Forbes “30 under 30″ list celebrates the achievements of 30 game changers in 20 different industries — 600 in total — of the brightest young entrepreneurs and innovators who are challenging conventional wisdom. The list highlights some interesting trends in robotics, AI, intelligence energy storage, and automation. Connected/smart consumer goods, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence are big ticket items for 2017. Forbes also unveiled its second annual “30 Under 30 Europe” list, featuring 300 young innovators, covering 10 categories. The entire list can be viewed here. 

You may also recognise some of these bright young minds from their contributions on Robohub:

Smart design / connected devices / energy storage

• Amrit Robbins & Anthony Diamond, Cofounders, Axiom Exergy
  An industry first, the Refrigeration Battery makes it possible for supermarkets, cold-storage facilities, and food processors to intelligently store and deploy refrigeration. The battery plugs into your refrigeration system, just like a display case. It stores thermal energy produced by your refrigeration system during off-peak hours and deploys it during on-peak hours. As a result, electricity demand is reduced by up to 40 percent during peak hours—a significant cost saving.
• Paige Kassalen, Engineer, Solar Impulse
  Kassalen was an electrical engineer on the ground crew of Solar Impulse, the first airplane to circle the globe powered by the sun. At 22, Paige was the youngest member and only American on the ground crew.
• Justin Barozie, Associate Manager of Manufacturing Engineering, Battery, Tesla Motors
  Barozie is lead manufacturing engineer for Tesla’s energy products and Model 3 battery modules. He leads a team of nine manufacturing engineers, and has designed and delivered more than 50 mass-production, multi-million dollar state-of-the-art automation projects.
• Nishant Garg & Jimit Shah, Cofounders, Flow Labs
  Flow Labs has devised a small wireless-enabled sensor that attaches to water pipes and measures the amount of water flowing through them — ideal for homes and businesses looking for ways to save water and save money.
• Ravi Kurani, CEO, Sutro
  Kurani has built a sensor connected app that monitors the health of your swimming pool, notifies you if maintenance is required and orders pool supplies. Automating water system maintenance saves chemicals, water and energy.
• Maanasa Mendu, student, Mason High school
  On family visits to India, Mendu saw the challenges of energy scarcity. A high school freshman in Ohio, she created a piezoelectric “leaf” device that harvests energy from sun, wind and rain. She’s working to commercialize her device.
• Colin Touhey, CEO, Pvilion
  Touhey’s Pvilion makes flexible photovoltaic solar products. He has led the development of solar-powered fabric for Google, built a sustainable 6,000-square-foot building on the roof of Carnegie Hall, and devised self-erecting robotic Army shelters.
• Richard Wang, CEO, Cuberg
  Wang’s Cuberg is developing a safer and more energy-dense battery to improve the affordability and range of electric vehicles. Wang studied battery degradation mechanisms Tesla Motors and has a PhD in materials science from Stanford.

Manufacturing & Industry

• Rhae Adams, Director of Energy & Mining, Planetary Resources
  Adams is helping to develop a market for mined materials from asteroids including water and industrial metals. Planetary Resources has raised more than $30 million in 2016 for its asteroid prospecting system.
• Chad Ammon, Cofounder, Inovdrone
  INOVA Drone is a TechStars company developing small drones for commercial and governmental applications, including public safety and critical infrastructure inspection. It was one of the first companies in Qualcomm’s Robotics Accelerator. Before founding the company, Amonn was one of the lead drone designers at 3D Robotics.
• Jeremy Blum, Head of Electrical Engineering, Shaper Tools
  Blum is head of electrical engineering at Shaper, a company looking to improve old-fashioned power tools with cutting-edge technology like machine vision. Prior to Shaper, Blum worked as a lead electrical system engineer at GoogleX, and did prototyping on Google Glass. He’s a prolific inventor, with three patents, and hosts a popular YouTube channel where he shows off his electrical engineering projects.
• Stefanie Mueller, Assistant Professor, MIT
  Mueller’s work focuses on the computer science of “physical data,” such as that involved in 3D printing. She leads the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL, which works on hardware and software that advance personal fabrication technologies, and is the conference General Co-Chair at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computational Fabrication 2017.
• Anurag Garg, CEO, Dattus
  Garg is cofounder and CEO of Dattus, an industrial Internet of things company that transforms old manufacturing facilities into smarter factories.
• Hasier Larrea, CEO, Ori [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Larrea is the founder of Ori (which derives its name from origami), a robotic, flexible furniture system for small apartments. The system allows for a number of configurations, from bedroom to office to living room, and back again, all controlled from one control panel.
• Ladislas de Toldi and Marine Couteau, cofounders, Leka [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Couteau and de Toldi’s company, Leka, has a solution for helping children with special needs engage with their education. They manufacture a multi-sensory robotic ball with lights, sounds and vibrations to engage children while tracking their progress.
• Marco Mascorro, Cofounder, Fellow Robots [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Retailers regularly struggle with inventory shrinkage and discrepancies in pricing and product that can cost a small fortune. Mascorro, who previously worked on robotics for BMW Group, cofounded Fellow Robots, which is developing robots that can help retailers with inventory management by scanning the shelves and keeping tabs on product. The company is rolling out its robots at American home improvement chain Lowe’s and Japanese electronics retailer Yamada Denki, among others.

