Ten years ago, I was in the early stages of the PhD programme in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. We were surrounded by incredible technologies spanning diverse areas of robotics and artificial intelligence. The potential of these technologies was incredible, but up to that point, the focus had been overwhelmingly on applications in areas such as defence, space, manufacturing or pure research. Despite the limitless potential, little of these technologies was making its way into consumer products and our daily lives.
A lot has changed in the past decade. Then, top autonomous driving research was funded almost exclusively by Darpa and other government agencies, and although large-scale autonomous cars have always been one of the dreams of robotics researchers, we would have all been shocked to see what is happening today: dozens of the biggest companies in the world (led by a search-engine company), as well as highly funded startups, are collectively investing billions of dollars at the pursuit of the commercial autonomous car. Now there is a sense of inevitability to autonomous cars being a staple of our daily lives within a decade (or sooner), with the only questions being the pace at which they will take over, and which of the companies chasing this prize will pull away from the pack.
These developments in transportation are a great template for how robotics can disrupt even the most entrenched industries, and highlights a few themes that we will begin to see more frequently:
• Incumbents will rarely be the ones that disrupt their own spaces. It's no coincidence that the first autonomous cars are going to come out of Silicon Valley-software-driven companies and not Detroit. This new age of automobiles where 90 per cent of what defines a car will be software, not mechanics or design, is simply counter to the DNA of traditional automotive manufacturers. And even when they realise this (as is now happening with increasing levels of panic by all traditional automotive companies), they are in the worst position to secure or direct the necessary talent to handle a challenge this significant.
• Algorithms are becoming better and more generally applicable. Challenges in robotics repeat themselves. Just as the history of software shifted from disconnected one-off solutions to consistent frameworks, methodologies and best-practices, families of algorithms and approaches in robotics and AI can extend to seemingly disconnected domains. Meanwhile, tools such as deep learning are letting us engineer solutions for complex problems with far greater speed and effectiveness than ever.
• Applications of robotics will exponentially increase. The costs of components and sensors are plummeting across the board, from capable microcontrollers for a fraction of a pound (thanks to the smartphone industry) to large-scale laser sensors for autonomous operation falling in price to ten per cent of what they were a decade ago. When you couple this with the fact that everyone has a mobile device in their pocket (the perfect brain and interface for any robots in our lives), applications that were previously impractical are suddenly fair game.
In the next few years we will see a continued trend of robotics entering increasingly diverse consumer categories, embracing these powerful trends in cost and capability. Although humanoid service robots are still far off, cars will continue their march towards full autonomy with the introduction of greater safety and convenience features. And robotics will become more widely accepted as a robust set of tools and capabilities driving surprising jumps in capability.
At Anki, we are leveraging these trends to take a bottom-up approach to robotics. Entertainment has always been a great starting point for us on a long path in consumer applications for robotics, particularly the long-stagnant toy industry. By applying robotics and artificial-intelligence technologies we're not only creating products that elevate to a higher level of intelligence, gameplay, and experience than ever in the industry, but developing foundational technologies that we'll be able to reuse in other categories of products and establish a brand that will carry across diverse forms of products.
It is fair to think of robotics as the extension of computer science into the physical world. As soon as something is able to understand its environment and has the ability to interact with it, one can use software to create a previously impossible level of intelligence and physical interaction. We're in the early stages of this transformation, and it's one that will change the landscape of countless industries, shake up the most entrenched companies and lead to great improvements in the quality of our lives.
Boris Sofman is co-founder of robotics company Anki.
The WIRED World in 2017 is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
