Sometimes, Teleoperation is introduced as bridge technology for creating Artificial Intelligence. The idea is, that Teleoperation is much easier to realize than a fully autonomous system. Most engineers who have implemented Teleoperation are trying to increase the automation level further, because they want to remove the human operator from the loop. But is this vision realistic? After removing the human operator from the loop, the robot will loose it's human level AI capabilities. It's no longer possible to talk to the robot with natural language. For filling the gap of the human an advanced sort of artificial Intelligence has to be realized.
It's a well known fact, that a human level AI is not available. And it won't be available in the next 50 years. After removing the human operator the robot will have a much smaller cognitive capabilities. The naive assumption is, that a state-of-the-art AI can control the robot by it's own, and that the task doesn't require the full human level skills. But this kind of assumption is wrong.
The reason why software controlled robots are not used in reality is because all the tasks are asking for human level skills. It's not possible to control airplanes, cars, ships, drones or grasping robot with sub-human-level AI. Let us ask the engineers in which timespan human level AI in software becomes realistic. The answer is, that they don't know. What was demonstrated in robotics challenges is only a narrow AI. That is a software which drives a robot on a line, or which can do simple image recognition tasks. The engineers have no idea how to program a human level AI. That means, they are not able to provide such software. And because of this reason, it's not possible to remove a human operator from the loop. Teleoperation is the only working robot which is available.
From a fantasy point of view, it's possible that one day, human level AI is available. That is a piece of software which can do everything what a human has to offer. It includes understanding of natural language, detecting all sorts of objects, learn new things and provides empathy. In some science fiction movies, Human level AI systems were shown, for example Data from Star Trek TNG. But right now no such thing is available in reality. Therefore AI can't be realized.
What makes teleoperation so amazing is, that without complicated software, human level AI is provided as default. All what the human operator needs is a joystick and monitor and the robot is able to do everything what the human can do. It's not a real AI, because there is a human in the loop. But the robot is on the same level like a human. He can be used for practical applications.
Practical example
I'm not the first one who is arguing pro Teleoperated robots. The company “Phantom Auto” has developed a teleoperated self-driving car. The basic idea is, that a car needs at minimum human level AI, which means, that without a human driver a car is not allowed to drive in real traffic.
The interesting fact is, that self-driving car engineers in the past have argued a different way. The assumption was, that the robot car can be controlled with software and they have demonstrated it in synthetic driving challenges. Either for RC Cars which were controlled by Python script or with real cars. The problem is, that a software controlled car provides only sub-human level skills. It is able to do some tasks like path planning and automatic steering but it won't understand a simple sentence like “hello robot, what's up?”.
The main reason why robots are not available is because human level AI is the minimum for practical application. And what the company Phantom Auto is doing is to provide such feature. A teleoperated car is working on a human level. It will understand the mentioned sentence and will respond to it. This make it a good choice for practical applications.
The interesting point is, that a teleoperated car provides a lot of technology except Artificial Intelligence. The onboard computer provides only a connection to a remote location, but the computer is not able to control the car by it's own.
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