Healthcare / wearables / brain-computer interfaces

• Alessandro Babini, Cofounder, Humon
  Alessandro’s company is building a wearable device that measures oxygen levels in muscles to determine how hard athletes should push themselves, when muscles have recovered and when training can resume. The company has received $1 million in funding.
• Huanyu Cheng, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  Cheng researches biologically-inspired electronics for use in robotics, biomedicine and energy. One of his more notable projects was being part of the research team that developed wearable electronic tattoos that can eventually dissolve in the human body.
• Prarthna Desai, Operations, Zipline
  Desai left her Harvard grad school program to use drones to get medication to people in the developing world. In her operations role at Zipline, she is leading efforts to integrate the medicine-delivery-by-drone service with the healthcare system in Rwanda.
• Nicole Moskowitz & Jessica Traver, Cofounders, IntuiTap Medical
  IntuiTap wants to streamline the process by using imaging technology, pressure sensors and predictive analytics not only to make spinal taps more accurate, but also to make the process more pleasant for patients.
• Param Shah and Alex Matthews, Cofounders, Fusiform
  Shah and Mathews are co-founders of Fusiform, which is building an infrastructure for custom fabrication for orthopedic devices. Rather than cast a patient with plaster, Fusiform has developed a way to take a 3D scan and design the orthopedics digitally.
• Lydia Kisley, Postdoc fellow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  Kisley focuses on using new technologies to take pictures of chemicals at a nanoscale level in order to better manipulate them. A few projects: showing that proteins clump in the presence of gold nanoparticles only when they are in low concentrations; and new efforts to understand how drug molecules fit together – an effort that could allow scientists to find the porous spaces in any nanotech particle.
• Ashwin Pushpala, Founder, Sano
  Pushpala thinks traditional preventive health is “fundamentally wrong” in its approach.His company, Sano, combines personalized health with a Fitbit approach. It has raised $18.75 million to develop a wearable sensor that, instead of counting steps, assesses things like blood sugar so users can see the impact of dietary changes on individual bodies.
• Niko Skievaski, Cofounder, Redox
  One of the biggest problems in healthcare: getting data from one place to another. Skievaski’s company, Redox, has raised $4 million to make an API that works as a bridge between healthcare data and the software that uses it, translating patients’ records across platforms. So far the company has partnered with more than 1,000 software vendors.
• Daniel Szafir, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
  Szafir’s research sounds almost like science fiction. It’s focused on human-robot interaction and human-computer interaction. Specifically, he’s developing ways to improve the performance of small flying robots so they can operate by themselves. He’s also worked on better ways to interact with computers, including brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality.
• TowerView Health, Cofounders
  After he was diagnosed with cancer, Nick Valilis was surprised by how difficult it was to remember to take his pills. So he teamed up with his college roommates to found TowerView Health, which sells a smart pill box with custom trays of medication.

