The Future of Robots in Manufacturing

I just watched a couple of fascinating videos on where robots are going and how that relates to manufacturing. They’re by Artificial Intelligence expert Rodney Brooks, who was also the man behind the iRobot robot vacuum cleaners. The nearly hour long series from Maker Faire 2009 can be seen here, but the interesting segment showing robots interacting with people can be seen in this YouTube video:

The Future of Robots in Manufacturing…

The technologies are fascinating. Apparently the breakthrough in machine vision has come from watching the relationship of objects to the background behind them. With the ability to construct a 3D model in the robot’s software coming from the computer vision, the kinematics needed to make the manipulator arm function are apparently also fairly straightforward. No super computers needed–these robots run with fairly modest cpu requirements and hence should be fairly cheap.

Brooks’ latest company, Heartland Robotics, just got a second round of venture capital to the tune of $20M, so real robots from them must not be far away.

Related posts:

1. Special Purpose Robots
2. Have You Seen the Maker Movement, MakerBots, and RepRap?