The Potential of Robots to Improve Quality of Life

Imagine a world, not far off, where it’s as easy to program a robot to do your shopping as it is to use a smartphone today. Robots can improve our quality of life and make the world better, not by replacing humans, but by working effectively together. Researchers at MIT Sloan and MIT CSAIL are exploring how robotics has the potential to power the economy and improve the quality of our lives.

Discover the potential of robots with Daniela Rus, Faculty Director in the Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy online short course from MIT.

Transcript

Imagine a world, not too far off, where it’s as easy to program a robot to do your shopping or to take a driverless car for a spin as it is to use a smartphone today.

Robots have the potential to improve the quality of our lives at home, at work. They have the potential to advance scientific discovery. They have the potential to power the economy and, generally, make the world better. And yet the objective of robotics is not to replace humans by mechanizing and automating tasks, it is to find ways for machines and humans to be more effective together. For example, commuting to work in your driverless car will buy you time and will allow you to read, to work… And now imagine if these cars can learn. Imagine if they learn how you drive. If they learn to never be responsible for an accident. And what if your car could talk with your refrigerator, figure out that you’re out of cat food and suggest where to stop on your way home? This is the future work of pervasive robotics: the connected world of many robots, working with many people, doing many tasks.

Understand how robots function

Robots put computation in motion. They are programmable mechanical devices that take input from the world through sensors, and impact the world through their actuators. The robots think about the input from the sensors, think about the tasks they have to do, and then issue commands to their motors to move in the world. The robots also have to interact with each other and with people in support of their coordination tasks. And the robots might become specialized so that we have special delivery robots, special autonomous driving robots, and special cleaning robots.

Transportation is already moving towards this direction. Now this change towards autonomous driving will be gradual. And, in fact, this change was defined by five steps towards Level Five Autonomy by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Level Zero is what your car can do today, which is nothing. Level One is if you have a high-end car with a rear-pointing camera that helps you decide on what to do. Level Two enables the car to take small actions on your behalf, like anti-lock brakes. Level Three allows your car to take longer actions, but the driver has to be ready to take over at any point in time, and this is the current Tesla model. Level Four is autonomy in some environments, some of the time. And Level Five is autonomy in all environments, all the time.
This is an extraordinarily exciting path to where transportation will become a utility available to anybody, anytime.