Tag Archives: robotics

Amazon Is Well on Track to Become a Fully Robotized Retailer

Amazon’s latest forays into robotics have left me thoroughly impressed. Take a look at this awesome presentation of one of the company’s most modern order fulfillment centers:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse-robots/^

Now combine this with the company’s obvious direction of turning into a delivery behemoth. Amazon is rather coy about this aspect, but why else would it be buying up planes^ and making airport^ investments^? This is only the beginning I believe. I see the company making use of robotic planes and a massive fleet of self-driving trucks in the near future.

I don’t really think that delivery via aerial drones will make it past the marketing gimmick stage. At most, it will perhaps become some sort of exclusive service – expensive and inefficient, at least for the customer. In any case, Amazon is well positioned to become a “full stack retailer” – a seller that controls the entire distribution chain. And there are signs that “retailer” is not enough.

Given the company’s (mostly) successful ventures with producing television and electronics, I wouldn’t be surprised if it begins buying up farms in becoming a full stack grocer as well. Then, I would expect Amazon to bring its robotics expertise into automated farming. There already have been plenty of experiments in that field.

Last but not least, check out this fully automated experimental grocery shop where there are no human employees (to see at least):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc^

To be honest though, I’m not so sure if I like this last one. This fully robotic retail world might rob some people of even the little human interaction they get when they go into a shop. We might be taking some things a bit too far. But then again, shops might soon entirely cease to exist. I’m quite sure Amazon’s vision of the future is to remove all “wasted” shelf space and move everything online. And for those who wish to actually see the groceries they’ll buy, there’ll probably be a virtual reality shop in some years.

I am also slightly worried about the privacy aspects of some of the company’s ventures. Not only about these shops where electronic eyes watch everybody, but also cloud services such as Alexa^ that create and memorize accurate snapshots of the customer’s preferences and even personality. It’s a well-known strategy to bait people into accepting various losses of rights under the guise of introducing “much-needed features”. But let’s wish for the best and have faith in society’s ability to self-regulate and evolve.

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Kitchen 3.0

The age of interconnected devices and gadgets is slowly dawning. This category of communications-capable electronics has been labeled “the Internet of Things” – somewhat of a misnomer now-a-days when it is obvious that the security threat of any machine reachable from the Internet is enormous. Perhaps quantum cryptography will one day address this issue. Until then, home owners will probably be safer by using offline “smart home controllers” with manually-upgradeable firmware in what will be an Intranet of Things.

Irrespective of the name, this new wave of electronics is still barely in its infancy. Any company worth its salt has to prepare for how business will change in the coming decades. And there’s nothing more disruptive than what is basically the rise of the first mainstream generation of highly task-optimized robots. Indeed, a smart refrigerator is basically a robot focused on a certain task.

While the first robots accessible to everybody will still function very much like our current appliances, their smarts will open up a myriad opportunities for ground-breaking innovation. Because the kitchen contains a large amount of appliances, let’s explore how all these can be interconnected in order to provide an evolutionary leap when compared to today’s emerging Kitchen 2.0 where we do have smart devices but they are working by themselves rather than in cooperation.

