Hm, annoying - I live in Munich, and I would have loved to visit the robot fair, but I didn't know about it. What is a good way to not miss interesting conferences and fairs?<p>Friends of mine recently went to see the guided tour through the BMW factory in Munich and they said it was very impressive.
"Almost come" is accurate. There is some major distance to be made in slew of robotics categories.<p>For instance, robots can still barely and accurately maneuver around using just vision. Slap on 3D like Lidar and it gets expensive both financially and computationally.
I'm sure I'm not the first/only one to have this idea, but to make the robot systems much cheaper, why not have an ecosystem of smart objects, and the robot itself much simpler? For example, for the food preparation industry, have all that food be in smart containers (self-weighing, able to dispence discrete amounts, chemical sensors to determine "freshness" of the food, if applicable). Is anyone aware of such systems, or perhaps working on them as part of a startup?
They only real-way to "Scale" robots, is to create a system of self-replicating robots. This way, they can organically interact with our (human) needs. Similarly to how one can raise a pig to eat, or, alternately, one can go hunt free range buffalo, one can custom-make a robot for one's particular need, or, instead, allow self-replicating "species" or robots to exist in well-defined areas. For example if one had a swarm of aquatic robots in say a harbor area, these could be remote-control programmed to fetch fish and bring those fish to a centralized net. The robots would replicate themselves, so no need to worry about fixing them or making more. With nano-tech who knows such might be possible. Effectively to maximize/economize robot use we need species "symbiosis" with robot strains. Everybody benefits. Without making robots become "organic"/self-replicating they remain to costly. However, carefully directing the evolution/creation of a symbiotic robotic ecosystem could benefit mankind. Robots are no threat, when handled properly.<p>Essentially two dangers lurk with robots: one they are economically prohibitive. But flash forward a hundred years and you have a different problem: controlling them. Directing the evolution of robots could solve both problems. In the short term make them more cost effective vis-a-vis population growth, in the long term create symbiotic interdependence with the robot species, by means of orchestrating and directing their initial evolution. It is like a flash flood. You can't stop it, but you can control where the waters go. Similarly we cannot stop the "singularity" the rise of the robots constitute, but we can control it. (Me, my ultimate dream is a robot drag queen, yeah, when I make my millions I'm gonna build me one of those and knock 'em dead at karoake night, lol!)