Big data / machine learning / algorithms

• Michelle Atallah, PhD candidate, Stanford University
  Atallah is designing algorithms to identify mechanisms in tumor-driven immunosuppression as part of her PhD candidacy in the Cancer Biology program at Stanford. Utilizing a new technology called Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging, she is collecting data about immune cells within tumors in order to better apply therapeutic intervention.
• Xi Chen, Assistant Professor, New York University
  Chen studies machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and operations research. These lead to new learning methods and approaches for big data analysis, with applications for business, medicine, and more.
• Korin Reid, Senior Data Scientist, McKesson
  Reid uses big data technologies to scale predictive modeling and machine learning on billions of healthcare records, reaching over 160 million people. Named one of McKesson’s 2016 Distinguished Technologists, she also mentors youth in STEM skills.
• Justin Solomon, Assistant Professor, MIT
  Solomon researches geometric problems in computer graphics, computer vision and machine learning. Co-inventor of three patents, he also spent five years doing computer research for Pixar, developing new algorithms for image processing in movies.
• Katharina Volz, Founder, Razor, Inc.
  Volz’s company, OccamzRazor, hopes to speed up the processes behind scientific research by addressing information fragmentation and data validation. This, in turn, should make collaboration easier and help build an institutional knowledge base. The company is running pilots at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and biotech companies.

Artificial intelligence and VR

• Marta Jamrozik & Misha Laskin, Cofounders, Claire
  Marta Jamrozik and Misha Laskin built an artificially intelligent chatbot that allows millions of users to provide product feedback in real-time. This helps companies get valuable pre-launch insight, and identify their bestsellers and worst performers early on — which is why Kohl’s, Alex And Ani, Rebecca Minkoff, and Rent the Runway are all Claire customers.
• Scott Britton, Cofounder, Troops.ai
  Britton cofounded Troops.ai with the goal of making work easier for sales teams by providing them with an artificially intelligent assistant that helps them perform their CRM functions in messaging interfaces like Slack.
• Ben Aneesh & Natalie Gray, Cofounders, Cover
  The entrepreneurs behind fashion app Stylekick are back with a less sexy but very useful startup. Mobile app Cover allows you to buy insurance as easily as you’d take a photo: send a snap of your jewelry, car, or home and get a quote.
• Beatty & Scranton, Cofounders, IrisVR
  Beatty and Scranton cofounded New York City-based IrisVR in 2014 to help companies transition their assets to virtual reality (VR) by making software to easily create, share and interact with 3D models on all major VR platforms, like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
• Arruda and Dall’Oglio and Ovbiagele, Cofounders, ROSS intelligence.
  A legal research engine that uses artificial intelligence to automate legal processes making them more efficient and less expensive. Leveraging IBM’s Watson, ROSS uses natural language processing to search and provide legal information from citations to full legal briefs.

Read the entire list here.

Credit: University of California – San Diego

A new U.S. Robotics Roadmap released Oct. 31 calls for better policy frameworks to safely integrate new technologies, such as self-driving cars and commercial drones, into everyday life. The document also advocates for increased research efforts in the field of human-robot interaction to develop intelligent machines that will empower people to stay in their homes as they age. It calls for increased education efforts in the STEM fields from elementary school to adult learners.

The roadmap’s authors, more than 150 researchers from around the nation, also call for research to create more flexible robotics systems to accommodate the need for increased customization in manufacturing, for everything from cars to consumer electronics.

The goal of the U.S. Robotics Roadmap is to determine how researchers can make a difference and solve societal problems in the United States. The document provides an overview of robotics in a wide range of areas, from manufacturing to consumer services, healthcare, autonomous vehicles and defense. The roadmap’s authors make recommendation to ensure that the United States will continue to lead in the field of robotics, both in terms of research innovation, technology and policies.

“We also want to make sure that research solves real life problems and gets deployed,” said Henrik I. Christensen, a professor computer scientist at the University of California San Diego, and the document’s lead editor. “We need to make sure that we are making an impact on people’s lives. ”

The Roadmap first edition came out in 2009 and led to the creation of the National Robotics Initiative by President Barack Obama. Researchers led by Christensen updated the document in 2013. They are revisiting the roadmap now ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Christensen, who is the director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, gave a preview of the roadmap’s main findings during the Contextual Robotics Forum Oct. 28 on the UC San Diego campus.

