Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics can perform an increasingly wider variety of jobs, and automation is no longer confined to routine tasks. Nevertheless, the automation potential for non-routine tasks seems to remain limited, especially for tasks involving autonomous mobility, creativity, problem solving, and complex communication.
Workers at the Fuji Xerox R&D Square in Japan are about to welcome a new workmate who will take on many of their mundane tasks and promote collaboration.
For more than a decade, biomimetic robots have been deployed alongside live animals to better understand the drivers of animal behavior, including social cues, fear, leadership, and even courtship. The encounters have always been unidirectional; the animals observe and respond to the robots. But in the lab of Maurizio Porfiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the robots can now watch back.
Automation-intensive sectors such as the automotive industry are not the only ones to rely on robots. In more and more agricultural settings, automation systems are superseding strenuous manual labor. As part of the EU's CATCH project, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK is developing and testing a dual-arm robot for the automated harvesting of cucumbers. This lightweight solution has the potential to keep crop cultivation commercially viable in Germany.
Sure, there have already been 3-D printed houses. And you can pick up a Nest Thermostat with artificial intelligence at your local hardware store. But a new book co-written and co-edited by Mahesh Daas, dean of the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design, argues that robotics can and soon will be even further integrated into the design processes at the heart of architecture.
Imagine living in a cramped studio apartment in a large city—but being able to summon your bed or closet through a mobile app, call forth your desk using voice command, or have everything retract at the push of a button.
Crumbling mine tunnels awash with polluted waters perforate the Colorado mountains, and scientists may one day send robots creeping through the pitch-black passages to study the mysterious currents that sometimes burst to the surface with devastating effects.
Last week's sea rescue of Australian swimmers by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is just the start of a robotics revolution.