Blog Ken

Today we continue to publish original summaries of the speeches of the speakers of the Russian Code Cup 2013. This time we present to your attention the report of Ken Goldberg.

Ken Goldberg, inventor of the world's first web-based robot, professor at the School of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

I would like to devote my speech to a discussion of modern robotics and its near future. Have you already heard about the “Googlemobile” that drives without a driver? I am often asked why Google is doing robots at all? I believe that this is due to the great interest of the "search corporation" in cloud technologies. Personally, I can’t imagine the future of robotics without the use of “clouds”. I suppose you are wondering: what kind of robots will they be that will not be able to work without the “cloud”? Let me tell you about cloud robotics and my latest research in this area.

I'll start with a historical excursion. The Internet as we know it was created about 20 years ago. In 1993, I first learned about www. My students and I wanted to come up with something interesting using this new technology. Our project was a garden robot connected to the network - "Telesad" ("Telegarden"). They arranged a flower bed with a diameter of 2 m and a height of 0.5 m, planted plants, installed a robotic “hand” in the center and wrote a simple browser interface. Of course, in 1993 there were few places where you could access the Telesad.

The robot made it possible to observe the plants through a video camera, as well as water them. Anyone could water our flower bed through the net. For those who spent N waterings, we gave seeds that could be planted with the help of a robot. Of course, over time, the number of remote users grew so much that they only interfered with each other, the flower bed fell into disrepair. So our experiment, among other things, clearly illustrated the saying about seven nannies.

Since then, both the Internet itself and robotics have come a long way. People have already begun to get used to robot vacuum cleaners, military robots are becoming commonplace, doctors are already operating about 2,000 medical robots, mainly in surgery. In general, robots have already entered our lives.

The orange boxes in this picture are robots that sort orders in the huge warehouses of companies like Amazon. Robots also deliver pallets of goods to human operators who directly collect orders.