Bruno Siciliano: generative AI and robotics - Scuola di Robotica
In March 2024, Open AI, the Artificial Intelligence research company that produced, among others, ChatGPT, released a video showing a humanoid robot following the requests of a human operator, handing him an apple, arranging dishes and glasses and carefully putting them back in the washing machine basket. It speaks. It chooses objects and handles them carefully. All this, says the manufacturer, without any external control: a robot with ChatGPT functions built in.
Open AI in robotics. A step that opens up important perspectives
Prof. Bruno Siciliano comments here on what he calls a change of perspective for robotics. Bruno Siciliano is an Italian engineer, academic and populariser of science. He is a full professor of robotics at the University of Naples Federico II and President of the Scientific Commitee of the ICAROS Centre, the Interdepartmental Centre for Robotic Surgery, which aims to create synergies between clinical and surgical practice and research into new technologies for computer/robot-assisted surgery.
The relationship between robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) began several decades ago, is complex and has gone through various phases. Recently, there was an experiment that changed the relationship between these two disciplines. Figure 01, the humanoid robot resulting from the collaboration between the Californian start-up Figure AI and Open AI, showed that it is able to understand sentences spoken by a human and perform the required tasks.
The robot implements ChatGPT and is equipped with cameras to analyse the context. It can interpret voice commands, speak and move objects. This kind of integration is actually not new. The company Boston Dynamics, famous for the acrobatic performance of its robots, even earlier integrated AI, a text and video recogniser, on Spot, a quadruped robot that responds and performs actions requested by the operator.
A physical generative Artificial Intelligence?
With the start of these closer collaborations between AI and robotics companies, a vision of robots endowed with significant interpretative capabilities, and thus able to operate more easily in human environments, even in non-specialised ones, could be established.
euROBIN, a new European network of excellence bringing together the main centres for AI and robotics research in Europe, comes at a crucial time in the development of robotics in Europe due to the spread of interaction technologies (IAT), which are fostering the transition from digital to physical twin, thus integrating artificial intelligence into robotic systems.
Along these lines, at a meeting of a few months ago in Brussels, we proposed a kind of challenge: to try to develop a physical generative AI: Action GPT, an intelligent interaction technology.
An Internet of Skills
With 5G or 6G in perspective, robots will be able to be dynamically controlled in real time and connected with people and machines both locally and globally. One can see, then, how the Internet of Things (IoT) will be overtaken by the Internet of Skills (IoS) a haptic Internet to enable a remote physical experience through haptic devices that match the skills, the abilities of, for instance, the drone operator or the surgeon dealing with an operation performed through a remote robotic system. What we describe belongs to a future dimension towards which research is heading.
How much to trust machines?
As humans, we tend to trust people and entities that are accredited. But how do we determine the credibility of a physical generative AI system? It could be the case that generative AI would intimidate the user by being able to know his profile and play on weaknesses or emotions.
