Combining multiple scientific education topics could help unlock the next generation of robotics, according to a new report from Imperial College London.
Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the report suggests combining materials science, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry into a unified teaching discipline. Students qualifying with this intersection of skills could be the driving force behind what the researchers term ‘Physical AI’, where the software and hardware of the future dovetail in the form of intelligent, life-like robotics.
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“The development of robot ‘bodies’ has significantly lagged behind the development of robot ‘brains’,” said co-lead author Professor Mirko Kovac from Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics and Switzerland’s Materials and Technology Centre of Robotics.
“Unlike digital AI, which has been intensively explored in the last few decades, breathing physical intelligence into them has remained comparatively unexplored.”
According to the Imperial team, the reason for this gap is that education has yet to come up with a coherent system for combining the topics required to make Physical AI a reality. Equipping tomorrow’s scientists and engineers with a broader range of complementary skills would help address that gap and could lead to the development of lifelike robots with biomimetic capabilities, such as adaptable body control, autonomy and real-time sensing.
“The notion of AI is often confined to computers, smartphones and data-intensive computation,” Kovac continued.
“We are proposing to think of AI in a broader sense and co-develop physical morphologies, learning systems, embedded sensors, fluid logic and integrated actuation. This Physical AI is the new frontier in robotics research and will have major impact in the decades to come, and co-evolving students’ skills in an integrative and multidisciplinary way could unlock some key ideas for students and researchers alike.”
According to the researchers, achieving biomimetic functionality in robots will not only require combining conventional robotics with AI and other disciplines, but also deeper interdisciplinary collaboration across a wide range of sectors.
“We envision Physical AI robots being evolved and grown in the lab by using a variety of unconventional materials and research methods,” said Kovac. “Researchers will need a much broader stock of skills for building lifelike robots. Cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships will be very important.”
The report from Imperial College London has done well to recognise that we must consider how we build the robotics that house digital intelligence, and not just focus on their artificial brains. However, in order to develop engineers with such a niche and intricate craft, more must be done to address the engineering skills gap.
A report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) found that 73 per cent of employers who had experienced the skills gap had problems with candidates who had the academic knowledge, but not the necessary workplace skills.
This highlights the absolute need for engineering education to incorporate more apprenticeships, which allow young engineers to get to grips with a bespoke skillset from the start. For example, one apprentice at EMS began his training by scanning in drawings, and is now a design engineer working on his own projects. To work on robotic “bodies”, future engineers need to get working with materials, components and technologies — not just learn about them in a classroom.