Our April speaker evening was very interesting. Titled "The rise of personal robotics", it gave us some insights into efforts to create a personal robot that are happening around the world. According to Jonathan Claassens, our speaker, the time when each of us will have a robot to attend to our every need is still many years away. It seems like teaching a robot (or any artificial intelligence, for that matter) to do one thing, is easy. But teaching it to behave like a human is hard. It's like taking a baby and trying to teach it in a short time everything it needs to know in order to be an adult. Jonathan's words: "We will have automated cars before we have personal robots."
Jonathan Claassens is a roboticist who runs an automation and design company based in Centurion. He is also completing his PhD with Imperial College London on the topic of enabling a personal robot to cooperate with a user in completing a task.
Thank you Jonathan for a very insightful evening.