The 100-page document highlights the following major findings and recommendations:

Unmanned vehicles and policy

Credit: nutonomy

The advances in the field of self-driving cars have far outpaced the predictions researchers made in the 2013 edition of the roadmap. But autonomous vehicles still have several obstacles to overcome, the researchers said. “It is important to recognize that human drivers have a performance of100 million miles driven between fatal accidents,” Christensen said. “It is far from trivial to design autonomous systems that have a similar performance.”

Self-driving cars need to become more like industrial robots, which can run autonomously for three years without human intervention, he added. Also, the many methods and technologies used in the field of self-driving vehicles need to be resolved into a single standard. “Systems integration might not get a lot of press, but it is essential,” Christensen said.

Finally, local, state and federal agencies need to formulate policies and regulations that ensure these cars can share the road safely with vehicles driven by people. Regulations and policies also need to be put in place for unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones or UAVs. When this is done, UAVs could revolutionize the way we ship goods by air, monitor the environment—and much more. They could help first responders during natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

Researchers also need to get better at controlling swarms of UAVs and robots. “Currently, it takes a small group of people to run complex UAVs. This ratio needs to be inverted so that one person can control a small group of UAVs and other autonomous robots. Human-robot interactions should resemble the relationship between an orchestra conductor and musicians,” Christensen said. “Individual players need to be smart enough to take cues from the conductor and play on their own.”

Health care and home companion robots

Source: Fraunhofer IPA/photo: Jens Kilian

A major wave of companion robots is about to enter the market, as the population of developed countries ages. For example, 50 percent of the Japanese population is over 50 years old. “We need to help the elderly stay in their homes,” Christensen said. “And robots can help us get there.”

To reach this goal, robots will need to have a better understanding of their surroundings and become more reliable. Existing systems are equipped with basic navigation methods. But long-term autonomy with little or no human intervention needs to be the goal. In addition, robotic home companions will need to be able to perform a wider range of tasks.

It is also essential that robots be easy enough to control so that they can be used by everyone. That means that home care robots, for example, need user interfaces that are no more complicated than a TV remote.

“This needs to be moon shot for robotics research,” Christensen said.

Manufacturing

Credit: University of California – San Diego

In recent years, the need to customize products such as cars has increased dramatically. For example, a high-end vehicle can feature millions of different options, from the color of its seats to the configuration of its electronics. As a result, manufacturers have turned to increasingly sophisticated technology to drive assembly lines. This in turn has brought many factories back to the United States. In the past six years, the U.S. manufacturing sector has added 900,000 jobs. “Tremendous growth in robotics doesn’t have to mean job losses,” Christensen said.

But this expansion of robotic systems in industry must overcome two major obstacles, the roadmap states. Researchers need to develop user interfaces that will allow workers to operate robotic systems with little or no training. In other words, user interfaces need to become more like video games, Christensen said.

Also, robots’ manipulation skills need to improve dramatically, to match at least the dexterity of a young child. Right now, the most advanced robots have the grasping abilities of a one-year-old, Christensen said.

An Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things

For all applications, the core challenge is flexible integration of robotic systems with human operators and collaborators.  Researchers envision an environment where physical systems are linked wirelessly via smart sensors and smart chips, within an industrial Internet of Things. This will make it easier for robots to navigate their environment and work with people. At the same time it is important to design these systems to be secure so that they cannot be hijacked or used in cyber attacks.

Amazon is at the forefront of this movement and owns 40 percent of application program interfaces, or APIs, related to IoT—which are open source, Christensen said. “This is going to create a whole new economy,” he said.

Education

Robotic systems will dramatically change everyday life both in the home and at work in coming years. As a result, the public and the workforce need to be trained to interact with these systems. Training needs to happen at all levels, from kindergarten to 12^th-grade and in trade schools before college. But most education efforts need to be focused on kindergarten through 12^th-grade. Too many young people are dropping out of high school and will be left behind by this new economy based on robotics and the Internet of Things, Christensen said.

