Bench Talk

Robots have captured our imagination since Leonardo da Vinci’s medieval sketches, but humanity’s mania with humanoid mechanical beings—friend or foe—has only intensified. The last century saw robots becoming a cornerstone of pop culture, showing up everywhere from books to films, TV shows, and songs, continuing the takeover of human entertainment.

Self-driving carts, smart shelves, cashier-less checkouts, and robotic delivery take grocery shopping to the next level of efficiency. Today’s consumers are as fickle as they are practical, but technologies are bringing highly accommodating smart shopping to stores near you.

The gift of sight via light detection and ranging (LIDAR) has enabled engineers to move beyond the development of robots that complete simple tasks to robots that can take on increasingly complicated workloads in safer, faster, and more cost-effective ways than ever before.

While industrial robots dominate—as the best option for low-volume, high-mix assembly in mass-manufacturing—in comparison to human dexterity, a new generation of lightweight robots promises to marry the best of man and machine.

The Olympic Games have become as much a showcase for a country’s high-tech capabilities as they are for the sporting events, but this year’s Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea takes this trend to a whole new level.

We may not (yet) have robots walking our dogs, but robots are certainly making their way into our daily lives. With names like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, robots are at our fingertips and are poised for even more advancements and applications in 2018. How do we prepare ourselves for this modern AI society? The answer: We must apply the three “modern” laws of robotics.

Hardware in the Loop (HITL) is the only practical way to test complex system hardware and software, and two ways of implementing it exist. Each approach has pros and cons, but in either case, developing the HITL installation can be a task as large as developing the system itself.

The rise of soft robotics is inspiring new materials and technologies that are able to sense certain cues—pressure, forces form different directions, vibrations, and more. Soft robotics use soft, compliant mechanisms and actuators, built using fluids and flexible materials, enabling a wide range of motion, making them more useful for things like exoskeletons or wearables. While soft robotics may sound a little wimpy, the reality is that the technology will likely punch way above its weight in terms of usefulness by blending the best of human with the best of mechanical in the near future.

Have you seen the recent Samsung commercial where a curious ostrich suddenly finds itself wearing a Virtual Reality headset solely by accident, and how it is presented with the idea of flight for the first time? Inspired by a new reality, the ostrich runs and flails its wings until one day it magically takes flight. (Yes, many of us TV viewers and the other ostriches watched on in disbelief—captivated.) It’s truly amazing what new worlds of opportunity this technology brings. And it’s not limited to only gaming or enhancing television.

High-performance, zero margin for error, extreme environments, and more are just some of the high-stakes challenges that space engineers face. New materials, louvres, space hardening, Whipple shielding, and artificial intelligence (AI) are just some of the ways space design challenges are addressed.