ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ROBOTICS

About AI and robotics (Introduction) >

AI has been one of the most controversial domains of inquiry in

computer science since it was first proposed in the 1950s.
Defined as the part of computer science concerned with designing
systems that exhibit the characteristics associated with human
intelligence, the field has attracted researchers because of its
ambitious goals and enormous underlying intellectual challenges
(National Research Council [NRC], 1999). The ultimate aim is to
make computer programmes that are capable of solving problems
and achieving goals in the world as well as humans – the pursuit
of so called ‘strong AI’. This goal has caught the attention of the
media, but by no means do all AI researchers view strong AI as
worth investigating – excessive optimism in the 1950s and 1960s
concerning strong AI has given way to an appreciation of the
extreme difficulty of the problem.
To date, progress in this direction has been meagre. Because 50
years of failure
eventually starts to affect funding, the AI field has diversified and
experts have
established themselves in other areas where they can be said to
have had some success.
These new areas are less concerned with the business of making
computers think,
focusing instead on what can be referred to as ‘weak AI’ – the
development of practical technology for modelling aspects of
human behaviour. In this way, AI research has produced an
extensive body of principles, representations, and algorithms.
Today, successful AI applications range from custom-built expert
systems to massproduced software and consumer electronics.
Robotics, on the other hand, may be thought of as ‘the science of
extending human motor capabilities with machines’. However, a
closer look at this definition creates a more complicated picture.
For example, a cruise missile, although not intuitively referred to
as a robot, nevertheless incorporates many of the navigation and
control techniques explored in the context of mobile-robotics
research.

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Furthermore, robots are not necessarily dependent on hardware

for their operation. It is possible, for instance, to conceive of
intelligent entities that operate purely within information systems
– the so-called ‘softbots’ or ‘software agents’ – as robots. It is
noteworthy, however, that such distinctions between ‘hard’ and
‘soft’ are bound to fade in importance in the future as physical
agents enter into electronic communication with each other and
with online information sources, and as informational agents
exploit perceptual and motor mechanisms. It is difficult, then, to
state categorically exactly what constitutes a robot. This report,
however, considers robotics research as the attempt to instill
intelligent software with some degree of motor capability. Since
many of the major areas of AI research play an essential role in
work on robots, robotics will be considered here as a sub-section
of AI.