Human nature is complicated! Robot technology faces these top ten challenges in the next 10 years

1. New materials and manufacturing solutions
Robotics experts are no longer limited to the traditional methods of making robots with motors, gears, and sensors, trying to integrate multiple functions into one material using techniques such as artificial muscles, soft robotics, and new manufacturing methods.

But most of these advanced manufacturing methods are still in their infancy, so integrating them is difficult to achieve. Versatile materials such as induction, movement, energy harvesting or energy storage make robot design more efficient. But combining these different attributes on a single machine requires a new approach, and the new approach must mix microscale manufacturing techniques with large-scale manufacturing techniques.

Another promising research direction is materials that can adapt to the environment or self-healing over time, but this requires more research.

2, bionic robot and biological hybrid robot
Nature has solved many of the problems that robotics experts are trying to solve, so many people turn to biology for inspiration and even work hard to integrate life systems into their robots.

However, there is still a huge bottleneck in replicating the mechanical properties of muscles and the ability of biological systems to provide their own energy. The development of artificial muscles has made great progress, but the robustness, efficiency, vitality and energy density of this muscle need to be improved.

Embedding living cells into robots can overcome the challenges of powering small robots, as well as embedding biological features such as self-healing and embedded sensing into robots, but how to integrate these parts remains a major challenge. While more and more “robot animals” are helping people unlock the secrets of nature, we need to do more to study how animals can switch between flying and swimming to build a multi-channel platform.

3. Energy and energy
Energy storage is a major bottleneck in mobile robotics. The growing demand for drones, electric vehicles and renewable energy has driven advances in battery technology, but the fundamental challenges have remained largely unchanged over the years. This means that while the battery is being developed, efforts must be made to minimize the power requirements of the robots and allow them to use new energy sources. Getting them to extract energy from the environment and transmit energy over the air is two promising research directions worth studying.

4, robot cluster processing tasks
Clusters of simple robots assembled into different structures to handle different tasks may be a cheaper, more flexible solution to replace large robots that perform specific tasks. Smaller, cheaper, and more powerful hardware allows simple robots to perceive the surrounding environment and combine it with artificial intelligence to simulate behaviors that can be seen in natural birds.

However, the most effective way to control the robot populations of different scales requires more work—small groups can be controlled centrally, but large groups need to be dispersed into small groups for control. These robots also need to be built to be more rugged, adapt to real-world changing conditions, and resist intentional or accidental injuries. In addition, more research is needed on different robots with complementary functions.

5. Navigation and exploration
A key use of robots is to explore places that humans cannot reach, such as deep seas, space, or disaster zones. This means they need to be good at exploring and navigating environments that don't have maps and are often extremely chaotic and dangerous. The main challenges include creating systems that can adapt, learn, and recover from navigation failures, and identify new discoveries.

This requires a high degree of autonomy, allowing the robot to monitor and reset itself, while building a world of images with multiple data sources of varying reliability and accuracy.

6, the robot technology itself
Deep learning has revolutionized the ability of machine recognition patterns, but it needs to be combined with model-based reasoning to create adaptable robots that can learn during work. The key to this is the creation of artificial intelligence, which recognizes its limitations and learns how to learn new things.

It is also important to create systems that can learn quickly from limited data without having to learn from the millions of examples required for deep learning. Our further understanding of human intelligence will be the key to solving these problems.

7, brain machine interface
The brain-computer interface will be able to seamlessly control advanced robots, but it can also prove a faster, more natural way to communicate commands with the robot, or just to help them understand the human mental state.

Most current methods of measuring brain activity are expensive and cumbersome, so it will be important to work on simple, low-power, and wireless devices. Due to the inaccuracy of reading brain activities, they also tend to expand training, calibration, and adaptation. Moreover, whether they will outperform some simpler techniques, such as eye movements or reading muscle signals, remains to be seen.

8. Social interaction
If robots are to enter human life, they will need to learn to deal with humans. But this is not simple, because we have few specific human behavior models, and it is easy to underestimate the complexity of our innate human nature. Social robots need to be able to perceive subtle social cues, such as facial expressions or intonations, to understand the cultural and social environment in which they live, and to model the mental state of the people they interact with to adapt to human interaction, whether Whether in a short-term relationship or a long-term relationship.

9, medical robot
Medicine is one of the areas in which robots will have a major impact in the near future. Robotic devices that enhance surgeons' capabilities are already in use, but one of the major challenges is to increase the autonomy of these systems in such high-risk environments. Automated robotic assistants need to be able to recognize anatomy in a variety of scenarios and be able to use situational awareness and voice commands to understand the needs of different scenarios.

In surgery, automated robots can perform routine steps in the surgical procedure to allow surgeons to serve patients with more complex conditions. Micro-robots operating inside the human body are also expected to become popular in the future, but there are still many obstacles to using such robots, including effective transmission systems, tracking and control methods, and the key is to find treatments that can improve existing methods.

10. Robot Ethics and Safety
As the previous challenges are overcome, robots will gradually integrate into our lives, but this development will also create new ethical dilemmas. Most importantly, we may be overly dependent on the robot. This can lead to the loss of certain skills and abilities of human beings, so that we cannot control the situation in case of failure .

In the end, we may entrust the task of human supervision for moral reasons to the robot, so that in the event of failure, the responsibility will be shirked to the robot. It can also reduce people's right to self-determination because human behavior changes to accommodate the daily activities and constraints that robots and artificial intelligence need to work effectively.