IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020 - 4

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
By Bram Vanderborght

ne hundred years ago, the
Czech writer Karel Čapek
gave us the word "robot,"
which first appeared in his
play R.U.R. in 1920 (although, later, he
identified his brother Josef as the actual source of the term). Long before science fiction became recognized as a
separate genre, Čapek wrote plays and
novels in which he discussed ethical
aspects of industrial inventions and
processes, including mass production
and robots. His robots were not exactly
robots as we
think of them
today; they were
R.U.R. is as visionary
living flesh-andas it is relevant, as
blood creatures
rather than astragic as it is comical,
semblages of
and as unlikely as
mechanical
c omp one nt s
it is frightening.
and electronics. Last year, I
was invited for a debate following a
performance of the famous play. A
century after its creation, the theme of
robots, in whatever form, is more topical than ever. While man increasingly
plays God, his creation threatens to
take over more and more. R.U.R. is
as visionary as it is relevant, as tragic
as it is comical, and as unlikely as it
is frightening.
Currently, the media talk about an
explosion of major breakthroughs in the
field of artificial intelligence (AI). In
1956, American computer scientist
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2020.2984469
Date of current version: 10 June 2020

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

JUNE 2020

John McCarthy organized
the Dartmouth Conference,
at which the term artificial
intelligence was adopted.
But ideas that led to the concept of an electronic brain
came much earlier, with, e.g.,
Claude Shannon's work on digital signals or Alan Turing's theory of computation. Despite well-funded global
efforts early on, governments and corporations began to lose faith in AI.
Computers were not well developed
enough to process such a large magnitude of data. The so-called AI winter
happened from the mid-1970s to the
mid-1990s, when computer scientists
dealt with an acute shortage of funding
for AI research.
The exponential gain in processing
power, storage, and network capabilities
offered companies such as Facebook,
Amazon, Google, Baidu, and others
opportunities to leverage AI to their
huge commercial advantage for many
(often invisible to the general public)
applications in daily life. This did not go
unnoticed by governments. In 2019, the
White House launched the American AI
Initiative, which articulates a comprehensive vision for U.S. leadership in the
technology. China is spending growing
sums on AI research and development.
Europe is also increasing its investments
and in February published a white paper
aiming to foster a European ecosystem
of excellence and trust in AI.
Among the general public, a robot is
often regarded as being the same as AI
and vice versa. We often define a robot
as a physical machine with sensors and

actuators that may or may
not require intelligence to
perform specific tasks,
whereas AI is a program, so
it doesn't need to be physical.
But developments in robotics
bring additional perspectives to
the integration of AI because robots'
physical nature enables them to become
increasingly capable of perceiving, acting upon, and shaping their environment and engaging in social interaction.
On the other hand, AI enables robots to
evolve and learn. No wonder that robotics and AI become more and more
intertwined and that, for example, there
are many sessions on deep learning at
our IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society conferences.
In its Coordinated Plan, the European Commission defines AI as "systems that display intelligent behavior by
analyzing their environment and taking
action-with some degree of autonomy-to achieve specific goals." That
sounds like a possible definition of a
robot, no? For the European Commission, robotics is regarded as part of AI,
and AI is used as an umbrella term for
deep learning, neural networks, prediction, machine translation, natural language processing, computer vision, artificial agents, and robotics.
Therefore, this special issue on deep
learning and machine learning in robotics comes at a timely moment. We
received a whopping 37 submissions.
Special thanks go to the guest editors,
Fabio Bonsignorio (Heron Robots,
Genoa, Italy), David Hsu (National
University of Singapore), Matthew

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020