A service robot is a robot that performs useful work for people and equipment, excluding industrial automation tasks.
Service robotics is divided into two types – for personal applications (robot vacuum cleaners, entertainment robots, robot assistants) and for professional, i.e. for providing various services (field, underwater robotics, medicine, monitoring and operation, construction and demolition, logistics systems, mobile platforms, military robots, underwater systems, power exoskeletons and so on).
The application cases of service robots are very diverse. For example, the American company SIMBE ROBOTICS has developed a mobile robot for auditing product shelves in retail stores. The robot moves between the shelves and scans their contents, determining, among other things, whether goods are running out and whether they are displayed at all. It is safe for employees and store visitors, so it can perform audits at any time, and it saves data on all merchandise to the cloud. And another robot from the company Fellow Robots is an ideal sales consultant who accompanies customers in the store and can recommend them a product in 25 languages.
Locus Robotics celebrated an anniversary in early 2020 as its autonomous mobile robots moved 100 million packages. Locus Robotics works with major transportation companies, including DHL, GEODIS, and Port Logistics. Bossa Nova Robotics plans to provide robots for product inventory at 1,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. In the U.S., robots are also being developed to help at the gas station. And in Japan, robotic bartenders and chefs have long been in use.
A modern robot can walk “upside down” on the ceiling or work in deep water, so there’s not much need for it to resemble a human. However, work on androids and gynoids (robots in female form) has captured the minds of many inventors in recent decades. Almost all developed countries have presented their androids with a variety of functions and an interface that resembles the human body as much as possible.
In 2010, China held the Olympic Games for humanoid robots, where androids competed in different sports disciplines. Autonomous robots, semi-autonomous systems and remotely controlled devices were allowed to participate, and each class competed only against its own kind. Ginoid Sophia was the first robot to receive official Saudi Arabian citizenship.
How robots will evolve
It’s hard to imagine what robots won’t be able to do in the coming decades. Robotic muscles have already been created that are 1,000 times stronger than human muscles and can lift weights 50 times their own weight. Further development of robots will be associated with the discovery of new materials and properties, as well as advances in computer technology.
Manipulator software will eventually increase the capabilities of technology and sensors. For example, a robotic arm gripping a load will be able to tell the operator its exact weight or size, and new computer technology will be able to provide more complex trajectories. The efficiency of neural networks will be improved by making their architecture more complex and reducing power consumption. The mass introduction of cloud services for machine learning will continue, which will expand the motor actions of robots.