

Robots are getting cleverer and more dexterous. Their time has almost come - theoneill
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11575170

======
Tichy
Hm, annoying - I live in Munich, and I would have loved to visit the robot
fair, but I didn't know about it. What is a good way to not miss interesting
conferences and fairs?

Friends of mine recently went to see the guided tour through the BMW factory
in Munich and they said it was very impressive.

~~~
pchristensen
That was one I idea I had, wanted to work on, procrastinated it, and now I'm
waiting for someone else to build the conference reminder.

~~~
Tichy
I wonder if there is a conference on procrastination? ;-)

~~~
pchristensen
Probably later.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
OMNI magazine in 1982 ran an article on the procastinator's club, which had
been meaning to have meetings for the last couple of decades or so.

I've been thinking about joining. Still not sure yet, though.

(true story)

------
bprater
"Almost come" is accurate. There is some major distance to be made in slew of
robotics categories.

For instance, robots can still barely and accurately maneuver around using
just vision. Slap on 3D like Lidar and it gets expensive both financially and
computationally.

------
ph0rque
I'm sure I'm not the first/only one to have this idea, but to make the robot
systems much cheaper, why not have an ecosystem of smart objects, and the
robot itself much simpler? For example, for the food preparation industry,
have all that food be in smart containers (self-weighing, able to dispence
discrete amounts, chemical sensors to determine "freshness" of the food, if
applicable). Is anyone aware of such systems, or perhaps working on them as
part of a startup?

~~~
krschultz
We couldn't even convert to the Metric system in America, I'm not saying its
impossible but if you can't point to a clear benefit from it, why incur the
cost?

I also think that right now the cost of robotics comes from the complexity of
the software more so than the hardware. We have plenty of commodity hardware,
and the actual robotics chassis/effector/sensor stuff is not all that
expensive in perspective, but the software is a giant tangled mess of projects
that do the same thing in different ways. (At least on the open source side).
There have been moves lately to fix that, like the Gearbox project, but
overall it is still a lot of people spending a lot of time reinventing the
wheel.

------
Allocator2008
They only real-way to "Scale" robots, is to create a system of self-
replicating robots. This way, they can organically interact with our (human)
needs. Similarly to how one can raise a pig to eat, or, alternately, one can
go hunt free range buffalo, one can custom-make a robot for one's particular
need, or, instead, allow self-replicating "species" or robots to exist in
well-defined areas. For example if one had a swarm of aquatic robots in say a
harbor area, these could be remote-control programmed to fetch fish and bring
those fish to a centralized net. The robots would replicate themselves, so no
need to worry about fixing them or making more. With nano-tech who knows such
might be possible. Effectively to maximize/economize robot use we need species
"symbiosis" with robot strains. Everybody benefits. Without making robots
become "organic"/self-replicating they remain to costly. However, carefully
directing the evolution/creation of a symbiotic robotic ecosystem could
benefit mankind. Robots are no threat, when handled properly.

Essentially two dangers lurk with robots: one they are economically
prohibitive. But flash forward a hundred years and you have a different
problem: controlling them. Directing the evolution of robots could solve both
problems. In the short term make them more cost effective vis-a-vis population
growth, in the long term create symbiotic interdependence with the robot
species, by means of orchestrating and directing their initial evolution. It
is like a flash flood. You can't stop it, but you can control where the waters
go. Similarly we cannot stop the "singularity" the rise of the robots
constitute, but we can control it. (Me, my ultimate dream is a robot drag
queen, yeah, when I make my millions I'm gonna build me one of those and knock
'em dead at karoake night, lol!)

