Co-evolution of Human and AI-Robots to Expand Science Frontiers

The possibility for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-robot scientists to work alongside human scientists is an exciting area of exploration in the world of AI, robotics and automated machines. Moonshot R&D is a flagship program in Japan that brings researchers together on R&D projects with the goal of overcoming challenging societal issues. Toshio Fukuda is Program Director of Goal three of the program's nine goals and envisions a future in which AI robots and humans co-exist. As such, one of the targets of Goal three is the: "Realization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) robots that autonomously learn, adapt to their environment, evolve itself in intelligence, and act alongside human beings, by 2050". Associate Professor Kanako Harada, Center for Disease Biology and Integrative Medicine (CDBIM), Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan, is a Project Manager working on this target. She is currently managing a project entitled the 'Co-Evolution of Human and AI-Robots to Expand Science Frontiers', in which she and her collaborators are developing AI-robot scientists that can collaborate in the lab, autonomously performing scientific experiments in challenging environments. The researchers anticipate that this could lead to the discovery of scientific principles and solutions by autonomous AI-robots in scientific fields by 2050.