Forum 03/10/2005

“Robotics: Predicting the next 20 Years”

Bret Wallach – Vision Robotics Corp.

Over the last several decades, the promise of robotics for commercial and personal applications has gone largely unfulfilled.  The primary reason for this has been lack of computing power, which has prevented robots from having adequate capabilities for sensing their environments and making intelligent decisions regarding their tasks in thoseenvironments.  With processors getting exponentially cheaper per Moore’s Law, these limitations will be soon overcome, enabling a wide variety of robotic applications.  The inherent demand for robotics will cause rapid adoption, affecting virtually every aspect of our lives within the next two decades.  During this presentation, several state-of-the-art robotics applications along with their enabling technologies are considered, which, combined with historical trends, form the basis for
predicting developments in the field of robotics over the next twenty years.