IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 79

ful, though, that materials scientists will
indeed have a lot to offer robotics.
Reducing size and weight will be critical in making tomorrow's personal robots
nimbler, safer, and cheaper. But some say
an even greater challenge will be software. "Like the early PCs, you need hardware of basic capabilities, but for the most
part the industry did not really accelerate
until you had great software," says Tandy
Trower, founder of Hoaloha Robotics, a
Seattle-based start-up developing robots
to assist the elderly.
The problem with the
soft ware today i s that
roboticists spend too much
time reinventing the wheel,
each creating different modules to handle control, communication, and other basic
tasks in the robots. This, in
part, is necessary because
robots are still highly customized machines, and
so reusing code is difficult
or impossible.
But it's hard to see personal robots flourishing
until large numbers of different manufacturers' machines are equipped with
standardized components
and interfaces. This, in turn, will make
programming them-and sharing code-
easier. And indeed, some robotics software is already moving in this direction.
Consider again Willow Garage's PR2. Its
software foundation is called the Robot
Operating System, or ROS, which takes
care of all the basic functionalities of the
robot, such as making sure sensors and
computers are talking to one another and
much more. ROS is also integrated with a
set of libraries that programmers can use to
make the robot perform tasks that involve
simulation, 3-D data processing, computer
vision, and other things. That means they
can develop complex applications-such as
folding towels-without worrying about

low-level details like how to acquire data
from a sensor or keep track of where different parts of the robot are with respect
to one another: ROS does all that for you.
The greatest virtue of ROS, which is free
and open source, is that it can run not
only on PR2 but also on pretty much any
other robot with a computer. Indeed, the
ROS community has grown to thousands
of developers, and ROS is now running in
everything from small humanoids to big
industrial robots. ROS, now maintained by

"a robot to
keep me
company,
i think that's
something
we will see"
the Open Source Robotics Foundation, is
bringing us closer to a world where people
don't have to re-create basic software modules every time they build a new robot.
If all goes well, ROS or software like it
will allow developers to focus on high-level
applications rather than basic systems
operations as they build ever more sophisticated capabilities into their robots. Those
developers will then package their creations into apps, which users will download
from robot app stores. Perhaps robots
will make these purchases themselves.
Or maybe newly created functionalities
will be stored in a cloud-based knowledge
repository, which robots would access to
learn new skills. At the same time, robots

would contribute to this repository on
their own: If a robot learned to grasp a
certain teacup, it would upload information describing how to do that in a way
other robots would understand. That is,
tomorrow's robots would learn not just
from people but also from one another.
And if we glimpse perhaps a few decades ahead, we see robots becoming
more than just labor savers in our homes.
As they become more common-and as we
become more accepting of them-certain
models will also serve as companions to
many of us. You may find this idea uncomfortable, even repulsive. But the next
generations, growing up alongside robots,
will embrace them-or at least demand
that they have more "personality" than
a disk-shaped vacuum bot.
Already filmmakers are beginning to
speculate about our relationship with
machines in the near future. In Robot &
Frank (2012), a grumpy retiree is initially
reluctant to accept the robot servant
his son buys him, but he soon finds its
presence indispensable. In Her (2013), a
lonely writer played by Joaquin Phoenix
becomes romantically attached to a talking operating system. "Like when I talk to
her," he says, referring to the OS, "I feel
like she's with me."
Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at UC Berkeley,
doesn't believe that ever smarter machines
will replace human contact. "But people
aren't always available," he says. "So having a robot to tell me jokes, play videos and
pictures of my past, and keep me company,
I think that's something we're going to see."
To be sure, nobody knows whether
robotics will evolve exactly this way. But
we think it should. Roboticists will have
to overcome many obstacles to get there,
but a future in which robots become true
helpers and at least surrogate friends is
awfully appealing. Of course, they'll fold
our towels too. n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014