Amazing what an Industrial Military Complex can do with half the US Budget. I'd like to see them put some money into space myself but robots are good too.
Arguably, putting money into robots is putting money into space. Along with a lot of other things, too. Robots have already long since passed through the hype cycle and now we're firmly sitting at the end of the cycle in "ho-hum", but it's worth taking a moment to realize just what this all means, and that the old sci-fi predictions may not have happened on schedule but are about to start popping up.
While everyone's busy moaning about the economy and how terrible everything is, I've been looking down the road five or ten years and I see amazing things coming at us, fast.
I don't see a lot of household robotics in that time frame, but I think we're going to see a new generation of industrial robots. Some of them have already started to pop up, and robots like this story will continue that trend.
Right now, robots only work in spaces explicitly designed for them, which has really limited their effectiveness. They're going to be able to move beyond that into more human spaces, which has two major advantages: A lot of human spaces exist, and those spaces are set up to do more different things, which robots will be able to participate in. An assembly line is a fine thing, but not terribly flexible. (Though increasingly, this is a fuzzy line, and the line will get fuzzier; indeed, this is one of the effects I am anticipating.)
Computer vision seems to have taken a new step forward lately, and while they're still miles away from "full human vision" (which is AI-strong, ultimately), they're moving from total toy problems into really useful problems.
Brain interaction is also moving forward lately.
Now, you might say I'm not being specific. Well, here's why. In the five-to-ten year timescale, what I see is that where today these things are still the cutting edge of research, in the five-to-ten year timeframe this is going to be available to small startups and dedicated hobbyists. I don't know exactly what will be made of advanced computer vision and smart robots and direct brain interaction and another five-to-ten years of hardware development and two guys in a garage (oh, and we'll still have the internet, of course, and pervasive cellular connections), but I find it quite likely that it'll be very significant... in exactly the same way the Internet is significant. It may take a genius to push the frontier of computer vision or robotics, but thanks to the miracle of programming, it won't take geniuses to apply them in new ways.
Also, I could probably go on for another three or four times longer, but this is an HN comment, not an essay. (Though maybe I should make it a blog post.)
You wake up today and it's much the same as yesterday, but you know, look back at what the Internet has done to so many industries in the past ten years, and what it has yet to do, and I think you start to get a reference frame for what we may be looking at with the convergence of some of this stuff. I know I'm not giving you product names and the bullet-point feature lists, but that would be almost exactly like me trying to predict Facebook back in 1990. Even those who were on the right track in the broad sense were wrong in many ways... but they were right that big things were coming.
Here's a specific technology that's going to be a huge boon to robotics in the next 5-10 years: Flash LIDAR cameras. This is the technology behind the XBox 360's "Project Natal", but it's a lot more than a game controller. A Flash LIDAR camera directly senses the distance to every object seen by the camera by measuring the time-of-flight of a reflected laser pulse. With accurate distance data for every pixel a lot of really hard computer vision problems suddenly become much, much eaiser.
One thing that might happen within the next 5 years is that robots start to learn more from what they see in their environment and from the feedback they get. I'm not sure how much that is already part of current robots, but I haven't heard about it so I think it's not an important part.
One way we humans learn is by observing things, trying to immitate them and learning from the feedback (either physical or via communication). If that principle takes hold in robot development, the "evolution" of robots could get much speedier I believe.
The ability to act in the physical world and actually cause things to happen, cause reactions, is what differentiates robots from other types of computers. So that's what I would try to exploit thinking about the principles of programming robots.
