Skip to main content
Tech Radar TechRadar the technology experts
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
RSS
Asia
flag of Singapore
Singapore
Europe
flag of Danmark
Danmark
flag of Suomi
Suomi
flag of Norge
Norge
flag of Sverige
Sverige
flag of UK
UK
flag of Italia
Italia
flag of Nederland
Nederland
flag of België (Nederlands)
België (Nederlands)
flag of France
France
flag of Deutschland
Deutschland
flag of España
España
North America
flag of US (English)
US (English)
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of México
México
Australasia
flag of Australia
Australia
flag of New Zealand
New Zealand
  • Phones
  • Computing
  • TVs
  • AI
  • Streaming
  • Health
  • Audio
  • VPN
  • More
    • Cameras
    • Home
    • News
    • Reviews
    • Opinion
    • How to
    • Versus
    • Deals
    • Coupons
    • Best
Tech Radar Pro
Tech Radar Gaming
Trending
  • Back to school
  • Nintendo Switch 2
  • Best VPN
  • ChatGPT
  • NYT Wordle today
  • Best laptop
  • Best web hosting
Recommended reading
Generative AI images created by Mark Pickavance
Pro Companies are becoming more accepting of robotics in the workplace, survey finds - but for how much longer?
AI model distillation
Pro Brainpower unleashed: agentic AI and beyond bots
Sam Altman
Artificial Intelligence Sam Altman thinks superintelligence is within our grasp and makes 3 bold predictions for the future of AI and robotics: ‘We are past the event horizon’
A profile of a human brain against a digital background.
Pro The path to Agentic AI: overcoming complexity to embrace the autonomous enterprise
A profile of a human brain against a digital background.
Pro How Agentic AI transforms enterprise automation
Google Gemini AI Robots
Artificial Intelligence Google’s new Gemini AI model means your future robot butler will still work even without Wi‑Fi
London Tech Week 2025 sign
Pro London Tech Week 2025 as it happened - Jensen Huang, Keir Starmer and everything else we saw at the show
  1. Computing
  2. Software

The future of robotics

News
By Darren Yates published 6 July 2015

Check out the latest innovations when it comes to robotics

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

The future of robotics

The future of robotics

There's an old Walt Disney cartoon on YouTube called 'Modern Inventions', a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of how the world considered robots and what we as a society might end up doing with them, poking a little fun along the way.

When you consider it was made way back in 1937, it shows just how much – and for how long – we've been fascinated by robotics. What's even more intriguing is how its appearance in popular culture has changed very little since.

Robotics has obviously come a long way from those comical beginnings, but more often than not, it's hidden away behind factory doors, doing everything from building cars to filling your orders on websites. But that's all set to change.

Page 1 of 11
Page 1 of 11
225km/h with no driver

225km/h with no driver

While Google has captured most of the attention with its driverless car efforts over the last few years, many traditional car makers are quickly catching up and actively researching various aspects of driverless vehicles.

German carmaker Volkswagen is leading Europe's AdaptIVe (Automated Driving Applications and Technologies for Intelligent Vehicles) program, which includes a 'who's who' of engineering giants including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Bosch as well as universities from most of the major European motoring economies. The research project began in January 2014 and is expected to run over the next three-and-a-half years.

It looks like good progress is being made as well – in October 2014, Volkswagen subsidiary Audi and Stanford University teamed up to push an Audi RS 7 sports car around the famed Hockenheim track in Germany at race speeds of up to 225km/h, all with no driver, no human intervention – and no accidents.

Page 2 of 11
Page 2 of 11
Tech companies line up

Tech companies line up

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has predicted that up to 75% of all vehicles will be autonomous by 2040, making it a growth market all major tech companies are eyeing off – and sooner rather than later.

Google's Nexus 9 Android tablet is powered by Nvidia's equally-new Tegra K1 processor, but Nvidia has its eye on a much greater prize for the Tegra K1 than just phones and tablets. The new CPU is being touted as a solution for self-driving cars, with reports it has already been mated to a LiDAR (light radar) sensor used in many driverless vehicles to map terrain and obstacles in front of the vehicle.

Also interesting is the growing affordability of the technology involved – with much of it built on the rise and rise of low-cost computer processors. Here, it's enabling faster, smarter, more capable robotic systems to be built.

There is much more CPU horsepower inside the fitness band on your wrist than what guided man to the moon in 1969 and now, companies such as Renesas Electronics, ST Microelectronics and Freescale Semiconductor (all licensees of smartphone/tablet chip designer ARM) are major players in the automotive market.

Page 3 of 11
Page 3 of 11
Military robots

Military robots

Star Wars may have brought robots to the battlefield on the big screen, but the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is making it happen in real-life. We might not quite be at 'Attack of the Clones' stage just yet, but like most things, developments in technology often have military beginnings.

Engineering firm Boston Dynamics has been spending DARPA's money developing a range of walking/running bots or 'quadrupeds' with impressive results, including the Legged Squad Support System (LS3) pack-mule now being trialed for the US military, the impressive Cheetah in 2011-12, reaching just short of 50km/h, and the most-recent untethered version called WildCat, combining the freedom of the LS3 with some of the speed of Cheetah. It's not surprising then that Boston Dynamics was purchased by Google in December 2013.

Page 4 of 11
Page 4 of 11
From engineering to ethics

From engineering to ethics

At its basic level, the science of robotics is a marriage between mechanical and electrical engineering, but it also has many relatives coming along for the ride. As the technology becomes ever more sophisticated, software development increasingly plays a dominant role, which calls on other disciplines such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

That also pushes into the realm of 'machine psychology', the idea of machines thinking and morally reasoning like humans. Further and you reach into the theoretical area of 'cyberethics', looking at the issues of technology from a legal, moral and social perspective.

While the engineering involved in getting a car to drive itself has progressed incredibly over the last ten years, that still may be an easier feat than working out some of the ethical ramifications of the technology.

For example, you're in a driverless car travelling along a narrow road and just about to enter a single-lane tunnel when a child suddenly runs in front of you and trips over. Does the car swerve, injuring you, or remain on its straight course and injure the child? This 'tunnel problem', prompted by Ph.D. student Jason Millar from Canada's Queens University, is a modified version of the classic 'trolley problem' often used to discuss consequentialism, the ethical theory described as choosing a moral option that results in the 'the greatest good for the greatest number'.

Solving this dilemma from a human perspective is hard enough – but how would programmers code a driverless car to solve this problem? And who gets to make that decision?

Page 5 of 11
Page 5 of 11
Who to save?

Who to save?

Roboticists from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a joint-venture between the University of the West of England and University of Bristol, created a simple experiment of this 'who to save' style problem by programming a robot to prevent a human-simulating drone bot from falling into a hole, which it did successfully. But adding a second drone left the robot with a choice dilemma. In many of the test runs, the robot took so long to decide that both drones ended up in the hole.

The question being increasingly asked is how do you teach robotics morals? How do you embed robots with ethical theory to make decisions, sometimes based on these examples of the 'lesser of two evils'?

In fact, so crucial is the requirement for ethical thought becoming in general that the Australian Computer Society (ACS), which provides accreditation to local universities for degrees in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), has deemed it necessary that all new students undergo formal ethics training as part of their degrees – both undergraduate and postgraduate. That's to ensure future ICT professionals are adequately armed with the ability to tackle ethical and moral dilemmas an increasingly-technological society will likely face.

Page 6 of 11
Page 6 of 11
The end of car insurance?

The end of car insurance?

As the future of driverless vehicles is in the latter stages of research and early stages of implementation, cyberethics is coming to the fore as a serious and relevant question – and one that driverless car developers will have to answer to governments and society as a whole.

And it's already being grappled with - according to reports, California lawmakers wrote into the statutes allowing driverless cars that any new application will have a 180-day inspection cooling-off period before governments will allow it to be sold to the public. California isn't alone - other US states including Florida and Nevada have also enacted legislation covering driverless vehicles.

Another by-product of the impending arrival of driverless vehicles is the impact it may have on the car insurance industry. The general thinking is that 90% of all motor accidents are the result of human error – taking out the 'human error' may see claims fall by a similar amount, with some are already predicting this could spell doom for insurance companies as a result of falling premiums.

Page 7 of 11
Page 7 of 11
Jobs under threat

Jobs under threat

It's an example of where robotics is providing opportunities for some, but looks set to take them away from others. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported that new figures from the Australian Department of Industry show as many as 500,000 jobs are under threat of automation.

But the Australian Industry Report 2014 surprisingly suggests that 'being low-skilled does not necessarily mean that your job will be replaced by robotics'. Further, the report says 'robots are increasingly replicating the tasks of medium and high-skilled workers'.

However, department chief economist, Mark Cully, told the AFR fears of mass-unemployment and poverty amongst middle-class employees are 'overblown', with the report declaring automation will allow new technologies to deliver higher productivity and lower-cost products.

Page 8 of 11
Page 8 of 11
Industrial robotics

Industrial robotics

Part of that productivity increase is already coming from industrial robotics projects like Swisslog's AutoStore, which replaces human pickers and sorters with robotic ones on a major scale.

The system has already been installed by Australia's Catch Group to power the logistics of websites like 'Catch of the Day'. AutoStore isn't the only option in this area either – Amazon purchased Swisslog-competitor Kiva Systems in 2012.

If you think of the complexity of multiple bots running around picking items from thousands of bins, there's nothing easy about it. In fact, Amazon is organizing the first Amazon Picking Challenge at the 2015 International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Seattle this year to try and promote innovation in the area. It appears to be aiming as something of a 'DARPA Grand Challenge' for the automated picking robotics industry.

