FUTURE OF ROBOTS KEYNOTE SPEAKER ON NEW TECHNOLOGY TRENDS, AI, DRONE ADVANCEMENTS AND MORE

Long confined to industrial factory floors, robots are poised to emerge as ubiquitous fixtures in everyday environments due to converging advances in mobility, navigation, natural language processing, vision capabilities and machine learning. All manner of new technology upgrades and future of work advancements hint at robots’ imminent integration into businesses and homes.

Perfecting bipedal locomotion remains active research as balancing two-legged motion is tremendously complex. But wheeled robots excel serving customers in retail and hospitality settings. Delivery robots will similarly become commonplace carrying packages and food using sidewalk sensors and GPS despite lingering challenges around weather hazards and unpredictable human interactions.

Enabling robots to manipulate objects with human-like dexterity remains extremely difficult engineering wise but critically underlies versatility in applications. Research around tactile sensors and gripping mechanisms continues as this capability could greatly accelerate adoption assisting elderly care services.

Artificial intelligence fuels robots’ improving cognition, situational awareness and decision making by analyzing visual, audio and spatial data. Cloud-assisted inference allows complex inferences about surroundings and interactive objects by tapping powerful off-site compute resources. 5G enables rapid data transfer.

As navigation and obstacle avoidance improves, flying drones and rovers gain access to spaces too dangerous, small or remote for direct human access like tunnels, contaminated sites and extraterrestrial destinations. High mobility fuels unique use cases.

Advances in natural language comprehension and speech recognition allow more intuitive voice-based human-machine interaction without needing screens, keyboards or remote controls. Biometrics can enable personalized experiences. As comfort levels rise, personal home assistants and companions are expected to emerge.

With capabilities maturing in parallel, robots transition from passive tools to collaborative partners and teammates. Blending digital dexterity and intelligence with emotional sensitivity, future robots promise to actively assist progress in business and society once basic technical challenges are solved over the next decade. Drones and automatons’ diverse capabilities can extend human potential.