Roboticists Predict The Future Of Robots

Futurists make predictions about robots all the time, from one day having the intelligence of a human to becoming its own species.

So News 9 talked with roboticists here in Oklahoma and in California to find out where they believe the future of robots is headed.

"If you talk to different roboticists, everybody has a different philosophy and opinion of robots," said Dennis Hong a robotics expert and professor of engineering at UCLA. "Robots for me are simply tools, these are machines, but intelligent machines that can do things for us."

News 9 visited Hong at UCLA, where he has created seven species of robots.

"Only a few exist in the world," he said. "We're not controlling, everything is fully autonomous, using a form of artificial intelligence so to speak."

Hong and his team built Thor, the 5-foot-tall, 119-pound humanoid robot, to compete in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge.

This year, THOR-RD competed against other robots developed by 23 other teams from around the world.

Guided by sophisticated computer software, the team carried out complex, dangerous tasks, like disabling a nuclear power plant during a radiation-spewing meltdown, without putting human lives at risk.

This is where Hong sees the future of robots heading.

Click here to read more about THOR-RD. 

"I think in the short-term, immediate applications, we'll see robots used in areas where cost is not an issue, in other words, when human lives are at stake, for example medical robots, military robots or disaster relief robots," Hong said. "I have a dream, later when I become a grandpa and I'm watching TV with my grandson or granddaughter and the TV, maybe it's a holographic TV at the time, there's a burning building, and robots go in and rescue people."

But Hong believes a robot being able to actually "think" like a human won't happen any time soon.

"Robots being self-aware, that's more of a philosophical question," Hong said. "I personally believe that's one of the last things that we'll be able to solve in the many important things in robotics."

Carl Latino, engineering associate professor at Oklahoma State University, thinks robots being able to "think" like a human is a bit far-fetched.

"The way our brain works, many things happen at the same time," he said. "This is the kind of thing that would take an enormous amount of time for even the fastest computers."

So the idea of robots taking over the human race one day?

"Not in my lifetime, it may someday, but practically speaking I don't think so," Latino said. "The human being has the one/off switch."

Meanwhile, Hong's THOR-RD didn't win in the DARPA Challenge.

"You can't always win, but you can always learn," he said. "Everyone who studies and learns from their mistakes goes on to improve, and that is what we are going to do."