This is a guest post by Open Source Robotics Foundation CEO Brian Gerkey. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System" was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan.

At about $85 per kit, the Arduino units are composed of a breadboard, resistors, switches, buzzers and LED lights that allow students to create a variety of projects powered by computer coding. Those projects include things like the "Love-O-Meter," – a system that lights up based on temperature - or one modeled after the Magic 8 Ball – a system that provides simple phrases randomly displayed.

Although the laws are fictional, they have become extremely influential among roboticists trying to program robots to act ethically in the human world. Now, Google has come along with its own set of, if not laws, then guidelines on how robots should act. In a new paper called "Concrete Problems in AI Safety," Google Brain--Google's deep learning AI division--lays out five problems that need to be solved if robots are going to be a day-to-day help to mankind, and gives suggestions on how to solve them. And it does so all through the lens of an imaginary cleaning robot. Let's say, in the course of his robotic duties, your cleaning robot is tasked with moving a box from one side of the room to another.