  The National Robotics Initiative (NRI) was launched 2011 and is about to
celebrate its 5 year anniversary. In parallel with the NRI, the robotics
community, with support from the Computing Community Consortium, engaged in a
series of road mapping exercises. The first version of the roadmap appeared in
September 2009; a second updated version appeared in 2013. While not directly
aligned with the NRI, these road-mapping documents have provided both a useful
charting of the robotics research space, as well as a metric by which to
measure progress. This report sets forth a perspective of progress in robotics
over the past five years, and provides a set of recommendations for the future.
The NRI has in its formulation a strong emphasis on co-robot, i.e., robots that
work directly with people. An obvious question is if this should continue to be
the focus going forward? To try to assess what are the main trends, what has
happened the last 5 years and what may be promising directions for the future a
small CCC sponsored study was launched to have two workshops, one in Washington
DC (March 5th, 2016) and another in San Francisco, CA (March 11th, 2016). In
this report we brief summarize some of the main discussions and observations
from those workshops. We will present a variety of background information in
Section 2, and outline various issues related to progress over the last 5 years
in Section 3. In Section 4 we will outline a number of opportunities for moving
forward. Finally, we will summarize the main points in Section 5.
