-
Asked by Gina to Siobhan, Ollie, Mateusz, Iulia, Katie on 6 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by ToastWithoutJam, huntingwewillgo, stafenhaa, Jose.
-
Siobhan Duncan answered on 6 Mar 2017:
Hi Gina,
This is a really good question.
Short answer is I think it will be slowly. I think robots will be integrated into society in areas that are not visible to all of us everyday and as they become cheaper we will then start to see them integrated into the home.
One of the first types of robot which will be made in very large numbers will be robot cars. These cars can navigate and drive themselves, meaning that humans will no longer have to drive. I think these will be everywhere by 2030, which is really not that far away.
I think the first areas of our lives where we will start to see more and more robotics, are areas of our life that have access to lots of money to spend. This is because robots are still very expensive and it will take some time for this to change.
For example, the NHS has access to billions of pounds every year and I think we will start to see some of that money go towards robots. I have a friend who is working on a robot who can look at MRI scans and detect if there is an issue and if so where and what is it?
An other area with lots of access to money, are the fire and rescue services. I am working on a project just now which will hopefully create robots that can help firefighters stay out of harms way as much as possible and allow the robots to do the dangerous work. The robots would go into the building and find the people or pets to be rescued, secure the area and then tell the human firefighters where they are needed. This means that the firefighters would only enter the building to save the people or pets located by the robots, limiting the time they spend in dangerous situations.
One final example is agriculture. We are already seeing some farmers use drones to tackle pests, or water certain areas of the crop. Some of my friends are working on how we can do this using robots, so that robots can manage our food supplies.
The reason I highlighted the three example above, is to show you that there are many applications for robots that aren’t visible to us in our everyday lives. Robots will be saving our lives and growing our food before they will be making out food or helping us around the home.
The longer we study robotics and the more areas of our lives that they are successfully used in, the cheaper and better these robots will become. Once we are able to build robots that are affordable to consumers, which are everyday shoppers like you and I, I think robots will be everywhere.
In a similar way that the telephone has gone from a patent in 1876, to being an expensive technology only in the richest homes or workplaces, to being in every home and now in every pocket. Did you know there are almost 7 billion mobile phones in the world now?
It’s a really exciting time to be a part of robotics as we are on the edge of robots going from being a cool expensive technology to turning into this technology we get used to like we are used to the internet, our computers, mobile phones, etc…
I hope this answers your question? If not please don’t hesitate to ask me more 🙂
Siobhan
-
-
Iulia Motoc answered on 10 Mar 2017:
I think yes, and I think this will happen very soon. As a matter of fact, we already use robots in houses (washing machines, fridges, and so on are all robots). But I think we will soon have a “companion” robot in every house. For example, we already have amazon echo.
We also use robots at work, or in hospitals, and I think these will become more and more advanced and more common.
-
anon answered on 14 Mar 2017:
Yep, it’s already happening 🙂
I think people don’t see it much, because robots don’t look like those in the movies. But if you look at Japanese robotics, for example, they have robots in shops, an entire hotel run by robots, and even helpers in airports and the like. Those kinds of robots are designed to talk to people, and we’ll see more of them coming.
It’s just that until very recently neither robotics, nor artificial intelligence were good enough for that kind of human-robot interaction. They still have lot’s of work to do, but with assistants like Jibo, Buddy, Pepper, Amazon Echo, Google Home and the like, we’ll see more robots being used daily by people in their homes.
Comments
Gina commented on :
Thanks!