On the grand challenges in robotics

摘要: In this paper, the most interesting achievements in robotics which can be considered grand challenges in the field are briefly presented. Moraff summarizes the main properties of a grand challenge in robotics:“broad scope or large scale, requires many teams and many efforts. high risk, high potential impact and capture the imagination”[1]. A grand challenge may be the socially assistive robotics for helping people with disabilities, the robots for health care, or for care of the elderly and children with cognitive disabilities, the driverless vehicle for the highway, the tele-service robots, the intelligent transportation robots, micro or nanorobots for medical and surgical scopes, the application of smart materials in actuating, etc. The paper focuses on the researches conducted by the authors on different challenges in robotics to potentially be achieved in the next years. The chosen topics are related to socially assistive robotics [2-10], the problem of increasing flow of the companies by modular and reconfigurable robotic systems [11-15], and respectively, the problem of recognizing the shape of a 3D object using tactile sensing by a dexterous robot hand [16-20].