Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 13Robots and Cobots

The One-Sentence Definition

Today’s robots can be defined as intelligent machines that can understand and respond to their environment and perform routine or complex tasks autonomously.

What Are Robots and Cobots?

In this data-driven age, it’s the intelligence and ability to act autonomously that define robots and separate them from other machines.

We’ve had equipment that can automate industrial functions for hundreds of years, but, surprisingly, the word “robot” wasn’t coined until 1920. Czech writer Karel Capek, best known for his science fiction, used the word in his play R.U.R. (translated as Rossom’s Universal Robots) to describe artificial automata. (In the play, the robots ended up going on a killing spree, which might explain the origins of our mistrust of robots.)

The first industrial robot, called Unimate, was invented in 1950. Early industrial robots would be programmed to complete certain functions in, say, manufacturing settings, and were used to replace repetitive manual labor. In the last couple of decades, robots have become more advanced, with greater intelligence and more automation. This is largely thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) (Trend 1), sensors and the IoT (Trend 2), and big data (Trend 4). Without the advances in these fields, many of the amazing examples I outline later in the chapter wouldn’t be possible. Today’s robots are not only physically more robust and flexible than early industrial robots, they’re also much ...