Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be crucial if robots are to better understand human behaviour and learn how to interact in a more sophisticated way with their human colleagues.
According to Stephen Barraclough, CEO of the CIEHF: “It’s vital we create automation that can work with people, interacting with routines and better understanding our capabilities.”
Interestingly these findings mirror comments from a panel discussion held last week, and hosted at Tower Bridge in London, by Intel.
Speaking at the event Chris Feltham, an Industry Technical Specialist with Intel said that: “As no one entity or company can make all the decisions, we need points of view from everywhere.
“We need a real mix of companies who all have different opinions and perspectives on things that we might not have seen. We have to collaborate with other players in the industry, governments, bodies and all the people who can make this work.”
Panel member Jeremy Wyatt, professor of robotics & AI, University of Birmingham agreed, suggesting that experience was going to be the great teacher.
“We need to explain to people how robots work and what is happening underneath. One of the really hard things to get across, regarding anything to do with AI or robotics is that if you see a video of a robot doing something, it is absolutely natural as a human to assume that it won’t, for example, only pick up the cup that you just saw it picking up, but that it will pick up any cup in any situation. In reality, it won’t. Because we have this ability to generalise we assume that robots do as well and that expectation needs to change.”
While we can agree that robotics and AI offer much we have to be better able to not only understand how they work, but have a better understanding of the systems we are looking to deploy in the real world.
As panel member Sabine Hauert, Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group member said: “As humans we like to understand how a decision came about and then we like to be able to test it systematically.”
It will be crucial for human factors to be taken into account at the design stage if we want to see robots integrated smoothly into society. As this research has found and as industry experts suggest, that will need to be central to future developments.
