Over the course of the past year Open Robotics has taken time from our day-to-day efforts to work with our colleagues in the field to consider how the technology we develop could negatively impact society as a whole. In particular we were concerned with the weaponization of mobile robots. After a lot of thoughtful discussion, deliberation, and debate with our colleagues at organizations like Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Agility Robotics, AnyBotics, and Unitree, we have co-authored and signed an open letter to the robotics community entitled, "General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized." You can read the letter, in its entirety, here. Additional media coverage of the letter can be found in Axios, and The Robot Report.

A spin out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, startup Apptronik has some serious R&D behind it. Two of the company co-founders were part of NASA's Johnson Space Center Valkyrie team, working on the actuators and controls of the humanoid robot, as well as participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge to build a versatile "hero robot" that could do all the things needed in a disaster relief scenario. These projects became advanced R&D work to eventually commercialize a more versatile robot that fills the need of working in an environment of unstructured tasks. And, despite the look of the robots the company has in its portfolio--like Astra, an upper body humanoid robot designed to operate with and around humans on a mobile platform, and Draco, a biped designed for agile dynamic walking--the company says it's solving a huge problem in manufacturing. "In manufacturing there are structured and highly repeatable tasks. Where we see this going is robots [designed] for the unstructured world," said Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik co-founder and CEO.

The AI field is plagued by irrational optimism and irrational despair. In 1973, Sir James Lighthill was asked to compile a report on the then-present state of artificial intelligence. His report criticized the hype surrounding artificial intelligence research, suggesting that AI's best algorithms would always fail at solving real world problems and could really only work for solving "baby" problems. His report followed almost twenty-five years of fervent research into human-like algorithms. The AI "summer" between the 1950s and 1970s saw DARPA investing millions into undirected research that touched on natural language processing.