Modern robotics works with externalize intelligence

Until the year 2020 it was hard or even impossible to build and program robots. There were endless amount of challenges available but no algorithm or theory was found. Since around 2020 most of the problems are solved and the underlying technology should be explained briefly.

In contrast to the assumption of the past, the AI technology isn't based on software libraries, algorithm or neural networks. Its has nothing to do with expert systems, reinforcement learning, deep learning or the Tensorflow library. What is used to control robotics instead is a less popular approach called externalize intelligence.

The concept has much in common with a teleoperated robot but its working with natural language. The idea is to externalize the complex AI knowledgebase from the robot to a human operator. If the important routines doesn't belong anymore to the robot itself, there is no need to program them in software. For doing so a communication interface is needed between the robot and the human operator.

Let me give an example. Suppose the idea is to program a warehouse robot. There is a human operator how gives the voice commands which are high level goals like "move to room A", "pick up the green box". These commands are submitted to the robot. That means, the robot itself doesn't know why it should move to room A but the robot executes the command from the human. This allows to reduce the complexity of the robot to minimum. The robot isn't able to navigate in the warehouse by itself, but the robot gets a stream of voice commands from the human and executes them.

Of course, such a voice based teleoperation needs to be programmed in a software with a programming language like C/C++. The details fo the implementation are minor problems which can be solved by programmers. Its a normal software engineering project, like programming a spreadsheet application. The programmer gets the specification for the natural language interface and writes the code.

The proposed principle around externalize intelligence was known in computer science before the year 2020. Projects like SHDRLU, teleoperated robots and NPC quests in RPG games were available and they have been documented. What was missing was the understanding, that these techniques are very powerful and can be utilized to program robots.