Current research directions in robotics push the envelope in each of these directions, aiming for better solutions to making robots, controlling the movement of robots and their manipulation skills, increasing the ability for robots to reason, enabling semantic-level perception through machine vision, and developing more flexible coordination and cooperation between machines and between machines and humans.
There are significant gaps between where robots are today and the promise of pervasive integration of robots in everyday life. Some of the gaps concern the creation of robots—how do we design and fabricate new robots quickly and efficiently? Other gaps concern the computation and capabilities of robots to reason, change, and adapt for increasingly more complex tasks in increasingly complex environments. Other gaps pertain to interactions between robots, and between robots and people. Current research directions in robotics push the envelope in each of these directions, aiming for better solutions to making robots, controlling the movement of robots and their manipulation skills, increasing the ability for robots to reason, enabling semantic-level perception through machine vision, and developing more flexible coordination and cooperation between machines and between machines and humans. Meeting these challenges will bring robots closer to the vision of pervasive robotics: the connected world of many people and many robots performing many different tasks.