Researchers from the University of Cambridge and University of Zurich have recently announced that they created a robot that is able to learn, evolve, and improve its performance over time.
While this might pique the interest of those looking to sound the alarm about Skynet, the ultimate goal is not to create a malevolent superintelligence. Rather, the point of the research is to make robots that can adapt to their environment, for use in advanced industrial applications.
Andre Resendo, one of the researchers on the project, told Pallah Ghosh at the BBC that one goal of the project is to develop robots that can adapt to new circumstances.
“You can imagine cars being built in factories and the robot looking for defects in the car and fixing them by itself,” he said.
These kind of developments are coming fast in the global robotics market, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 26.47% from 2014-2019.
The defense sector is a major robotics end-user, despite warnings
In 2014, the defense application segment was the largest contributor to the growth of the global professional robotics market with a 44.34% share of overall shipments.
Defense applications for robots:
- Army Intelligence, Surveillance, and Combat
- Unmanned Ground Based Vehicles
- Unmanned Arial Vehicles
- Demining
- Explosive and Hazard Disposal
- Other Defense Applications
While robotics in defense offers a huge range of possibilities, including monitoring inaccessible, remote or dangerous areas, incorporating artificial intelligence into these robots has raised the ire of experts worldwide.
In an open letter posted by the Future of Life institute in late July, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and 19114 other signatories outline some of the key concerns of using robots—specifically AI—in defense:
“Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”
But despite this relatively severe warning, demand for robots in defense is not waning. They help safeguard military personnel, develop new surveillance strategies and tactics, curtail military costs, and help advance the fields of military science, computing and sensor technology to create even more advanced robots.
Interested in robots? Check out Technavio’s report on agricultural and industrial robotics
Unsurprisingly, the US is currently the largest contributor of this market with the highest R&D spending for development of unmanned defense systems.
Humans and robots working together?
It would seem that the grim warnings on the use of robots and AI for defense haven’t done much to dampen the robotics market. In fact, a lot of work is currently being put towards developing collaborative robots, with the global market growing at a stunning CAGR of 50.88% from 2014-2019.
These machines work with employees in industries to assist them with work rather than working autonomously. Collaborative robots, or CoBots, are smaller, more flexible and more user-friendly than traditional immobilized industrial robots, and act as smart tools to amplify human capabilities— Cobots use advanced technologies such as torque sensing, collision detection, elastic actuators and follow instructions without the need for regular programming.
Advantages of CoBots:
- Less expensive than industrial robots. For instance the price of Baxter, by Rethink Robotics, is $27000 (Excluding software and other handling charges). Average price of an industrial robot is $56,000-$59,000.
- Easy to operate and programme
- Ability to learn and adapt human instructions through machine vision and sensing systems
- Information from these robots can flow bi-directional i.e. between machines and between humans and integrated systems
- Can be reused for multiple tasks
