What is Robotics?
(This answer is taken from my book ‘Innovate the Next: Success Frameworks to Innovating Products in Any Revolution’). This technology has come far. We’ve been hearing about robots since we were young. We’ve seen them in movies such as Paul Verhoeven’s, RoboCop (1987).
The robot in this movie is a cyborg, i.e. a fusion of human being and machine.
Peter Weller stars as a RoboCop; he is a real human being and a cop. He gets killed by a gang in the line of duty and is revived as a cyborg, at the behest of his employers, to continue fighting crime.
RoboCop was being of use to humans. That is what robots are intended to be, or do.
We are not yet at cyborg level in our innovation. Maybe we are in that we can fuse electronic objects to biological organs, e.g. a heart pacemaker.
Robotic machines are meant to assist, substitute or replicate humans. They take over repetitive jobs usually done by humans, e.g. manufacturing, assembly, packaging and mining.
Robots have been around for a while but the scale just keeps getting bigger as they become more and more autonomous. Today there are robots used for several different purposes: aerospace navigation, cleaning, military fighting and disaster response.
In the name of convergence and exaptation, they also fuse whatever innovation is available, e.g. military robots fusing sensors and artificial intelligence to discern between aggressors and unarmed kids and adults.
Maybe 10 years ago it was a dream to have a robot that could cook for you. Today, perhaps we are astonishingly close to achieving the goal of having a robot as your chef.
London’s robotics company, Moley, will soon start selling the first robotic chefs.
Sex robots are already here.
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Click here for the explanations of the other components of the 4IR (5G, Quantum Computing, Biotechnology, Autonomous Vehicles, 3D Printing, Decentralised Consensus, Iot, Nanotechnology, AI And Robotics).
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‘Innovate the Next’ is available on Amazon, on Takealot.com and in all South African bookstores.