The purpose behind any post in this Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine we’ll find in the kitchens of the near future (coming decades). Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Among its kitchen brethren, the refrigerator is going to see some of the largest changes to the way it operates. First of all, it will be able to manage its own contents and automatically order things its owners usually consume. Secondly, it will become smaller due to the increased efficiency in food delivery.
  • The way goods arrive in our household will fundamentally change, paving the way for new companies to establish themselves or creating new opportunities for profit for existing companies, such as Walmart which, 7 months after this article was published, has started experimenting with deliveries directly to the refrigerator^. Almost all perishable goods will be delivered by robots, most likely by self-driving trucks. We can’t exclude aerial drones that land packages on the rooftop of buildings. However, this is far less energy efficient and current experiments with this technology are either marketing gimmicks or attempts to create a segment for very fast but also very expensive shipping.
  • After delivery, a property’s own small transport robots will take the goods and store them in a Central Refrigerator. From there, the products will be distributed upon request to individual household refrigerators.
  • There will be no need for a refrigerator to have more than a day’s quantity of milk because more milk will be just 1 to 5 minutes away. Apartment buildings will have a Central Refrigerator somewhere in the basement, so quite close to family refrigerators. Product delivery will be slightly longer for areas with villas (due to the Central Refrigerator being located in a separate building somewhere close by).
  • All food orders will go to the Central Refrigerator. This will, in turn, bulk orders together and get the best offers from various warehouses in the area. Such a system will also save power due to having more efficient storage and much less heat leakage – the main door of this large refrigerator will almost never open because small delivery robots will go in and out through isolating access hatches.
  • Cooking a meal will often be as easy as pressing a button. People will be able to download recipe-programs for their kitchen. A recipe will therefore consist of a list of items that the refrigerator has to order and a set of instructions for various kitchen appliances. Some ingredients such as flour, sugar, oil, will be available to purchase in packages with the exact dosage required for the recipe, reducing waste and making it easier for Kitchen 3.0 to prepare the recipe.
  • Kitchen appliances will be integrated in one single block inside which ingredients can be transported from one section to another using various robotic arms. I’ll call this the Kitchen Block. Products that don’t require refrigeration will be brought from a larger storage compartment, either inside the home or a common storage location used by more families.
  • Baking a cake for example will consist of the mixer requesting items from various storage locations. The mixer will also be able to assign tasks to other sections of the Kitchen Block, such as asking the oven to toast some nuts before sending the cake batter to it.
  • All appliances will therefore be a part of a single unit, able to give instructions to each other. This will be done using preferably open source protocols and open standards, which is probably the only way for the manufacturers of various robots to be able to allow these machines to work with each other.
  • There will still be plenty of room for people to cook by themselves if they so wish, but more and more citizens will become recipe downloaders and/or developers. Creating a recipe program will probably not be so difficult, since in the coming decades computers will be operable using natural language. This transition is already taking place.
  • Despite the recipes being programs, they will be human-readable, making it very hard for an attacker to hack Kitchen 3.0. Combined with a strict security policy based on user approval and only minimal communication with the Central Refrigerator and similar “Master” robots, Kitchen 3.0 has good security prospects.
  • On the topic of Master robots, does every home really need something as complex as a Kitchen Block? Perhaps it should belong together with the Central Refrigerator, serving more than one household. This way, costs will be kept down and cooking will be more efficient. Then, Kitchen 3.0 could be split into a central section and a trimmed down “thin client” located inside each family’s home.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get anybody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2017-02-16 – 1.0 – Written.
2017-09-23 – 1.0.1 – Added a link about Walmart experimenting with deliveries directly to the refrigerator.
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China’s Awesome Robotics Challenge

It’s called RoboMasters and it’s more important than it may seem. At first sight it could be classified as a nerdy game show. It is much, much more than that. The article below (and the video it contains) will beautifully demonstrate:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/27/13059144/dji-robomasters-robot-drone-battle-video-frank-wang-interview^

Robotics company DJI has been very smart in how it organized the game show. It’s a beautiful way to attract talent and reward the dedication of China’s students. I feel that this can become a long term commitment, a championship, and could turn out as one of the world’s leading benchmarks in robotics.

This has seriously impressed me. I’m seeing a fascinating amount of innovation and initiative arising from China in the past few years. The country is on the rise in a deeper, more meaningful way than in the “manufacturing powerhouse” decades.

My only worry regarding creating a thinking robot that can defend its base against all attackers is… well… think about it. Despite the scary scenarios that the thought may invite, in fact, I don’t believe artificial intelligence will arise as soon as others think. However, I do think that in a couple of decades it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate between a human and a robot when it comes to certain disciplines. Combat is one of these disciplines. You don’t want this sort of AI in the hands of terrorists.

We’re strolling into uncertain territory. I wish that AI researchers will be careful with all their programming in the coming decades. I wish they will keep ethics in mind and be aware that AI shouldn’t be thought of as some sort of servant, but as a partner. The desire to control and dominate will lead to nothing good.

For now, we could say it’s mostly advanced remote controlled machines fighting in the RoboMasters arena. But sooner or later we might have something that is not that much different from ourselves there, with all the ethical implications this will entail.

Related: more robotic innovation from Asia: here’s Japan’s sweating robot^.

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