Service robot needs to be more ingenious

From family services to education and entertainment, from medical surgery to elderly health care, from scientific investigation to rescue, intelligent service robots are going into all aspects of our lives. Yesterday, 2017 International Summit of Service Robot Industry was held, many domestic and foreign large specialists gathered together to explore the development of the robot industry. They said that robots from China need to further improve the "IQ" and "emotional intelligence”, learning to more ingenious.

At the summit, the specialists unveiled the development direction: light-weight, flexibility and intelligence. They pointed out, “Intelligent robots’ accurate movements and actions cannot meet the requirement of the society, and they need to be more ingenious. The flexible functions are Cloud fused actual intelligent services are required.”

At present, Chinese intelligent robot has potential markets and the demands are higher. "With the evolutions of the demographic structure and production mode, China's demand for robots continued to grow substantially in the future, and hundreds of thousands of non-skilled robots will go into our work and lives." Deputy Director of MIIT Luo Junjie said, because of the lack of artificial intelligence, the robots in the markets are not ingenious enough and need to further enhance. "More advanced voice recognition, visual recognition, emotional recognition and other functions are needed to enrich robot perception and movement, breaking the current cognitive limitations.”

Chen Xiaoping, the Dean of Research Center of University of Science and Technology of China, introduced that, with the dozen-year’s development, the accuracy of the robots’ “Machine + Control Technology” is developing very well and the thick and blunt images are changing with new material’s applications. “Light-weight + Flexibility” make robot application break the traditional industry manufacturing and be introduced into family, finance and health care areas.

Mr. Song Xiaogang, the Executive Director of the China Robot Industry Alliance, introduced that the robot, artificial intelligence, communication technology and mechanical control technology, given the robot voice, visual and touch, real-time response to the command, accurate reflection. This makes robot adapt to the rich areas of service and complex needs and is the focus of the future direction of development. "The global advanced AI robots have a big market with tens of billions of dollars, and robots, especially service robots, are becoming the new blue ocean of manufacturing," he said.

"In the future, we hope that robots can achieve 'emotional interaction' with humans." Peter Sincak, director of the Department of Control and Intelligent Sciences at the Kosice Institute of Technology in Slovakia, argues that robots need to improve "emotional intelligence", such as escort robots should gain the patient's mood and choose the appropriate topic to release them from the pressure; or the intelligent educational robots, should also be based on the students' movements, eyes or words, to timely adjust the lectures and activate students’ mood.

Let intelligent robot help with the education for kids

With the technology developing, new worries have been emerging continuously, and one of them is whether we should let robots teach our kids. As the capabilities of smart software and artificial intelligence advance, parents, teachers, teachers’ unions and the children themselves will all have stakes in the outcome.

The pioneer in intelligent educational robot so far is, not surprisingly, Singapore. The city-state has begun experiments with robotic aides at the kindergarten level, mostly as instructor aides and for reading stories and also teaching social interactions. In other countries like China and the UK, researchers are trying to apply robots help autistic children better learn how to interact with their peers.

A big debate today is how we can teach ourselves to work with artificial intelligence, so as to prevent eventual widespread technological unemployment. Exposing children to intelligent robots for education early, and having them grow accustomed to human-machine interaction, is one path toward this important goal. While, in a recent Financial Times interview, Sherry Turkle, a professor of social psychology at MIT, and a leading expert on cyber interactions, criticized robot education that the robot can never be in an authentic relationship.

Sanbot Elf is a highly artificial intelligent robot and one of its application industries is education. No matter preschool education at home for mother language or foreign language learning, autism therapy treatment, the programmable robots for education is equal to all of these. In addition, equipped with advanced hardware, the robot is capable of remote education, school or class check-in/check-out and more in education. Sanbot Elf has been performed class education and activities in the school in Netherlands, the UK and China.

Keep in mind that robot instructors are going to come through toys and the commercial market in any case, whether schools approve or not. Is it so terrible an idea for some of those innovations to be supervised by, and combined with, the efforts of teachers and the educational establishment?

One of the biggest concerns about robotics education in school, by the way, involves humans. Children sometimes trust robots too much. Teachers and administrators could use robots to gather confidential information about children and their families, as the children may think they are talking to a robot only, rather than creating a database for future scrutiny. This could be addressed by comprehensive privacy standards, probably a good idea in any case.

It is an inevitable trend that robots are going to various industries and application scenarios with the technology developing faster and better, and going mature. And robot for education is also inevitable and unavoidable. At the same time, the robot will be assisting human with education, not replacing their jobs. Why not open your heart and let the intelligent robot education your children?