In my mind, the next big step will be the machine perception, specifically full scene understanding in vision.
Computer vision has advanced very rapidly recently in sub-tasks like object recognition, scene segmentation, 3d-modeling from videos, and others.
Now people are trying to put these elements together, along with text-based metadata and logic for physical interpretation of images (e.g. the coffee cup is on the table which is on the ground and abuts the wall; physical interpretations of spatial information).
Soon enough we'll be to the point where a drone can identify and track most objects in its line of sight and know their physical relationships to each other. This opens up tremendous possibilities in robotics.
Computer vision has advanced very rapidly recently in sub-tasks like object recognition, scene segmentation, 3d-modeling from videos, and others.
Now people are trying to put these elements together, along with text-based metadata and logic for physical interpretation of images (e.g. the coffee cup is on the table which is on the ground and abuts the wall; physical interpretations of spatial information).
Soon enough we'll be to the point where a drone can identify and track most objects in its line of sight and know their physical relationships to each other. This opens up tremendous possibilities in robotics.