Publisher’s Note: For the rest of this week in Money Morning we’re featuring our technology specialist, Sam Volkering. Sam’s currently putting the final touches on a major new piece of research. The article below gives you an insight into that research. Keep your eye out on Saturday, when he will release his groundbreaking report…
If you haven’t figured it out by now, this week we’re going crazy about robotics. And it’s all going to culminate in something at the end of the week we call The Hundredth Robot.
Watch your inbox. It could be the best thing you see all year.
But as we put the finishing touches on it, today we want to expand further on just how far robot technology has come in the last few years.
No longer are robots confined to the production lines of mass manufacturing. Robots are now finding their way into the world, and soon enough into our homes.
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One of the most popular robots in the world is the Roomba, the robot vacuum from iRobot. Roombas have been around since 2002.
The first few generations weren’t actually that good at vacuuming. But today’s models are much better and really do vacuum the floor. For a vacuum, though, they’re expensive. And for a robot, they’re boring. Better off with a Dyson.
Actually, just last week Dyson announced they too were getting into the robot game and announced a new vacuum, the 360 Eye.
Like Roomba it’s just a robot vacuum. But Dyson says it navigates and vacuums better than any other robot vacuum on the market.
If you ask us, we don’t care. Robot vacuums are boring and certainly not representative of robotics revolution to come.
Perhaps this little guy is a better representative.
That’s a robot in the picture. He’s made from silicon rubber. This rubber is super tough. These guys can withstand extreme conditions, even fire and acid.
Now, he’s not fast, but he’s mobile. His design allows him to move in any direction and carry heavy loads for his size.
This squishy robot is just an example of the kinds of conditions robots could exist in. Imagine if you could take this guy’s best qualities and combine it with other robot technologies?
The scary sounding ‘swarm robots’ have been in the news recently.
Harvard scientists described them as 1,024 tiny robots that work together to achieve an outcome. In other words, a swarm of individual robots work together without a central control system. You could say they have a mind of their own.
Swarm robot technology was inspired by nature. Bees, ants, schools of fish — these are what scientists looked to when developing the swarm.
And eventually, they were able to get the swarm to manoeuvre into specific shapes. As the Wall Street Journal explains, this was possible as, ‘[Lead scientist] Dr. Rubenstein and his colleagues developed a programming formula that allowed a very large group of robots to find each other and collaborate on a task, without requiring detailed moment-to-moment instructions.’
It’s unlikely that swarm robots will make their way into the home. But again, imagine if we were to take the best of swarm robotic technology and combined it with other emerging robotic tech. You might begin to see where we’re going.
Think about it this way.
Let’s take the 360-degree camera from the Dyson 360. Let’s take the resilience of the squishy robot. And let’s take the swarm robot ability to ‘collaborate on a task’.
Let’s put those features into one robot. Let’s give this new robot a 3D printed carbon fibre composite body. And let’s give him a wireless connection.
This is what we mean by technological compounding. This is what happens when technologies converge.
Now, if we can take just three robotic technologies available today and merge them into something like that…imagine what professional robot makers are working on.
Young, smart, tech-savvy people all over the world are working on new types of robotics. I know because last year I met three of them at Campus Party. Campus Party is a huge tech event where the best hackers, technologists and roboticists gather over a week to ‘hack the system’.
The kids I met were working on a robotics project. They were writing code furiously on their MacBooks. Their project included an array of processors, sensors and electronics, as well as 3D printed structures that were the robot’s arms.
These kids are the Jobs and Wozniaks of today. These are the kids who will make breakthroughs in robotics and build multibillion dollar companies.
And they’ll accomplish these things faster than their predecessors.
This is because they have the access to the technology…because they’re autodidacts. And because it’s their passion; it’s all they know.
Maybe they’re toiling away in garages for now. But that’s exactly how Apple started.
I’m not saying this group of kids is building the next Apple. But somebody is. And the next Apple will be a company based on robotics.
Robotics is the next massive wave of consumer technology. This wave will come with such speed and ferocity to the market that we won’t even remember life before consumer robots.
In a few years, you’ll be sitting with your home robot and you’ll ask them, ‘What was life like before you came along?’
Your robot won’t answer you. They’ll just show you a picture of a Roomba, and you’ll laugh at it together…
Regards,
Sam Volkering+
Technology Analyst, Revolutionary Tech Investor
The post How Technological Compounding Will Lead us into the Future of Robotics appeared first on Stock Market News, Finance and Investments | Money Morning Australia.
