The Future of Collaborative, Decentralized & Intelligent Robotics
In 1954 George Devol invented the first programmable robot called the Unimate, which was used on General Motors assembly line.
Robotics have long handled dirty and dangerous jobs. And they’ve been separated from people for safety reasons, but now, a new generation of advanced robotics has “come out of the cage” to work alongside humans.
Industrial robots are becoming more intelligent, human-friendly and easier to work with.
Higher levels of automation promise greater speed and precision of production. And those efficiencies increase a company’s competitive advantage.
Automation is expected to reduce operating costs by 10-15%. And it’s also expected to boost productivity growth by 10-55% depending on the industry.
Advances in human–robot collaboration will increase their adoption to 25-45% of production tasks by 2030. Adopting advanced robotics and AI could boost productivity by 30%, while cutting labour costs by 18-33%, yielding a positive economic impact of between $600 billion and $1.2 trillion by 2025.
The next generation of robotics are no longer caged programmed arms. They will operate in swarms with autonomy, decentralized and collective emergent behavior as robotics, AI and blockchain converge.
But perhaps the area that I’m most excited about is artificial swarm intelligence. Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system to create a desired collective behavior between the robots and the environment. And by definition swarm robotics are distributed and decentralized can operate with high efficiency, parallelism, scalability and robustness.
A key component to swarm intelligence is the communication between members to build a system of constant feedback. Sometimes this is referred to as swarm nervous system. The swarm behavior involves constant change of individuals in cooperation with others, as well as the behavior of the whole group…