“We need to empower people to use robots,” he said. “We need to realize that most of the interfaces we design today for robotic systems aren’t easy to use.”

A shared robotics infrastructure

Researchers also are making a call to build a common, shared research infrastructure for robotics here in the United States. The research network would expand existing sites, with a focus on testing autonomous driving, medical and health care robotics, micro- and nanorobotics, agriculture robotics, UAVs and underwater robotics. Each site would need about $3 million to be revamped into a shared facility.

“We need to invest to make sure the United States remains a leader in the field of robotics,” Christensen said.

Read the entire document here.

The 2016 U.S. Robotics Roadmap is partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the University of California San Diego, Oregon State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Pokeball and Robotiq. Source: Robotiq

You may be reloading this page trying to figure out if the title of this blog post got mixed up with something else. No, you read it correctly, I am going to outline similarities between Industry 4.0 and Pokémon Go.

First off, if you aren’t familiar with the term Industry 4.0, or if you weren’t born after 1990 and you don’t know what a Pokémon is, fear not: a crash course in both subjects is coming up.

Industry 4.0: the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Industry 4.0 is a term coined by the Germans in 2011. It is not a new technology, and it is not a new industry. It is a new approach to achieve results using technological advancements from the past 10 years.

One key aspect of this industrial revolution is the Internet of Things  (IoT)  and the multitude of cyber-physical devices that have the ability to collect data that can be used by manufacturing companies. Great strides have been made in the world of big data and analytics, allowing systems to sift through heaps of information in the blink of an eye and provide useful insight for manufacturing, marketing and decision making.

Behind the term Industry 4.0 comes the dream of the smart factory. This is a factory that uses robots to automate production, sensors to feed the optimization effort and even artificial intelligence to perform complex tasks when most of the workers are still on summer vacation. The factory will also use big data analytics to predict the next trend in product design or manufacturing, thus enabling a more targeted production or marketing strategy.

The Internet of Things provides a means for machines, robots, sensors and humans to communicate regardless of their geographical location. This information transparency also allows smart factories to create virtual copies of their factories, allowing to input sensor data to simulations of production runs. The advancements in the modern factory could add $14.2 trillion to the world economy over the next 15 years according to a report released by Accenture in January 2015.

Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go is a mobile location-based augmented reality game developed by Ninendo. Pokémon is a worldwide phenomenon that dates back to 1996. In the game, users are encouraged to venture outdoors (in the real world) to capture, battle and train virtual Pokémon who appear in the real world through your mobile device. The player’s avatar moves through a virtual map and runs into different Pokémon based on the environment . Near lakes and ponds, water-type Pokémon can be spotted, whereas in the downtown areas, the Pokémon resemble rats and pigeons. The game uses the mobile device’s GPS to position the user’s avatar on the virtual map and the device’s camera to provide a real world background on the device’s screen.

As the player walks around looking at the world through his or her smartphone,  Pokémons that pop-up on the screen and users can throw a Poké-Ball to catch it using the device’s touchscreen. Since the release of the mobile game one week ago, Pokémon Go has become the most played mobile game in history. Furthermore, the average daily use of the app on Android devices exceeds the use of Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. According to SimilarWeb, 5.92% of the android devices in the United States are engaging with the app on a daily basis. This popular launch has had a very positive impact on Nintendo’s stock value, that is, if you consider an value increase of $9 billion a decent days’ work.

The crossroads

Now that you are up to speed on the basics of the Industry 4.0 and the world of Pokémon, we can get down to the analytics.

First of all, it is obvious that both make the most of the data provided to them by their sensors. While Industry 4.0 uses data from robots to provide inputs to their cloud computing algorithms, Pokémon Go uses data provided by a mobile device’s camera, GPS and gyroscope to provide an augmented reality experience.

Second, both innovations are based on a machine-human interaction. Industry 4.0 allows collaborative robots to interact in a safe environment with humans, and Pokémon Go creates an augmented reality relationship between a human and a mobile device.

