Laboratory of Planning and Management Systems -

This is a working article that started as a report for the Information Communication Technology class. Should you like to comment or offer any advice and recommendations, please don't to hesitate to contact me at chrismina[at]civil.mbox.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp. I will be very happy to hear from you.

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    Information communications technology (ICT) is a very broad term used to refer to the technologies used in the communication of information. ICT includes technologies used to store and retrieve as well as to transmit and broadcast information in various forms utilizing different types of media. Examples of storing and retrieving media include such traditional instruments as pen and paper and more recent ones such as magnetic media, optical disks, CD/DVD and flash memory cards and drives. Technologies used in the transmission and broadcasting of information include radio, television, microphone, camera, loudspeaker, telephones including mobile phones, the Internet and others. The emergence of digital networks such as the Internet accelerated the pace of development of ICT. Recently the widespread adoption and enhancement of wireless networks further accelerated the rate of development of ICT. As the new technologies become more affordable for the society, ICT applications that take advantage of the new technologies find their ways from the laboratories to our lives.

    The so called “personal robot” application is one such example of a new ICT application that is recently getting a lot of attention. The “personal robot” effort is creating a revolution in robotics similar to the personal computer revolution that generated small and affordable computers for the masses 25 years ago. Currently, improvements in several technologies indispensable to robotics such as motion planning, computer vision (e.g. face and scene recognition), voice recognition, natural language processing, and automated reasoning are accelerating the pace of the development of personal robots. Yet the future of personal robotics is highly uncertain and further research is required to understand how this new phenomenon will be evolving in the near future and what will its impacts on the society be.

    This article will investigate the future of the personal robot phenomenon. The article is organized as follows. In section 2 the future needs of users of personal robots will be identified and discussed. Section 3, referring to the needs identified in section 2, will postulate on what kind of technologies should be developed and/or enhanced in order for the future personal robots to be able to satisfy the needs of their users. Section 4 will discuss the impacts of the personal robot phenomenon and the development of its technologies on the society. Finally, section 5 will conclude the article.

    Recently, so called service robots are being used in many areas both in the consumer and commercial sectors. Examples of service robot usage can be found in the industry (e.g. welder and spray paint robots), in the military (e.g. explosives disarming robots), in disaster relieve and aid (e.g. robots assisting in finding and removing survivors after an earthquake), and in the business sector (e.g. front desk greeter and general information providing robots). The so called “domestic robots” make a special category of service robots. Domestic personal robots are being used to deal with various situations encountered in daily activities such as cleaning the floor, vacuuming, cut the grass, child care, entertainment and to simply keep company to people of several ages.

    Currently, personal domestic robots are not widely available to the public. Reasons include their high costs and their experimental nature. Nevertheless, the technologies behind personal domestic robots are in a constant flux and the cost of their hardware and software is diminishing over time. As a result, it is predicted that in the near future domestic personal robots will be integral parts of every household, as common as microwave ovens are for households today.

    In order to understand how personal robots will become integral parts of future households, one has to first grasp the needs of a future household. With a clear vision of the needs of future households, personal robots with capabilities of addressing those needs can be designed. In addition to that, existent technologies that have to be enhanced or new technologies that have to be created in order to support the design of personal robots of future households should be identified.

    The following is our personal view on what kind of needs a future household will have and how those needs could be addressed by introducing a personal robot in the household. In the process, we will identify existing or new technologies that we believe that should necessarily further enhanced or developed in order to design the ideal personal robot of the future household.

    We envision that in the future a household will have a variety of electronic devices capable of communicating both with each other and with the household's members via a closed secured wireless network. Central to the household's network will be a personal robot, virtual or otherwise, capable of co-ordinating the communication between the household's members and its devices. The central personal robot will be also capable of communication with the outside world. Examples of communication with the outside could be answering the phone and taking messages, transmitting messages to household members, paying the bills and doing other minor transactions, get and deliver various reports and provide information and answers to questions (e.g. weather reports, TV channel programs, road conditions, definitions of unknown words, news reports, etc). Subsequently, the central personal robot will be able to transmit data in visual and audio forms such as video clips or create virtual 3D projections. An additional capability of the central personal robot would be to locate the members of the households and transmit messages to them whether they are in or outside of the household. Finally the central personal robot will be able to provide various kinds of entertainment to the members of the household, depending on their ages and interests. In order for the central personal robot to achieve that it should be able to learn from its environment and evolve with time.

    The purpose of this section is to discuss the necessary technologies and infrastructure necessary to design and develop a central personal robot, with reference to the needs of a future household identified in section 2.

    The first important capability of a future central personal robot would be the communication with other household devices in order to check their status or transmit information to and from the members of the households. In order to achieve that firstly a common communication protocol between all the household devices and the central personal robot should be designed and implemented. A client-server approach seems to be a feasible choice for the design of the protocol. A peer-to-peer (P2P) also seems to be another feasible construct. Secondly, a digital network, preferably a wireless one, should also be in place. All the devices of the household should have connectivity to the network and be able to utilize the common communication protocol. The central personal robot should then act as the coordinator of the devices and also as the main communication route from the household members and the devices. For example, a household member could ask the central personal robot to clean a certain area of floor of the household. The robot will then transmit an order to the robotic vacuum cleaner along with the co-ordinates of the area that needs to be cleaned. The robotic vacuum cleaner will then proceed to clean the area and report back to the central personal robot when finished. The central personal robot will then report the completion of the task back to household member.

