domingo, 13 de novembro de 2016

4- The robots among us


Last week BNAIC took place in Amsterdam. Companies and academy meet each other to share experiences and expectations in AI area. Among many topics discussed, we can highlight Robots and Deep Learning.

Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University) talked about - Autonomous Intelligent Service Robots: Learning and Explanations in Human-Robot
Interaction.  She talked about robot localisation, movement and planning routes. She also noticed two relevant aspects of robotics nowadays. One of them is that “robots can guide and inform people, transport things, work as a receptionist and do any repetitive task in industry. We already have technology for these activities, although we don’t see them in commercial areas performing these jobs”. Different of industry where they are present. Probably the limitation in the commercial sector are costs and the culture of not adopt them. The second point is: “we can use robots to collect data from the environment while they perform some task”. That can become an important complement to smart environments.

She also mentioned ”the difficulty to robots interact with our environment”. All buildings and external environment are designed to humans. Based on this point of view, it is important to plan future environments adapted to robots’ movements and interactions.
  • What is the best choice: invest in robots suited to our environments like they are or adapt the environments to facilitate the robot tasks? At the first moment, I would say that the industry is improving robots to lead with the environments like they are. Is that the best choice? Or a mix of adapted environment and improvement in robots can provide us better interaction between humans, environment and robots?
  • Other questions that arise are: what is a good environment to robots and humans? and…
  • How adapt our already built environments in a cheap way while they can offer the best conditions to robot act in the environments?


Change our buildings and industrial plants to absorb these new beings can increase the production line and push the inclusion of robots in our lives, save energy and time to perform tasks. Also, they can provide us better services than they do nowadays.  In the other hand, to adapt environments lead to agreements between Govern, Robot Industries and those that design our buildings.