Start cowering under your afghans …

… the robots are coming. (Just to let you know, the title refers to an old Saturday Night Live short selling insurance to the elderly for protection from robots.)

The Conference on Artificial Intelligence is making the case for robotics as a major growth industry in the very near future.

From the link:

“Early on there was this dream that robots could be generally intelligent; that they would rival and surpass humans in their abilities to do things,” Leslie Kaelbling, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, said at the conference. “The current commercial reality is pretty different.”

A lot of AI research fragmented in directions away from robotics, creating algorithms that underpin business intelligence, finance, Web and other uses. AI got separated from robotics because the machines are a pain: physical and unreliable. However, “They are getting better,” Kaelbling said.

Today, robotics researchers have computers that are faster, machinery that is more reliable, and many of the algorithms used in routine robotic tasks have already been built, said Kaelbling, who asked this research community whether it was time to give robotics another try.