Robots are going where no man has gone before. They rove around Mars and explore the ocean floor. They even dig under debris looking for survivors after a catastrophic event. Now, robots are beginning to do something that until this point has been unimaginable: interact with human beings.
Dubbed human-centric robotics, the stage of robot development now upon us will be life-changing, observers say. Robots will assist physicians in surgery, act as personal attendants to the elderly, and become an extension of human workers on the factory floor.
"If you take the paradigm from the medical room to the shop floor, it's the same," says Bruno Siciliano, professor of control and robotics at the University of Naples, Italy, and co-editor of the Springer Handbook of Robotics, published in May. "Robots can extend human dexterity. So it's not about replacing humans with a machine, but getting close to the machine to do something together."
This is very different from the traditional view of deployment that has kept robots isolated in separate work cells.