Service robots for citizens of the future

This paper summarizes the author’s presentation at the 26th Annual Conference of the Academia Europaea, Barcelona, July 2014.Erasmus Lecture 2014Robots are no longer confined to factories; they are progressively spreading to urban, social and assistive domains. In order to become handy co-workers and helpful assistants, they must be endowed with quite different abilities from their industrial ancestors. Research on service robots aims to make them intrinsically safe to people, easy to teach by non-experts, able to manipulate not only rigid but also deformable objects, and highly adaptable to non-predefined and dynamic environments. Robots worldwide will share object and environmental models, their acquired knowledge and experiences through global databases and, together with the internet of things, will strongly change the citizens' way of life in so-called smart cities. This raises a number of social and ethical issues that are now being debated not only within the Robotics community but by society at large.The described research has been partially supported by the European projects PACO-PLUS (IST-FP6-IP-027657), GARNICS (FP7-ICT-247947) and IntellAct (FP7-ICT-269959), and the Spanish project PAU + (DPI2011-27510).Peer Reviewe