The key to success for these innovations is the learning curve required to get up and running. In the case of collaborative robots, the user can program a pick & place program using a UR robot in a few minutes. Upon downloading the Pokémon Go application, the user can be out in the real world catching Pokémon and battling in gyms in the time it takes to tie your shoes. This is essential for strong adoption rates. Compare Pokémon Go to modern video games that can take hours to learn. The same can be said about the time and effort required to learn how to program and integrate traditional industrial robots.

Finally, an important aspect of  both Industry 4.0 and Pokémon Go is its adaptability to the end user. In Pokémon Go, the user decides whether to play from the comfort of his neighborhood or to take marathon length walks in search of the rarest Pokémon. The same can be said for collaborative robots: the smart factory can use many different robots and an even wider variety of end-effectors, such as suction cups, grippers, magnetic gripper, etc. You can also decide to build the network, by implementing cloud computing, big data analytics, or to keep it simple and with a single robot to help free your workers hands from dangerous or monotonous tasks.

Oh comfort zone, you are a thing of the past

In both cases, people are getting out of their comfort zones. Gamers are, literally, getting mobile and playing outside the home; while production floor workers go from simply feeding parts into a machine to managing their new robot colleague.

Think about this: the next time you see a man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, he could be catching the rarest of Pokémon, but he could also be checking in on his factory’s robots – all from his smartphone.

We’ve entered a period of epic technological transformation that is impacting society in ways that are leaving even veteran tech observers speechless. In some ways, it might seem like 1998 all over again. The internet was then in its infancy and cyberspace was uncharted territory for much of the population. The Dot-com boom and eventual bust was inevitable and reflected the markets expanding and contracting with the newfound surge of interest, but obviously overinflated speculation, around the potential of the Internet to transform society. Following a tremendous growth spurt in the first 5-6 years, the World Wide Web ended its first decade by learning to become sociable.

Indeed, the rise of the digital social network through channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have transformed how businesses and individuals work, think, and communicate. And now that the Internet has crossed the threshold into young adulthood, it’s continuing to grow and drive massive transformations throughout all parts of business and society. Soon-to-be-released autonomous cars, wearable tech, drones, 3-D printing, smart machines, home automation, virtual assistants like Siri, you name it . . . the pace of change is staggering.

Graphic by Predikto on company blog.

Many of the breakthroughs and innovations we’re seeing right now are a result of three major confluences over the past 8 years: mobile, cloud, and Big Data. These technologies have collectively resulted in quicker and more efficient means of collaboration, development, and production, which in turn have allowed businesses to achieve unprecedented levels of growth and expansion. New ways of working, often remotely, mean that more people can do their jobs outside of traditional corporate structures. We’ve entered not only the freelancer economy, but the startup one as well. Now everyone is an entrepreneur and innovation and new business growth is through the roof. What’s more is that technology processes and production cycles have become commoditized. This means that anyone with the right idea, system, skills, and network in place today can effectively build a billion dollar business with very low overhead costs.

This crazy rate of change is certainly great from the consumer standpoint, but also a bit unnerving for businesses simply trying to keep their head above the water. How are companies today to keep up with the market, their competitors, and with consumer expectations? What does all this change mean for startups struggling to gain traction, for more traditional brick and mortar businesses, and even for established enterprises that might be too big to pivot quickly?

These are more comprehensive questions that we’ll try to answer in another blog post. But for now, here is what we do know about the massive impacts over the next few years. The first thing is that Internet of Things is taking the world by storm with projections that 21 billion objects will be connected by the year 2020. That’s just about 3 for every man, woman, and child on the planet! A few years ago Cisco estimated that the IoT market would create $19 trillion of economic value in the next decade.

What’s more is that the global robotics industry is also undergoing a major transformation. Market intelligence firm Tractica released a report in November 2015 forecasting that global robotics will grow from $28.3 billion worldwide in 2015 to $151.7 billion by 2020. What’s especially significant is that this market share will encompass mostly non-industrial robots, including segments like consumer, enterprise, medical, military, UAVs, and autonomous vehicles. Tractica anticipates an increase in annual robots shipments from 8.8 million in 2015 to 61.4 million by 2020; in fact, by 2020 over half of this volume will come from consumer robots.

