Next Generation Robotics
Henrik I Christensen, Allison Okamura, Maja Mataric, Vijay Kumar, Greg, Hager, and Howie Choset

TL;DR
This paper reviews the progress in robotics over the past five years, focusing on the National Robotics Initiative and future directions, emphasizing co-robots and community-driven roadmaps.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of recent robotics advancements, assesses the impact of NRI, and offers strategic recommendations for future research directions.
Findings
Robotics has made significant progress in the last five years.
Co-robots remain a central focus for human-robot collaboration.
Future opportunities include new research directions and policy considerations.
Abstract
The National Robotics Initiative (NRI) was launched 2011 and is about to celebrate its 5 year anniversary. In parallel with the NRI, the robotics community, with support from the Computing Community Consortium, engaged in a series of road mapping exercises. The first version of the roadmap appeared in September 2009; a second updated version appeared in 2013. While not directly aligned with the NRI, these road-mapping documents have provided both a useful charting of the robotics research space, as well as a metric by which to measure progress. This report sets forth a perspective of progress in robotics over the past five years, and provides a set of recommendations for the future. The NRI has in its formulation a strong emphasis on co-robot, i.e., robots that work directly with people. An obvious question is if this should continue to be the focus going forward? To try to assess what…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Robotics and Automated Systems
