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Future Enterprise - Intelligent Robots
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
Robots are slowly but surely edging towards more advanced states of cognitive development, sentience and higher intelligence. This will change the way society and business integrates this technology within its own processes and workflow, creating the emergence of a robotics industry as significant and far-reaching as the original computer revolution of 50 years ago.
A key capability currently being applied is to allow robots to sense their surrounding environments and make decisions based on adapting to that environment based on its structure and dynamics.
Powering these advances is improved access to cheap computing power from multicore processors and grid architectures as well as new AI techniques, to assist develop machine learning and autonomous adaptation. These developments have permitted scientists to make progress on many of the hard problems fundamental to making robots practical, such as voice and visual recognition, autonomous navigation and complex operational decision-making.
These advances also offer new ways to manage complex activities over distributed networks involving concurrency and coordination of operation, often based on large arrays of input sensors and output command actuators, to handle multiple simultaneous tasks. Such activities operate as separate processes or decentralised software services- DSS, run from multiple servers, eventually aggregated via the internet on control web sites. Combined with broadband wireless technology this level of coordination makes it easy for example to monitor and control a group of robots from a remote location using a web browser.
In addition, humanoid robots are now being programmed to learn a sense of self and express emotions- paving the way for them to manage their own components and systems autonomously if repair or reconfiguration is required- for example in remote isolated environments.
Future Trends
Advances in robotic intelligence and self-awareness will have far-reaching implications for the future enterprise. Robots in the future will become more autonomous and sociable allowing them to be involved in more complex and creative decision-making and social interaction with humans, as already occurs at a more abstract virtual agent computational level in the field of financial engineering and trading. At the same time their level of productivity will be higher, significantly reducing enterprise costs.
Over 3 million personal humanoid robots were in operation worldwide in 2005, assisting the disabled, cleaning and monitoring home and office environments and managing energy and security requirements.
By 2010 10 million intelligent robots are projected to be in operation, integrated into most routine tasks in homes, offices and businesses- supplementing and complementing scarce labour resources and integrated into a web service IT environment.
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