How Cloud is Shaping the Future of Robotics

How Cloud is Shaping the Future of Robotics

You may not have been paying close attention to the robotics industry lately, but there are a lot of interesting things going on among people who make machines fight and pick things up for a living, among other tasks. One of the more intriguing — if highly experimental — segments of robot design right now is a concept called “deep learning.”

Though deep learning is still in its infancy in terms of development, it’s an aspect of robotics that could mean serious change for how we approach everything from daily tasks to complex problems. “Deep learning” refers to the ability for machines to know how to learn, rather than just repeat. This will allow robots to examine problems and make inferences in order to come up with a solution.

This research is at the core of artificial intelligence, basically. What researchers are thinking about now, though, is that the ability to reason things out has limits when only one robot can do it. In order to really “think,” robots will need a huge number of algorithms and mathematical techniques to move forward.

This is where cloud computing comes in to fill in the blanks left by other research into artificial intelligence. A key part of a robot is often mobility. For this reason, the amount of hardware a robot can contain is extremely limited. A vacuum, for example, can’t sport a giant box of hardware on top of it. Using cloud solutions, a robot can access a potentially unlimited amount of data and information.

How would this type of robot work in action? Say your robot is designed to clean your house. On the counter is a new type of sponge it can use. A pre-programmed robot might ignore the sponge, having no knowledge of what it is. A robot hooked up to a cloud hosting network could use data from other robots like it and understand what the device is used for.

Cloud computing solutions could be important for robotics in many ways. Many tasks we perform easily and automatically, such as picking items up and recognizing faces, takes a huge amount of processing power.

Do you think cloud solutions and hosting services could impact and improve robot technology? Let us know in the comments. Links like this.