Robots with advanced capabilities touted by celebrities, companies as technology revolution beckons
Robots big and small are rapidly changing the way we lead our lives. See how some of Australia and the world’s companies are incorporating them into our lives. See the video.
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Many of us grew up entertained by the fussy and worry-prone C-3PO droid as he and his mechanical counterpart R2-D2 found themselves at the centre of key moments of galactic history in Star Wars.
And who could forget androids Lore and Data in the Star Trek franchise, as they blurred the lines between human and machine.
These mechanical creations, which seemed absurd and farcical in fantasy and sci-fi narratives, are now being normalised in human reality.
And while there may be a lack of C-3PO-like droids wandering around our cities or R2-D2’s in our homes, there’s another graduation of autonomous machines leading today’s robot revolution.
We only have to look as far as US president-elect Donald Trump, where a robot patrols the perimeter of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
The robotic dog named “Spot” made by Boston Dynamics is the latest tool in the arsenal of the US Secret Service and comes after two assassination attempts on the Republican’s life.
Robots were also a major talking point when Kim Kardashian posed with one in a photoshoot in November.
Going topless under a puffy black jacket, the 44-year-old sat on the robot’s lap as it posed in the driver’s seat of her custom Tesla Model S car.
Then, there are the robots you don’t see, like the ones doing the majority of heavy lifting in retail fulfilment centres, helping ensure those end-of-year sales purchases arrive on-time.
Amazon is at the forefront of this technological innovation, harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to revolutionise its operations in the US, and at its fulfilment centre in Kemps Creek in New South Wales.
Robots Sequoia and Cardinal take turns selecting an item out of a pile of packages delivered via a chute and place it into the appropriate cart before it’s brought to a truck in the loading dock.
The second robot transports inventory directly to a storage system or to an employee picking out items for a customer order.
“It’s exactly the same sort of thing as what a person would do but that lifting, that reaching and that bending is now being done by a robot,” Mikell Taylor, principal technical product manager at Amazon Robotics, said.
“Introducing these automation systems and reducing, or sometimes entirely eliminating, the need for people to do that heavy lifting, especially out of their power zone, is really our goal.”
Amazon’s latest robot, Proteus, goes even further where it knows how to work with and around humans.
“We invest heavily in making robots pleasant for people to be around so it’s not annoying people, so workers are happy to have it in their environment, and we have a lot of investments like that as we see this sort of partnership between people and robots strengthening in the future,” Ms Taylor said.
Australia Post uses robots to help load parcels at its Brisbane parcel facility, while DHL also uses robots at their fulfilment centres
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Robots are also helping process supermarket orders after Coles spent $400 million to build automated customer fulfilment centres in Melbourne and Sydney, while autonomous machines are also counting the daily inventory at Kmart.
Then there is the software which could be installed in future robots.
It is already aiding the distilling business, with new research showing artificial intelligence algorithms can determine whether a whisky is of American or Scotch origin and identify its strongest aromas better than humans.
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging in Germany trained an AI molecular odour prediction algorithm called OWSum on descriptions of different whiskies.
Then, in a study involving 16 samples – nine types of Scotch whisky and seven types of American bourbon or whiskey – they tasked OWSum with telling drinks from the two nations apart based on keyword descriptions of their flavours, such as flowery, fruity, woody or smoky. Using these alone, the AI could tell which country a drink came from with almost 94 per cent accuracy.
Andreas Grasskamp at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV said the groundbreaking research could be more widely applicable.
“While we are confident that our AI approach and machine learning methods are now, in some aspects, on a level with a human sense of smell,” he said.
“People want products to smell good and so what we’re looking to achieve with these methods in the coming decade is to increase the efficiency with which we can determine whether a material is suited for the consumer.”
Niusha Shafiabady, an associate professor of computational intelligence at the Australian Catholic University’s Peter Faber Business School has modelled the jobs most likely to be affected by robots and AI, with jobs in manufacturing and automation, education and health services, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality on the cutting block.
“Our life is changing because of this boom of technology and a lot of things will be taken over and changed for the future generation – life will be totally different from what we have experienced as kids,” she said.
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Originally published as Robots with advanced capabilities touted by celebrities, companies as technology revolution beckons
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