progress in many critical areas enabling fantastic new levels of performance of robots in laboratories. The future capabilities of robots will be greatly expanded by progress towards four capability goals:

• the object recognition capabilities of a two year old child
• the language skills of a four year old child
• the manual dexterity of a six year old child
• the social awareness of an eight year old child

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