The robot revolution has a distance to go, if the attendees at a NEXT25 panel on robotics were anything to go by. Only ⅓ of the audience have really interacted with a robot before – but they were interested enough to come to the panel, and meet one in person. And that suggested that perhaps the future of robotics was already here…

Certainly, their eyes were quickly opened to the diversity of potential in the robotics world. Each of the panelists had a very different vision of robotics.

Johannes Hinckeldeyn, director of Advanced Core Technologies at KION Group, noted that, as a well-known mechanical engineering company, both automation and robotics are of interest and importance to them.

“We want to streamline supply chains,” he says. “We want to break new ground, and to achieve that, we are looking for partners.”

This video gives us some idea of what they are doing, in the world of physical AI and its merger with robotics:

“We are trying to bring efficiency, AI and robots to all layers of the warehouse,” says Hinckeldeyn, “both for efficiency, and to make it safer for the human workers.”

Robots get more manipulative

However, the robotics work of Sven Parusel, senior vice president, Franka Robotics, is muscling into human territory…

“Our aim is to make robot manipulators that can do everything humans can do — and that involves bringing a sense of touch to them,” he says. “We’re also focused on being a very open system; a platform for researchers, and entrepreneurs. This puts us at the forefront of embodied AI.”

Indeed, he already sees companies using their technology as a platform to develop their own embodied AIs. For example, one of their customers is using their robot arms as a massage system.

“This is a very intimate interaction, and one where you have to trust your robot,” says Parusel. “Of course, there’s a lot of AI involved.”

Humanising the robot

But the closer you bring robots to humans, the more complex things become. As Jérôme Monceaux, CEO of Enchanted Tools, puts it: “We have to deal with unpredictable things: humans. And we’re not talking about engineers, or people with PhDs in robotics, but nurses, who know nothing about this technology.”

Why nurses? Because their robots are being used in care homes, and other medical environments, to support and supplement the human caring team.

He has his robot, Miroka, demonstrate how it can respond naturally, and verbally, to spoken commands. It describes the environment it sees around it well, including the people watching their phones. He also demonstrates moving it around, both by issuing commands, and by taking its hand and leading it. These are very natural environments, and interacting with the robot directly is more meaningful to many than using their phone, he suggests.

Barrier to adoption

Panel host Maria Danninger, Next Gen Robotics GTM Lead, Accenture, asks what the barriers are to adoption.

Two major barriers experienced by the panel are cost and safety. “Nobody wants to pay for logistics. It’s all about costs, efficiencies — but it also has to be safe,” says Hinckeldeyn. “The safe robots which we currently have are automated trucks, automated forklifts. They are inflexible, if safe. They are engineered for a single purpose. A lot of effort goes into customising them.

“Having a more generalised robot which can adapt to working with humans, to adapting to different challenges, will help. Robots need to be as flexible as humans — but we have to do it in a way that it is so safe that nobody gets hurt.”

But new barriers are emerging all the time. “The new environments we’re exploring create new barriers,” says Parusel. “Usability of systems is one — we’re creating robots somewhere between automated robots and human robots. We still have some way to go.“

However, he sees AI eroding the cost barrier fast. “The advances with embodied AI will make them more capable, which will increase volume and decrease price, almost automatically,” he says. “I don’t think humanoid will be the one and only shape for robots, though.”

But safety remains a big issue to address. When you have a 50kg robot climbing stairs around your kids, that is an understandable concern. Can we accept a robot failing 20% of the time if it’s carrying boiling water?

Making robots more usable

Parusel suggests that we need a variety of interfaces to suit different situations.

“Natural language processing might not work in every environment — a factory, or underwater, for example,” he says. “We might introduce modalities that are not human-like, to suit different environments.“

Currently, their customers want training on their products, but they’re aiming to make them intuitive so that people don’t need that training.

Monceaux certainly sees that human ways of interacting are part of this future.

“We’ll soon have more retired people in Europe than active ones,” he says. “We are already doing deployment in nursing homes, especially in the US, to help with that. We’re also in hospitals with kids, helping comfort and guide them.”

He envisions home care robots in private residential settings within the next five years. And that’s the concluding message of the panel: things are moving fast, and certainly more swiftly than most people are aware. AI is speeding up the adoption curve of robots by making them more intuitive and natural to use.

AI accelerating robotics

Right now, only 1% of forklifts globally are automated. That could well hit 10% in five years. Automated cookery is looking feasible — and could the final path to autonomous vehicles be robot drivers, rather than a whole new vision of the car? General-purpose AIs put all of this on the table.

But it also raises the spectre of robot soldiers, and the panel suggested this was an area of intense interest and research in both the US and China. That’s the sort of development we need to start having conversations about as a society, right now.