Elisa Donati, when will AI robots become part of our everyday lives

If intelligence isn't merely a property of software but something that emerges from the interplay of body, brain and environment, then evaluating robots purely on speed or precision is no longer sufficient.

Everyday life is messy and full of unpredictable situations. To offer real assistance in this kind of environment, AI robots need a certain degree of flexibility when responding to change - for example, when they encounter obstacles, different types of surfaces or unfamiliar tasks.

This is why we also need to measure how quickly robots adapt to new situations, how robust they are under real-world conditions and how efficiently they use energy. How they interact with their environment is equally important: Do they cause any damage? Can they work safely with humans?

What we need, then, is adaptability over perfection. The future doesn't necessarily belong to the cleverest systems, but rather to the most flexible ones. However, a robot's capacity for flexible responses is only as great as its onboard computing power. There is no room for a supercomputer inside of a multi-purpose everyday robot.

My suggestion for making robots suitable for everyday use is to combine small, specialised control networks with an intelligent body, as published in a recent external page study. When looking at the natural world, we see that there aren't any central systems governing every movement and reaction. Reflexes and motor sequences often arise from local neural circuits that handle specific tasks with remarkable efficiency.

Some aspects of intelligence emerge directly from the interplay between body and environment. This holds enormous potential for robotics. AI-powered robots aren't yet perfect all-rounders, and perhaps they don't need to be. Far more important is how well they cope with our messy world and how we can learn to live alongside them.