2015: Faster Forward

Longform
(Image: Stockfresh)

15 January 2015

Analytics is also a major driver of the very visible market trends towards Robotics. Industrial robots have been with us in factories for three quarters of a century. One Japanese car maker even made a balletic video with its production line robots and there was a global reaction to the sheer cutesiness of Sony’s Aibo and Honda’s Asimo (HRP-4C is pretty attractive too). But what we are seeing today is the growth in highly practical semi-autonomous (often remotely guided by operators) and autonomous robots. Military drones, unfortunately, spring to mind but so do self-driving cars, video drones and quadcopters, vacuum cleaners and warehouse pickers with bar code readers. The analytics bit comes in by enhancing decision-making logic for the tasks in hand, including reacting to changed circumstances.

The humanoid (and four-legged) robots confuse the picture. Companion robots in domestic and healthcare situations might benefit, but your autonomic shelf-stacker can look like an advanced Transformer with 10 ‘arms’ if that improves the performance. It’s fair to say that the Age of Robotics really began with the Roomba vacuum (although Electrolux had an earlier version), in the sense that robotics moved out of the industrial closet and into mainstream consumer and other visible applications.

Mobility is of course the other key element, for robots as well as us mere humans. Telecommunications and mobility add a set of dimensions that offer infinitely richer potential than static or single site, single purpose industrial robots — which in turn have enormous growth potential because of the advances generally in software and micro-engineering. Electronics manufacturing at micro or even nanoscale, laboratories and process plants, industrial 3D printing on demand are just an obvious set of possibilities.

Hardware_mouse_hand_robot_01_web

Civilians can also look to the promise of robots for jobs in hazardous environments, from mining to waste disposal to underwater engineering

Two other huge areas of technology advancement that will interact with robotics are the Internet of Things [IoT] and cloud computing. From the point of view of monitoring and control, re-programming or updating, robots are integral to the IoT. So far we tend to understand the potential of the IoT in terms of relatively static sensors — fridges, traffic lights, wearable monitors. But that is really advanced telemetry, using the Internet.

Household management is a good example of more active applications, with remote app control of any electronic (or electronically controlled) device in your home. Robotics, including autonomous vehicles, will be at the top end because input will be disseminated and locally applied according to the logic in the robot device. That could be traffic or road conditions information for the car or meteorology for the drone.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie