{"id":39,"date":"2016-05-15T20:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T01:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robotistry.org\/blog\/?p=39"},"modified":"2016-03-18T18:38:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T23:38:22","slug":"gaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robotistry.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/15\/gaps\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaps"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is the biggest gap in robotics research?<\/em><\/p>\n

There are two major gaps that we should at least investigate as part of the process of defining robotics as a discipline.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0We don\u2019t have positive laws. \u00a0Our history is still largely\u00a0trial and error and scavenging from other disciplines, rather than the development of foundational design principles or laws governing the creation or operation of robots in general.<\/p>\n

We do have recognizable (tongue-in-cheek) negative laws, roughly equivalent to Murphy’s Law.<\/p>\n

The First Law of Robotics: \u00a0You’re wrong (you set the parameters wrong, the user doesn’t need the robot to do whatever it was you thought they wanted, your model of the environment was wrong, etc.);<\/p>\n

The Second\u00a0Law of Robotics: \u00a0On a good day, half the robots in your lab are actually working (alternate version: \u00a0Your robot is working a little over (or under) half the time. \u00a0This has actually been demonstrated in two\u00a0longitudinal studies<\/a>);<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Third\u00a0Law of Robotics: \u00a0All demos are faked or staged in some way (if you want to demonstrate a particular behavior or capability, you need to stage the demo so that that specific behavior or capability is required);<\/p>\n

The Fourth Law of Robotics: \u00a0The likelihood of something going wrong with the demo is proportional to the importance of the people you’re putting it on for;<\/p>\n

Corollary to the Fourth Law: \u00a0The thing that goes wrong with your demo will be unrelated to what you are trying to demonstrate, but will completely prevent you from demonstrating the important part of your work.<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0 \u00a0 We have trouble defining the space in which we work. \u00a0For example, autonomy means to operate without outside control, but the human intervention axis is demonstrably not equivalent to the autonomy axis.<\/p>\n

Since one of the most common categorization tools for levels of autonomy<\/a> does not make this distinction clear, a simple example is provided.<\/p>\n

We can define four extreme types of robots:<\/p>\n