The sense-think-act paradigm revisited

Approximately 25 years have passed since the "sense-act-think" paradigm was advanced as the operational definition of a robot, and as a broad roadmap for robotics research. With the appearance of mobile robots that do real work in the real world, "communicate" has de facto been added to the list of functionalities that are essential features of robots. In keeping with the theme of the ROSE-2003 Workshop, this paper attempts to articulate and justify a set of intellectual and engineering challenges for 21 st century sensing and perception for robotics. It especially argues for examining the current and re-examining future roles for teleoperation, both as a practical route around the improbability that machine intelligence will equal human intelligence in the foreseeable future, and because it is apparent that sensor improvement is driven in large part by incremental advances in sensor-display design-and-test loops that are in turn driven by human factors governing perception.