Robot Revolution opened on Thursday, May 21, 2015 and will run through Sunday, January 3, 2016. Robots have been featured in mainstream pop culture for years, familiarizing and personalizing robots for the general public.
The Maschinenmensch robot in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist silent film Metropolis (1927); Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories I, Robot; Robby the Robot in The Tempest adaptation Forbidden Planet (1956); Rosie the Robot on the Hanna-Barbera animated television series The Jetsons (1962-63, 1985-87); Robot from Irwin Allen’s C.B.S. television series Lost in Space (1965-68); R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Star Wars series; the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica (1978-79), its sequel, and remake shows and telefilms; the Terminator T-800 Model 101 from The Terminator (1984) and its sequels; Bender in the FOX and Comedy Central animated television series Futurama (1999-2003, 2009-2013); and the eponymous robot in the Pixar animated film Wall-E (2008), are a few amongst many robots that people may recognize from books, movies, and television shows. The first toy robot for consumer purchase is believed to be the yellow tin robot, Lilliput, made and sold in Japan in the mid-1940s.
Robot brains are computers. The software written in computer code that controls their actions are algorithms, a series of logical steps that help the robot decide what to do with the information at hand. Computer code boils down to questions with only two answers: “true” or “not true.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, expects demand for qualified robotics engineers to grow by as much as 13% through 2018. Additionally, the National Association of Colleges and Employers ranked mechanical engineering, which includes robotics, fourth on its list of most in-demand bachelor’s degrees for its Job Outlook 2015 survey. The same survey also ranked mechanical engineering number one among the top engineering degrees in demand.
The consumer-robot market is the fastest growing, according to research done by Business Insider Intelligence. The market for consumer and office robots will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17% between 2014 and 2019, seven times faster than the market for manufacturing robots.
By 2019, the consumer robot industry is predicted to be a $1,500,000,000 market. To date, robots have been used in forty-three disasters worldwide, according to data provided by Texas A&M University’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (C.R.A.S.A.R.).
Robot Revolution’s sponsors are Google.org, The Boeing Company, RACO Industrial Corporation, The David Bohnett Foundation, The Kaplan Foundation, and official airline United Airlines. Google, Inc.’s interest in robots is more than academic. The company is best known for the Google search engine, Google Maps, and the gmail e-mail service, but in recent years it has invested in the development of fully-automated cars and other robots.
The timing of the exhibit’s opening was opportune. The DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015 Finals were just held in Pomona, California. An agency of the U.S. Department of Defense D.A.R.P.A. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), makes grants to small teams that develop new technologies that often have civilian as well as military applications. The D.R.C. Finals took place June 5-6, 2015 at Pomona’s Fairplex.
“The DRC Finals required robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators,” stated D.A.R.P.A. The winning team, Team Kaist of Daejeon, Republic of Korea (South Korea), and its robot DRC-Hub, received the $2,000,000 grand prize, D.A.R.P.A. announced.
D.A.R.P.A. awarded $1,000,000 to the runner-up, Team IHMC Robotics of Pensacola, Florida, and its robot Running Man, and $500,000 to the third-place team, Tartan Rescue of Pittsburgh, and its robot CHIMP. Program Manager and D.R.C. organizer Gill Pratt congratulated all twenty-three of the participating teams. D.A.R.P.A. stated he also “thanked them for helping to open a new era of partnership between robots and humans.”
“These robots are big and made of lots of metal and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety,” said Pratt. “But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell. And what did people do every time a robot scored a point They cheered! It’s an extraordinary thing, and I think this is one of the biggest lessons from DRC – the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us, but to help connect people to one another.”
The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr noted, “Given that Google bought multiple AI and robotics companies 18 months ago on a secret shopping spree, including a Japanese one, Schaft, which won the first round of the Darpa challenge, it’s hardly surprising that Page has turned up for what is the World Cup of cutting edge robotics. Or what Gill Pratt, the programme director at Darpa who designed the competition, calls ‘the Super Bowl for nerd’. Because what Google is planning to do with its robots is one of the many hot topics of the weekend. The company has “gone dark”, Will Knight of MIT Tech Review says. ‘Nobody knows. It’s a complete mystery. Though it’s also possible that even Google doesn’t know what to do with them yet.’”
Source: examiner.com