Autonomous mobile robots: still a vision for the future

The world’s first electronic autonomous mobile robots, Elmer and Elsie, were created by Dr William Grey Walter in Bristol, UK in 1948. Seventy years on, electronics shows like CES 2018 are full of them, but our homes and workspaces are not.

Already, we’ve seen table tennis-playing robots, laundry-folding robots …and an incredibly creepy robot (we’re looking at you Sophia), yet the pattern of autonomous robotic performances remains the same: lots of nice demos; little that works well in messy real-world situations.

Robots can do very clever things within known spaces, but systems get ‘lost’ if they move too fast or conditions aren’t perfect. Expensive technology can quickly look pretty stupid.

Robotics in the real-world, it transpires, isn’t easy: “Edge cases are the largest barrier to widespread adoption of this technology in the marketplace; uncommon and unpredictable events that make solving any problem significantly harder,” said Jorgen Pedersen, CEO of US robotics firm Re² Robotics. “Ninety-nine per cent reliability isn’t high enough if you’re talking about a device potentially harming a person”.