In the future, robots will perform surgery, shop for you, and even recycle themselves

Daniela Rus is a robot evangelist. She challenged a packed audience in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex on Tuesday to imagine a world where robots free us to be more creative by taking care of all our physical tasks--from playing with our pets to performing surgery without an incision. As director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rus delivered the inaugural lecture in Northeastern's Distinguished Speaker Series in Robots. "Imagine a world where you're being driven home by your autonomous car," said Rus. "Your car is connected to your refrigerator, which tells it what ingredients you need for dinner. The car is also connected to the grocery store, which is run by robots that fill your bags so they are ready when you drive up. Then you bring the food home to the robot cook and you happily let your children help in the kitchen even though they make a mess, because the mess will be taken care of by the cleaning robot."