Seth A. Hutchinson

Robotics researcher Seth Hutchinson describes the action at his group's Beckman Institute Open House exhibit this way: "We have the little mobile robot chasing a red ball and kids play soccer with it. It's great fun until a kid with a red shirt gets in the arena. Then all bets are off as to who the robot is going to chase."

That image could serve as a snapshot for the current state of robotics since difficulties like distinguishing a ball from a child aren't limited to Hutchinson's Open House performer. In fact, the scene illustrates a broader problem that has dogged the field since researchers began making predictions in the 1960s about the potential robots had to improve our lives.

Hutchinson, a full-time faculty member in Beckman's Artificial Intelligence group and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said that issues such as limited processing power and the challenge of mathematically accounting for every possible scenario a robot might face in navigating the world have proven far more difficult than any of the early robotics researchers expected.

"That's the reason you don't have robots out in the world doing interesting things, unless you consider vacuuming your floor while you're at work an interesting thing," he said.

If people get the impression that Hutchinson isn't all that excited about today's robots they would be correct, but it's a perspective grounded in nearly 20 years of doing high-level research in the field. He sits on the editorial boards of two robotics journals and is editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society journal. He has been at the Beckman Institute since 1990 focusing on robotics, an area that intrigues him because of the science underlying robots rather than the end products themselves.

"I never want to build a robot from scratch," he said. "I like to take them out of the box and use them."

And, Hutchinson says, most robotics researchers he knows would not ride shotgun on a robot-controlled road trip to Vegas: "I think most of us would not want to be in the passenger seat of a car driving in the desert, say for the extended trip to Vegas from L.A. A few of us would like to do that but I'm not on the list."

Hutchinson's comments about the general state of robots are reflective of a shift in attitude toward the mechanical critters over the past two decades. Except for that little vacuuming robot that stars in infomercials, robot development on a mass scale could be described as disappointing.

Some scientists and many science fiction writers going at least as far back as the 1940s had exciting visions of a future society bustling with multi-tasking robots. A seven-foot giant named Elektro captured the imagination of visitors to the 1939 New York World's Fair, while science fiction depictions from 1950s B films to TV shows like Lost in Space to more recent movies like the Star Wars series continued to paint robots as essential players in the future.

Academic papers on robotics were just as optimistic 40 to 50 years ago, drawing a fairly straight line from conceptualization to future machines that would approximate human beings in their cognitive capabilities and ability to perform tasks. While robotics have become an important component of modern industry, especially for repetitive tasks like those found on assembly lines, robots as an integral part of people's everyday lives have yet to materialize.

"Part of that is the fault of the robotics community that oversold expectations, starting in the 60s," Hutchinson said. "If you go back to the 1960s and read some Ph.D. dissertations from the major university Artificial Intelligence labs, you will find that they have titles like sensor-based robotics, or sensor-based manipulation of random parts using computer vision, and it sounds exactly like the end goal of what we are after."

Hutchinson said the early theories were too simple and the practical applications much more difficult than anyone realized.