General-purpose Robots Archives

The paper “The Universal Robot of the 21st Century” by Oliver Bendel was published in February 2025 in the proceedings volume “Social Robots with AI: Prospects, Risks, and Responsible Methods” … From the abstract: “Developments in several areas of computer science, robotics, and social robotics make it seem likely that a universal robot will be available in the foreseeable future. Large language models for communication, perception, and control play a central role in this. This article briefly outlines the developments in the various areas and uses them to create the overall image of the universal robot. It then discusses the associated challenges from an ethical and social science perspective. It can be said that the universal robot will bring with it new possibilities and will perhaps be one of the most powerful human tools in physical space. At the same time, numerous problems are foreseeable, individual, social, and ecological.” The proceedings volume comprises the papers presented at Robophilosophy 2024 in Aarhus. Leading philosophers, computer scientists and roboticists met there in August. Like the ICSR, the conference is one of the world’s leading conferences on social robotics. General-purpose robots, the predecessors of universal robots, have now become widespread, as exemplified by Digit, Apollo, and Figure 03. The author accepted manuscript of this article is therefore being made freely available on this site for non-commercial use only and with no derivatives, in line with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

As part of the ToBIT event series at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), four students working with Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel are addressing four topics within his research area: “The Decoding of Symbolic Languages of Animals”, “The Decoding of Animal Body Language”, “The Decoding of Animal Facial Expressions and Behavior”, and “The Decoding of Extraterrestrial Languages”. The first three topics are also being explored – or have already been explored – in dedicated projects. DEEP VOICE focuses on whale communication. The Animal Whisperer Project comprised three apps that analyzed and evaluated the body language of cows, horses, and dogs, while VISUAL provided blind and visually impaired individuals with audio descriptions of images from wildlife webcams. In ANIFACE, a system was designed to identify individual bears in the Alps using facial recognition. Projects involving the reception of extraterrestrial signals and communication with alien life forms were discussed in the book “300 Keywords Weltraum“. The students presented their interim results on November 26, 2025. The final ToBIT event will take place in January 2026.