Contextual Robotics Forum 2015: the Future of Robotics

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

UC San Diego engineers, computer scientists and cognitive scientists also got an opportunity to show off their work at the event’s technology showcase, which was packed with people from industry, academia and the public sector. The robots on exhibit ranged from RUBI, a robot designed to play with and teach preschool children, to nanorobots from the laboratory of NanoEngineering professor and chair Joseph Wang.

In addition to UC San Diego researchers, the forum included a lineup of some of the most prominent leaders working in robotics industries today.

Marc Raibert, President of Boston Dynamics, talked about creating robots that mimic the way humans and people move. These dynamic robots aren’t just robots that do what we tell them to do; they also take cues and commands from their physical world. “I’m interested in making robots that have the functionality levels that we see in people and animals. That means things like mobility, dexterity and perception of the world around them,” Raibert said. He showed videos of the company’s iconic ATLAS and BigDog robots in action in rugged outdoor terrain.

Robots that augment human capabilities

Rob High, Vice President and CTO of Watson Solutions, IBM Software Group, leads teams that are developing cognitive systems able to learn and evolve thinking abilities as they encounter more complex problems. “It is our intention to use these cognitive systems for the purposes of augmenting human cognition,” he said.  This approach involves deep learning algorithms that analyze and understand text and other data and make predictions about how to handle and interpret the information.

A vision for the future of healthcare includes robots that augment the capabilities of doctors and surgeons. Jonathan Sorger, Senior Director of Medical Research at Intuitive Surgical and a Jacobs School bioengineering alumnus, described how advanced surgical robotic systems could “help surgeons see things they shouldn’t cut.” Intuitive Surgical is building robots for minimally invasive procedures that the company says are considerably safer than open surgeries. Such robots are adroit in suturing delicate tissues in the body, for example, and employ computer vision to enable surgeons to visualize areas they wouldn’t normally see with their own eyes, such as nerves and small tumors.

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