"Robotics experts tell Congress the U.S. is in danger of losing the international robot race

It’s time to invest. Big time.

Artificial intelligence is already everywhere. Robots are performing surgeries, courts use AI to help determine sentencing and bots trade on the stock market all day.

Last week, 150 academics and industry experts published the U.S. Roadmap for Robotics — just ahead of the presidential election — to help guide Congress as it moves to figure out how to allocate federal funds to encourage innovation, keep humans safe and, importantly, make sure America remains a global leader.

The first Roadmap for Robotics report, published in 2009, inspired the Obama administration to launch the National Robotics Initiative in 2011, a program that allocated $70 million to advancing robotics research in the United States.

The 2016 report is a 100-page tome packed with specific, technical recommendations that the contributors believe will be important for Congress to fund and support as robotics starts to take center stage across U.S. industries.

Here are a few of the recommendations:

For robotics systems to expand in manufacturing industries, roboticists need to develop interfaces that can be used by human workers with little to no training.
Researchers should build robots that match human mobility to “negotiate stairs, elevators, doorways, curbs, broken concrete, cluttered environments and go where people go” in order to extend automation beyond warehouse settings.
Surgical robots should eventually be able to “estimate user’s intent, rather than simply executing the user’s commands that may be subject to human imperfections.”
In 15 years, the roadmap suggests that autonomous driving “will be indistinguishable from humans except that robot drivers will be safer and more predictable than a human driver with less than one year’s driving experience.”
Highlight Robotics in Education.