Artificial Intelligence (AI) is probably the most exciting and controversial field of robotics. People agree that robots can work in a factory but can robots be intelligent?

AI is a term that is difficult to define. Ultimately AI would be a recreation of the human thought process - a machine that has human intellectual abilities. This would include the ability to learn just about anything, the ability to reason, the ability to use language and the ability to formulate original ideas.

Roboticists are nowhere near achieving this level of artificial intelligence, but they have made a lot of progress with more limited AI. Today's AI machines can replicate some specific elements of intellectual ability.

The real challenge of AI is to understand how natural intelligence works. Developing AI isn't like building an artificial heart - scientists don't have a simple, concrete model to work from.

Because of this, AI research is largely theoretical. Scientists hypothesize on how and why we learn and think, and they experiment with their ideas using robots.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is an interplay of three big ideas: rule-based systems, neurobiology, and massively parallel search.

Rule-based systems take the intuitively obvious approach to AI: if you want a system to perform a task, give it a set of rules to follow. The rules are often simple: if X is true, then do Y. 

Such structures have proved quite effective at solving certain kinds of problems, such as simple games, classification based on pre-defined features, manipulating formal logic, or ensuring that the patterns in an IC design are compatible with the process technology.

But these are all problems about which humans think at a conscious level. If asked, we can show our work. There are many tasks, including perception, judgement, awareness, or intuition, for which we are unaware of our thinking processes.

Try to imagine a set of rules that could determine in any context that a group of pixels represented your mother’s face. Intuitively it seems there must be one. Yet the first wave of AI came up against such problems and simply ran out of ideas, and out of computing power.

Engineers are working together with neurobiologists to solve this problem. The future will determine whether human made machines will have something we are calling intelligence.