OLM1.1.

1 My Engineering Future – Field of Interest: Robotics

Development (5 things that have changed over the past 30 years)

1. Lidar sensors have changed drastically over the past 30 years since 1993, when John
Zayhowski invented the passively Q-switched microchip laser. This change affected
the Geiger-mode lidar as well as the Cyrax2400 3D scanner. Later on, in 2005 David
Hall’s Toyota Tundra fails to finish the DARPA Grand Challenge, but the spinning lidar
he used, became the basis for Velodyne’s HDL-64.

2. Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of the changes in robotics, in particular the

development of actuators. The first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2013 saw Boston
Dynamics create an Atlas humanoid robot that could open doors and turn valves.
Atlas was further developed in 2017 to be able to execute backflips.

3. The third main change in robotics over the years has been artificial intelligence. In
1997 an AI called DeepBlue beats the legend Kasparov at a game of chess. 1998
harked the birth of Kismet, a robot equipped with emotions. Roomba, a highly
efficient AI-powered vacuum cleaner, was invented in 2002 and in 2023 ChatGPT was
introduced. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that uses the data from its users to train and
fine-tune itself even further.

4. The gradual change in effectiveness and acceptance of automations have drastically

increased over the past 30 years. The DARPA challenge was the catalyst for inventing
driverless cars from 2004 to 2014. Then the levels of autonomy were defined in
2014, which lead to the 2017 bill of regulation of self-driving cars. Currently many
semi-autonomous cars are on the market, including Tesla, Mercedes and the Audi R8.

5. Robots for industrial/manufacturing use first appeared in the 1960s. They were
large, expensive, static and could only perform one or a small number of repetitive
tasks. Recent generations are far smaller, cheaper, mobile, autonomous and flexible.
Many can even be programmed by non-specialists or imitate their human
counterparts.

Future Changes (3 aspects that are on the cusp of changing)

1. Scientists have been working to develop brain computer interfaces (BCI) to

neurologically control robots since 1929. However, recent advancements have seen
this dream become a reality. Ultra-Electronics unveiled a BCI for piloting a
quadcopter in 2021, Neurable has a virtual reality game called Awakening that is
played using a BCI, and it is already possible to mentally control World of Warcraft
avatars. The issues preventing mass production of BCI’s are financial, but hardware
manufacturers are working hard to develop efficient and affordable headsets. They
may become available sooner than we expect with the American Chemical Society’s
progress this year in developing electroencephalography sensors.
 2. Currently, there is currently no missile defence system that can defend against
hypersonic weapons. A seemingly unstoppable hypersonic missile has a weakness
during its terminal stage, when it becomes slower than a ballistic missile. To exploit
this weakness, powerful laser prototypes have been developed by the US, Israel,
Russia and China. The issue faced is that a laser must be focused on a target for a few
seconds to destroy it, which is difficult for targets travelling thousands of kilometres
per second. Advancements of more efficient power sources, AI-assisted beam
modulation and miniaturisation of key components are contributing to the
emergence of laser-based missile defences against hypersonic weapons.

3. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), has become commercially available and widely
used. However, data availability and market demand result in today’s ASR models
unable to accommodate multilingual scenarios. Developments are being made for
fully multilingual ASR models available at commercial quality. Amazon Transcribe
supports automatic language identification for multilingual audio for 51 since 2022.
Facebook has developed XLS-R, a self-supervised speech processing for 128
languages to translate to English different languages spoken in the same sentence.
Anticipated innovation will see ASR systems become available for both low-resource
languages and mixed-language use cases within the decade.

Drivers of Change in Robotics (Past and Future)

The foundational driver of change in robotics has always been humans’ insatiable curiosity. It
means no matter how far human development advances, there will always be a thirst to
innovate further, learn more and produce new ideas. As technology advances, the
possibilities of change are expanded, widening the field of innovation. Innovation and
curiosity together create an everlasting loop of technological advancements that lead to new
discoveries of potential technology, that then become current technological advancements.

The major ethical motivation of robotic progress is improving physical health. Medically
equipped robots have the potential to prolong the lives of patients suffering debilitating
illnesses and diseases. Exoskeletons can completely change the healing process of patients
suffering injuries that require intensive physical therapy. Acting as external bones and
muscles, robotic exoskeletons train the patient’s body to move properly again. A physically
disabled person regaining mobility is just one example of the motivation to advance the
capabilities of exoskeletons. Another driver of robotic innovation in the medical sphere is
the goal to use micro robots to perform surgeries. If microscopic robots as small as a human
cell can perform surgery on a patient from within, patients will experience faster, less painful
recovery times and the process may become a lot safer with less risk of human error.

Without the capabilities of robots, humans would never have been able to overcome their
own limitations. Exploration of the remote and hostile environments of the deep sea, the
Solar system and even the planet Mars, has greatly spurred the innovation of robots.
Agricultural robots are also on the rise, as the number of young farmers is declining, yet the
physical demands of agricultural work remain. Driven by the decreasing agricultural aptitude
in the young populace, the University of Cambridge developed a robot that can identify and
harvest lettuce.