01 May 2019
Author: Bryce Check, Beyond Limits Software Engineer

 

The California Institute of Technology Robotics Symposium brought Southern California’s best Roboticists from a myriad of labs together for a day of discussion about robots, by those who build robots, while surrounded by robotic dogs and bipedal walking robots. From Beyond Limits’ perspective, some of the key takeaways were to see how robotics will become more commonplace in everyday life for everyone.

 

From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s climbing robots to drones that can fly centimeters off of the ground with extreme precision and control, these different robotic platforms will allow robots to accomplish tasks they have never before been able to do in environments they have never been able to go to.

 

 

In addition to the robots themselves, the software that is currently being developed right now will usher in a new era of robots that will safely and efficiently move around obstacles and manipulate objects in the physical world in the direct vicinity of humans. Uncaged and untethered.

 

To speed up that process, Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing at CalTech and Director of Machine Learning Research at NVIDIA is working with her group on research to enable robots to learn how to navigate the real world on their own, with much less data and time by combining the hundreds of years of human studies of physics and kinematics with modern AI and Machine Learning.

 

All these factors will foster a steady rise in both the types and numbers of robots that we interact within our daily lives, which will augment humans to focus on the work that is truly important to accomplish.