Random Robotics Facts
For the past two days I have been reading Wikipedia articles and listening to The Robot Podcast as a way of getting a sense of where robotics are today. So far I have learned some interesting facts about the history of robotics. The word "robot" was first used in the play Rossum's Universal Robots by the Czech playwright Karel Capek. His use of the word "robot" was from the Czech phrase for "compulsory work" which is an accurate description of what robots do. Fast forward to Isaac Asimov who wrote the 3 Laws of Robotics, which are:
1. A robot must not injure a human or allow a human to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey an order from a human unless it conflicts with Rule #1.
The first documented electronic autonomous robots were built in the late 1940s by a British gentleman, William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute. Since then the pace of robotic development has accelerated and broadened into a wide range of areas.
Many people challenge the development and pervasiveness of robotics as an invasion of the workforce. Robots are seen by many as stealing jobs and leaving human workers redundant. I thought Gabe Bentz in his Robot Podcast (see above) did a reassuring episode on this topic, where he argued that many industrial robots are developed as collaborators with human operators, augmenting the speed and accuracy of a human worker but not replacing them.
I have learned that autonomous research robotics and BEAM robotics are now antiquated concepts (1980s era, which I guess counts as "antiquated" in this fast-paced environment) but they're still listed as relevant areas of robotics research on the Wikipedia page. I learned that Bayesian networks was a tool for displaying random variables and their conditional dependencies graphically. I am not sure how that is applicable to robotics. Finally, I learned that most self-driving cars (especially the ones on display at CES 2017) use Nvidia computing chips because Nvidia has mastered the art of parallel computing, whereas Intel has relied on Moore's Law to accelerate their chips' computing power, which is starting to slow down at this point.