    Another critical feature of the future central personal robot will be to communicate with the world outside of the household. In order for the personal robot to achieve that it will be necessary for several technologies to be in place. The first necessary technology will be the connectivity with several types of networks both wired and wireless such as the Internet and telephone. Due to the fact that the demand of those networks will increase substantially, their infrastructure should have to be strengthened and new ways of meeting the demand more effectively will have to be developed. Technologies based on traditional traffic engineering could provide the direction on how to proceed in the future. A second technology that will have to be developed and/or enhanced is the voice-visual recognition. Tasks such as answering phone calls, delivering messages, both audio and visual, require such enhanced technologies to be solidly in place.

    Finally, an equally important feature of the central personal robot of the future will be to provide several types of entertainment to the members of the future household depending on their ages and interests. In order for the central personal robot to achieve that it should be able to learn and adapt to its environment. Technologies based on artificial intelligence for example will have to be developed to a reasonably high level in order to design the future central personal robot with capabilities of learning and adaptation. This is admittedly a very challenging task given its high perplexity. Nevertheless, the ability of the future personal robots to learn and adapt will clearly distinguish them from those currently developed.

    Several of the future necessities mentioned above require the enhancement of current technologies such as the strengthening network infrastructures. Other technologies require the development of methodologies and as result software based on those methodologies. Especially, so called infrastructure software such as operating systems and communication tools should be design to support the future development of personal robots. Developing infrastructure software can be very resource demanding and costly. Currently, big communities of software developers, engineers and researchers collaborate via the Internet to produce software that is reliable, transparent and cost efficient. Efforts such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative produced successfully infrastructure software such as operating systems, database systems web servers and client applications that meet or surpass proprietary software in quality. Recently, the open source paradigm inspired new approaches in creating open methodologies and software tools for various industries. An example of such an approach is the Alliance for Global Open Risk Analysis (AGORA: www.risk-agora.org). AGORA was initiated at Kyoto University and was created to provide open methodologies, data and software tools for the disaster risk management industry. The personal robotics industry could benefit from a similar open initiative that will harness the collective power of software developers, engineers, researchers and the academia world-wide. Utilizing simple and well tested techniques such as peer-review and transparency of process, the development of infrastructure software and methodologies for the personal robotics industry will proceed at a faster pace and more efficiently using lower resources. Since the effort to develop a personal robot is a multi-discipline effort, adapting an open approach will easily attract researchers, software developers and members of the academia from various areas, cultures and locations around the globe thus providing the necessary intellectual power and diversity necessary for the industry to take off and reach maturity quickly.

    Identifying and evaluating the impacts that future personal robots and their technologies will have on the society involves a great deal of uncertainty. As a result we can only provide educated guesses based on the discussions of the previous sections.

    A positive impact of future personal robots and their technologies on the society will be the reduction of the time used by people in engaging in daily households chores such as cleaning the floor, standing in line to pay bills, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes and looking for general information such as weather reports, news, etc. As a result people will have more time to spend for other beneficial activities. It can also be anticipated that the time spend at work will be reduced due to the extra efficiency that will be provided by specialized robots and devices at work, leaving extra time for working people to use for leisure. As a result it is expected that the total social welfare will increase.

    On the negative side we can expect that the traditional face to face interactions will be reduced and people eventually will developed some kind of anti-social behavior. In addition to that, people will become excessively dependent on their devices and technology in general. In times of great disasters, such as major natural disasters when services and devices will be interrupted, the peoples' dependability on devices and their technologies will render them unable to react effectively. This phenomenon of dependability on technology can be easily observed in current modern societies. Imagine, for example, the trouble someone will have to go through if she looses her mobile phone or her personal digital organizer.

    In this article the future of the personal robot phenomenon was discussed and analyzed. This was achieved by identifying and discussing the future needs of users of personal robots. By directly referring to those needs the article postulated on the kind of technologies that should be developed and/or enhanced in order for the future personal robots to be able to satisfy the needs of their users. Finally the impacts of the personal robot phenomenon and the development of its technologies on the society were discussed.

    Through the discussions presented in the article, it can be concluded that the personal robot phenomenon shows a very promising future and that it will be contributing to the future enhancement of the total social welfare in general. A very important conclusion drawn from the discussions of this article was that in order to have a healthy, rapid and efficient development of the infrastructure software and methodologies of personal robotics open and transparent approaches should be adopted. In addition to that, involvement of experts from various discipline should be seek in order for providing diversity and pluralism. Currently, a few initiatives to create open standards, software and methodologies for the personal robotics industry exist. Examples of such initiatives are the effort of IBM to create open source robotics toolkits[1], the Leaf Project which is a group open robot development program[2], the Open PINO platform[3], the Willow Garage project[4], the Open Automaton Project[5] and the Player project which provides a platform for creating free/open software tools for robot and sensor applications[6]. Even though the efforts to create open standards and tools are at the early stages of development, the interest and the contributions of researchers and software developers from around the globe is on the increase. It is our opinion that the industry should support and closely collaborate with open software community in order to successfully create the future personal robot infrastructure.