Putting together the two major industry trends, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the two industries – Internet of Things and Robotics – will together lead to a “perfect storm” of global market disruption, opportunities, and growth in the next 4 years and beyond. This confluence is part of a larger epic transformation, which has appropriately been called the Second Machine Age. Listen to how this FastCompany article sums it up:

The fact is we’re now on the cusp of a “Second Machine Age,” one powered not by clanging factory equipment but by automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Self-driving cars are expected to be widespread in the coming decade. Already, automated checkout technology has replaced cashiers, and computerized check-in is the norm at airports. Just like the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago, the AI and robotics revolution is poised to touch virtually every aspect of our lives—from health and personal relations to government and, of course, the workplace.

This is a mouthful but in case it’s not clear, let me spell it out: there’s never been a better time than now to get onboard with robotics and Internet of Things!

If you’re a startup or small business owner, and especially feeling behind the technology curve, you’re certainly not alone. But instead of commiserating about all of the changes, proactively start today to ask yourself what it will take to get your organization to the next level of innovation. Set yourself up with a 6 month, 12 month, 18 month and 2 year innovation plan which maps to a broader 2020 strategy. Time is of the essence but it’s not too late to pivot and get onboard with the robotics and IoT revolution. As the famous statement goes, “The journal of a thousand miles starts with one step.”

As everyone starts to look for “the big technology trends of 2016”, it seems that one technology is overshadowing all others – the Internet of Things. We take a look at why robotics is actually ahead of the game with the IoT trend, and show that some industrial robotic companies have been involved with it for 10 years already. 

It’s around this time of year that people start making a lot of predictions about the future (ourselves included, here were our predictions for 2015). Technology journalists get all excited about what they think will be the big “Tech Trends” of the New Year.

For 2016, popular upcoming robotic trends include affordable social robotics (e.g Pepper and Buddy), an increasing use of robotics in mining and agriculture, connected autonomous cars, drones, drones and more drones, a proliferation of robotics startups, among others. But one tech trend is overshadowing them all for the upcoming year: The Internet of Things (IoT).

Predictions about the IoT being “the next big thing” are coming from all technology sectors, from information technology and computer security to investment. It’s not all hype: there are real devices being produced. At the end of 2015, IoT devices had begun to show up on the consumer market, including a smart cup that tells you how much water to drink and a stealth gadget that ensures the security of other connected IoT devices.

Interestingly, in the field of industrial robotics, the IoT has been well underway in the field of industrial robotics for a quite few years now. Back in 2013, one of our top takeaways from RoboBusiness 2013 was how IoT is an important concept in robotics. Then, in our recent takeaways from RoboBusiness 2015, we heard about numerous examples of companies using IoT concepts.

Why is the Internet of Things Important for Industrial Robotics?

Let’s look at how two big robotics companies have already implemented IoT concepts into their systems:

ABB

In 2015, ABB placed itself at the heart of IoT technologies in industrial robotics by becoming part of the Industrial Internet Consortium. Although IoT might seem new, ABB announced earlier this year that their IoTSP (Internet of Things, Services and People) strategy has been underway for the last 10 years. They have been finding ways to integrate all of the sensors and devices on a manufacturing shop floor to improve all areas of their operations, including: reducing the downtime of robots, improving the reliability of systems and optimizing processes.

As they describe in the above video, there are great benefits when every robot is able to store and analyze its own usage data, and then is able to communicate that data smartly to other connected devices. For example, it means that ABB doesn’t have to schedule the maintenance of a robot by a simple, old-fashioned “after 10,000 hours of uptime”, which might be overly conservative. Instead, the robot itself can monitor its own actual usage and report on its performance. ABB can schedule maintenance of the robot at the perfect time to avoid interfering with its operations, by looking at when the robot is actually used most. It can also mean that problems are caught before they have even become problems.

KUKA

In 2014, KUKA integrated with Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform to create a “connected factory” of 60,000 devices and 259 robots. This 24-hour automated factory is able to manufacture automobiles very flexibly thanks to the IoT approach. This application shows that IoT concepts can be well and truly integrated into industrial robotics. We can expect to see many more examples like this turning up in the coming years.

Is There a Common Protocol for the Internet of Things?

