The Scaling Up of Amazing Tech🚀
By: Allison Zhao
Tags: Robots, Future

A brief overview of What To Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration

This book co-authored by Laura Major and Julie Shah explores the challenges with the introduction of new robotics at scale. As complex machines enter the everyday world, what challenges might come up from robotics moving out of factories? From how we move to how we get our goods delivered these robots will definitely revolutionize life, but how these robots behave and help us with tasks at hand without becoming a nuisance is key. In addition, society needs to be a little bit more root compatible. Questions like, how would robots need to be designed so that they can act as new entities in society and how do we adapt the world to better support these robots all need to be considered before moving on to a full-on human and robot society.

About human-robot collaboration

The robots we know today face many limitations and are only good at what they were made to be good at. Take Roombas, an independent vacuum robot that can clean and map various floor plans for houses, for example. They are limited by simple commands (for instance, clean and send home). As a result, they don’t understand much about us and we don’t understand much about them; thus, we can only expect little. This is often mistakenly perceived as human-robot collaboration, but human-robot collaboration is something a little more interesting and revolutionary.

A new type of robot is coming, and it’s technically already here. Slowly inching its way into society, this new type of robot (aka working robots) may already/will be responsible for delivering packages to you or doing your shopping. Their specialty? The ability to replicate human behavior. And this is what makes these robots can no longer mere tools.

Here’s an excerpt that gives a good insight into the possible future of daily life in a world bustling with robots…

IT IS TUESDAY MORNING. YOU STEP OUT OF YOUR HOUSE AND WALK toward your car, which is parked on the street. Meanwhile, a delivery robot is zipping down the sidewalk, attempting to deliver packages in time for the single-day shipping deadline. It detects you as a nearby obstacle and stops for safety, but not in time. You snag your foot on it and lurch forward, catching your fall. It’s already a bad way to start a day. As you drive to work, you pause for a pedestrian to cross the street, and just as you proceed you spot a small assistant robot, probably carrying the person’s laptop and lunch, trailing behind. It’s low to the ground, like a puppy — and you almost didn’t see it. You slam on the brakes, narrowly avoiding the robot with its cargo of laptop and sandwich, but the car behind you gently rear-ends you. After you thankfully confirm there was little damage to either of your bumpers, you get back on the road, but you feel the frustration grow when you realize you are now behind an autonomous vehicle doing a test run through a new neighborhood… It is only 9:00 a.m., and four different robots have already made your life more difficult, simply because they have not been designed to understand or care about you. You can’t help but wonder who these robots are really helping. — What To Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration

Robots in the future will definitely be working with us, yet almost all of us think about how to get robots to fit in society, rather than to figure out how the world can accommodate these new robots. Something important to note is that to get from robots working for us → robots working with us, many social norms have to be changed. It takes change on the societal level to allow these machines to operate with maximum efficiency in harmony with humans; very similar to the magnitude of the much-needed climate change action we have yet to take.

Who is Laura Major and Julie Shah?

Both Laura Major and Julie Shah are what you can call robot engineer experts, as they have extensive experience working with artificial intelligence and robotics in various fields (for instance, aerospace and self-driving cars). They are also co-authors of the book: What To Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration.

Laura Major is currently the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Motional, a previous Hyundai-Aptiv Autonomous Driving Joint Venture. Before, she was the CTO at Aria Insights, where she led the research, product design, development, and managing of a multi-disciplinary engineering team. Even prior to joining Aria Insights, she worked at Draper Laboratory and CyPhy works. She has been recognized as a national Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leader.

Julie Shah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She leads the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Shah has presented with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award and appeared on the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 list. Her work on industrial human-robot collaboration was also in MIT Technology Review’s 2013 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Key Takeaways

As robots continue to enter everyday life, we must consider the changes that they will create, as well as the modifications we have to collectively make to accommodate these robots

Human-robot collaboration is when robots are seen and act as “partners” rather than just “tools”

How working robots behave and help us with tasks at hand without becoming a nuisance will either make or break our relationship with robot technologies

To get from robots working for us to robots working with us, big changes have to be made

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