Dubai is striving to become one of the world’s smartest cities, and robots are becoming an increasingly important part of its plan. Robot science is already having a significant impact on numerous vital sectors in the UAE, from production to surgery, security to delivery. The director of Dubai Future Labs, Khalifa Al Kama, says that the city started its journey towards becoming more digital 20 years ago, offering digital services to citizens in order to bring greater comfort to their lives. He believes that society can benefit from the presence of robots for some services or to increase the efficiency of government initiatives.
One area in which robotics is making a significant impact is healthcare. Dr. Yaser Saedi, a robotic surgeon and Urology Consultant at Dubai Hospital, is the first doctor to receive robotic surgical training in his specialty area. He currently uses the fourth-generation robotic system being developed by NASA, called the Da Vinci Xi, which is considered the most advanced system currently available. According to Dr. Yaser, technology helps surgeons to perform complex procedures, minimizes invasive surgery, and makes more precise adjustments with robotic arms. He suggests that “the advantages of classical surgery over laparoscopic and robotic surgery are decreasing. Factors such as less blood loss, better results, and faster recovery are being enhanced with robotic systems. Therefore, laparoscopic surgery is naturally evolving into robotic surgery,” and most surgeons are gradually moving towards robotic surgery, leaning towards surgery.
DG World, an artificial intelligence and digitalization company, offers industrial automation, advanced transportation solutions, and robotic products. By taking advantage of the industrial sector’s transition to autonomous systems, the company is developing autonomous vehicles, small delivery vehicles, and robotic arms. Boston Dynamics’ autonomous robot dog inspects high-risk areas such as crime scenes to collect data for investigations. The CEO of DG World, Matthias Krause, says that the benefits of robot technology, particularly Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs, have increased significantly: “We have received interest from nuclear power plant officials. You don’t want to expose people to radiation. Every day, we monitor and understand the radiation level. We are researching how to use these in other civil duties and different ways. We contacted the Dubai Customs office, which requires advanced and repeated site tracking. Many of these applications come from our customers.”
Arious Holding’s Singularous project takes robotics and artificial intelligence to the next level, moving beyond the smart city to redesign and develop the first conscious city, which will think for itself. According to Singularious President and CEO of Eltizam Group, Chris Roberts, “We want to create and build new cities for the future. Cities are now based on artificial intelligence, not traditional buildings. A conscious city thinks for itself. This is a city. This lifestyle will have a significant impact on how we protect and manage cities in the future.”
Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNet and Chief Scientist of Singularity, has helped create human-like social robot Sofia, music robot Desdemona, and health robot Grace. He believes that in most smart cities, there is a collection of smart devices that perform specific tasks that have not been integrated into a single general cognitive system. The main objective of a smart city is to achieve intelligence at an urban level and make it available to humans.
Dr. Goertzel expects artificial intelligence with human-like abilities to move from research laboratories to universal applications within the next 3-4 years. He believes that sharing our daily lives with human-like robots and adapting to humans is a natural way to provide all artificial intelligence systems around us. In the future, we will create interfaces with our surroundings in a much more natural way than writing, speaking on the phone, using Alexa, or using something else.