One of the big issues facing IoT is whether there should be a common protocol, because, in order for everything to be able to communicate, the devices must be “speaking the same language.”

In the consumer world, for the moment at least, there are already four big competing protocols – Qualcomm’s AllJoyn, Intel’s IoTivity, Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Brillo. There are also a load of smaller platforms. Although these consumer protocols might be used for home robots, industrial robotics is going to need a slightly different protocol. Security will be paramount, not least because a successful hack could do real damage if it gained access to a robot. There are a few potential options for an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), including the Connext DDS protocol from RTI and Predix from General Electric.

You might think that it’s going to be difficult to decide on a standard. However, one of the proposed strengths of the IoT approach is that it (supposedly) does not rely on a standard protocol. It looks like the IoT might not end up with those long, heated discussions that we’ve had in the field of robotics research before we finally ended up with ROS as an (almost) universal platform.

Instead, the IoT is all about the communication paradigm between many devices regardless of the specific protocols used. For example, all of the robots in my factory might communicate using one platform, while all the robots in your factory might use a different platform. Even though my robots couldn’t communicate directly with your robots, we would both still be using the IoT approach. Despite this, it is likely that some sort of linking protocol will become necessary in the future. But for now, we shall just have to wait and see.

image: hjl/flickr

Anupam Chander’s paper, “Robots, the Internet of Things and the future of trade,” is the first effort to locate and analyze these complimentary technologies within an international trading framework. In this We Robot 2015 panel titled Robot Passports, Chander asks whether international law – that ultimately seeks to liberalize the exchange of both goods and services – can help stave off attempts to erect border barriers to this new type of trade.

Goods and information services can both be defined as smart objects of the 21st century and are thus are subject to multiple means of government protectionism, but also trade liberalization.

WeRobot 2015 Panel 2: “Robot Passports”
Author: Anupam Chander
Discussant: Ann Bartow
Paper: http://bit.ly/1QBX2fp

The devices that we interact with in our everyday lives are getting ‘smarter’: we wear smart watches, carry smart phones, and many of us are now living in smart homes that are equipped with intelligent automated devices. Some of these home devices, such as thermostats and lights, can already communicate with smart phones, so that you can control them without even having to be there.

As our homes become increasingly automated, will we eventually be living inside what is essentially a robot?  Given that smart homes can collect data and learn about your daily habits, and come up with the optimum time to turn on/off different devices in the home, what should this giant robot optimize for?

They want to communicate more accurately, resolve issues faster and with higher levels of satisfaction than at present. They also want to enable more complex communication. And they want to do it amiably. As we move toward the Internet of Things, more players will enter the fray – all having the same goal.

Google appears to be acquiring people and companies to build a better human interaction interface. This interface can be the front-end of search, IoT devices, robotics and voice systems. Even if Google keeps their algorithms private, the first to deploy complex communication modules that can understand and resolve queries is going to have a big winner on their hands.

Certainly Google is going all out in this endeavor:

• Ray Kurzweil has been at work at Google for over a year now to develop natural language understanding. If successful, Google’s computers will be able to pick up semantic meaning enabling people to ask more complex questions.
• Just last week Google acquired DeepMind, a British AI start-up with some high-profile investors and a whiz kid founder (Demis Hassabis). DeepMind’s forte appears to be smart recommendations for online commerce.
 
• Facebook attempted to buy the deep learning group within DeepMind but Google outbid them.
• Deep learning is AI that trains AI to recognize patterns within streams of data instead of programming immense decision trees. For example, DeepMind trained software to play an Atari video game without teaching it the rules. The software had to learn through trial, errors and low scores.
• Google has hired and bought up leading researchers in AI for years including Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig and Geoffrey Hinton.

In a recent New Yorker article by Gary Marcus, Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again, it was clear that AI has received a lot of enthusiastic press attention over the years but hasn’t delivered upon those promises. Perhaps Google is on the right track toward converting all that desire into reality.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Google acquires Nest for $3.2 billion
• Amazon isn’t the only delivery service testing flying robots
• Apple, Amazon and now Google: It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics!
• What were the top stories in robotics from 2013?
• Forget the octocopter, let’s talk about Kiva

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