Third Industrial Revolution

Nowadays the world is changing drastically, and the humanity needs to adapt to the new context. We are living in the most significant known times of human history! History is being made in real time and most of us are not seeing it.

Image 1 - Illustration

The technology is evolving very fast, world is being very abused with all the human competition for the resources and now, more then ever, the life on the planet is under threat.

Artificial Intelligence

Advancements in artificial intelligence are making possible the creation of robots which can learn in real-time. Complex algorithms are opening a way for robots to recognize objects or learn new ones.

This kind of technology will allow the application of machines in more dynamic tasks.

In the next video we can see "ARMAR-III", a humanoid robot recognizing and learning objects dynamically and in real time.

Automation and Robotics Today

Coming to stay, ready to get our jobs...

They are coming, and nobody can stop this evolution. Their work is cheaper, they can work in the cold, in the hot, in the dark, they don't complain, they don't need vacations or even go to the bathroom. Its a dream of any boss!

Factories are implementing every kind of automation to replace employees, and their jobs are not coming back. The industrial tendency is to go fully automated, like "Tesla" Car's factory (Image 1) is trying to do (and is being very well successful I must say! ).

Image 1 - Tesla Factory producing cars

Robots around us...

Where are they?

The reality is that robots are no more science fiction, they are here and not just in a physical form. If we consider automated tasks as a form of robotics, then robots have being with us for a long time in form of software. Actually, nowadays there is even software that writes news articles by itself, and it makes it very well. An article referred to this can be found in the online site of "Weired" magazine: 

Image 1 - Illustration: Mark Allen Miller

"Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece(...)

Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners." - From "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter" article - (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/)

What robotics are?

Robotics are insert in a technology branch, which is constituted by several elements: Computers, automated mechanical parts, integrated circuits, sensors (and so on), that turn mechanical motorized systems, automatically controlled by electric circuits.

Image 1 - Humanoid Robot

In spite of some robots look like some kind of living "thing" that do its thing autonomously, they are in their essence just a combination of logic programming that makes them react with the environment changes, according to their programming.

Robots are usually known by their humanoid shape (like in Image 1), much due to scientific fiction movies, but that's not the reality. In fact, build robots based just on that shape is a huge irrational limitation, since that for some tasks it can be very restrictive. For example, if we want a robot for palletizing we just need the set of components to do it, that usually are a mechanical arm (Image 2). This configuration is very useful in industrial complexes and is being used for years.

Image 2 - Palletizing Robotic Arm