Sachin Chitta
  • Home
  • Research
    • Publications
    • Motion Planning
    • Learning for Manipulation
    • Mobile Manipulation
  • CV
  • Collaborators
  • Software
  • Blog

Robotics and AI

11/30/2013

0 Comments

 
One of my recent trips was to NY where I got a chance to attend the World Technology Network Summit. Its an annual gathering of some of the world's best technologists, policy specialists, educators and others. This turned out to be a completely different experience for me - I am used to traveling to  academic conferences and talking with Robotics researchers. Robotics was certainly hot at the summit with several of the awards going to people who were doing robotics to some degree. The highlights of the summit included several talks by some of the world's leading experts in technology.

Eric Brown, of IBM Watson fame, gave a fascinating talk on the progress of Watson. The success of Watson in Jeopardy has re-invigorated interest in AI, a field which has been on the verge of breaking through (just like Robotics). Eric talked about how IBM was now developing Watson for applications in the healthcare industry, mining data from medical records and tests to suggest informed decisions in medical cases. If it succeeds in such a venture, it would be a great example of a successful "tech-transfer" where a promising technology goes on to also be commercially successful. Its also a good example of why technology should never be judged solely by its cover - the Jeopardy task may seem trivial in light of all the more important issues in the world but the ultimate applications of the technology are much more worthwhile.

AI, in a certain form, is already part of our lives, e.g. in Siri and competing similar services. AI also made headlines recently with the claim by Vicarious, a Bay Area startup, that they had beaten Captcha (my former office-mate and colleague from Willow Garage, Bhaskara Marthi, now works at Vicarious). Robotics is the ultimate frontier for AI and we'll have to wait and watch for how long it might take for these two fields to converge (again).

0 Comments

Trends

11/30/2013

0 Comments

 
For the last few weeks, I have been traveling a lot - to Robotics workshops, industry meetings and trade fairs. One of my shorter trips (at least in terms of commute time) was to RoboBusiness 2013 in Santa Clara. RoboBusiness is an annual Robotics trade fair that has traditionally been held in Pittsburgh and moved to the West Coast this year.I was part of the SRI International booth, showing off MoveIt! but also got a chance to walk around and look at some of the other exhibits.

The show brought out a lot of new players in Robotics, especially the new generation of robots aimed at enterprise and commercial customers. Virtual visitors from all over the world could visit the show using the BEAM robots from Suitable Technologies (a Willow Garage spinoff). Also on display were Baxter (from Rethink Robotics), the UR5 from Universal Robots, a Danish company that has been making waves in the US robotics market and the UBR-1, a new robot from another Willow Garage spinoff (Unbounded Robotics).

The trends emerging are clear: (1) low-cost (2) safety and operation around people (3) easier to use teaching interfaces. Some early prototypes aimed at the consumer market were intriguing, e.g. Budgee, a shopping cart robot that can follow you around. Its clear that these robots are not yet ready for the market but the concept merits attention. The trend in the education market, on the other hand, is much clearer and primed for maturity by the success of the PR2. The Baxter Research robot and the UBR-1 are two robots hoping to take advantage of this trend. Similarly, the UR5 shows how an easy to use teaching interface combined with a solid robot (with good quality of motion) can fill an existing gap in the commercial and industrial arena.

Overall, its an exciting time to be in Robotics.

0 Comments

    Author

    Sachin Chitta is a Roboticist in the Bay Area.

    Archives

    April 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    November 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013

    Categories

    All
    MoveIt!
    ROS

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.