You'll also start seeing autonomous industrial robots turning up in the most unusual of places – including the vege garden! Sydney University's Ladybird was designed by its Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) to provide autonomous farm 'surveillance, mapping and classification for the vegetable industry' and has been successfully trialed in Cowra, NSW.

Page 9 of 11
Page 9 of 11
Building your own robotics

Building your own robotics

But if you're not quite ready to commit to a university degree, there are plenty of alternatives you can try out. Today, the proliferation of low-cost electronics and computer chips means building your own self-propelled, self-monitoring robotic machines is almost 'silly' affordable. Whether it rolls or walks, you can pretty much build it now.

LEGO's Mindstorms NXT and newer EV3 systems are popular entry points, particularly for lower/middle high-school students that can start them off but also grow into reasonably complex designs. If you're a school teacher, there are numerous education packs available from local LEGO distributors, although be warned – they can become quite expensive.

Beyond (and even an alternative to) Mindstorms, the next entry point is Arduino, the open-source microcontroller circuitboard system developed in Italy, but now manufactured and sold all around the world. Arduino predominantly uses low-cost 8-bit processors that you program with a simplified C++ language called Wiring.

Arduino is more 'real world' than NXT and sophisticated enough to handle everything from simple hobby robots to eight-legged octopeds and multi-prop unmanned aerial vehicles (or 'drones'). Arduino can mate with all manner of electronic and mechanical devices and is a great next-step platform – but you have to do all the design work yourself. If you have the necessary electronics and software coding skills, Arduino can be a cheaper, but also more complex alternative to LEGO's Mindstorms platform.

Beyond Arduino, you're getting into the rarified air of 32-bit CPUs of the same class used in current fitness bands and trackers. These ARM Cortex M-series chips provide a serious jump in performance and are used by industry in all manner of embedded applications – even to handle wireless broadband control in smartphones and tablets.

Page 10 of 11
Page 10 of 11
The future

The future

Like most areas of science, society's engineering capabilities in robotics continue to stretch the current legal framework, particularly in motoring. From insurance and employment growth to ethical theory and the military, the future of robotics is causing much thought across all sectors as we figure out the ramifications of combining computer processing and all manner of motors into self-moving objects.

We've come a long way from the early days of Walt Disney cartoons, but you also get the sense that in the grand scheme of things and the potential the future has in store, we really haven't come that far at all.

Page 11 of 11
Page 11 of 11
Darren Yates
See more Computing News
Read more
Generative AI images created by Mark Pickavance
Companies are becoming more accepting of robotics in the workplace, survey finds - but for how much longer?
AI model distillation
Brainpower unleashed: agentic AI and beyond bots
Sam Altman
Sam Altman thinks superintelligence is within our grasp and makes 3 bold predictions for the future of AI and robotics: ‘We are past the event horizon’
A profile of a human brain against a digital background.
The path to Agentic AI: overcoming complexity to embrace the autonomous enterprise
A profile of a human brain against a digital background.
How Agentic AI transforms enterprise automation
Google Gemini AI Robots
Google’s new Gemini AI model means your future robot butler will still work even without Wi‑Fi
Latest in Software
Copilot Vision Desktop
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision can now see your entire desktop – but it probably won't judge you for the clutter
ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode
OpenAI really helped me finish my to-do list when it launched ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, and it can do the same for you
ROG Xbox Ally
Windows 11's handheld mode spotted in testing, and I'm seriously excited for Microsoft's big bet on small-screen gaming
WeTransfer website
WeTransfer issues flurry of promises that it's not using your data to train AI models after its new terms of service aroused suspicion
LinkedIn/Mike Matsel
Microsoft employee uses terrible AI-generated image to advertise for Xbox artists just weeks after massive layoffs
NotebookLM featured notebooks
Google transforms NotebookLM into a curated knowledge hub and I might be in geek heaven
Latest in News
8BitDo Pro 3
The 8BitDo Pro 3 is compatible with Switch 2 and could be a must-own retro gaming controller
A screenshot of part of the first poster for Supergirl showing the DCU hero sipping on a drink next to a graffitied Superman logo
First poster for Supergirl reveals near-full look at the DC comic book hero's outfit – and puts a rebellious spin on Superman's 'look up' tagline
Copilot Vision Desktop
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision can now see your entire desktop – but it probably won't judge you for the clutter
A Star Wars BDX Droid robot walking around Disneyland.
They’ve landed – Disney’s Star Wars BDX Droids are now roaming in Disney World
Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in Porcelain
Google sets the date for its next big Pixel roll-out and it'll bring phones, watches, and more
AWS Summit New York
“It’s a tectonic change” - AWS AI head calls agents "the most impactful change we've seen since the dawn of the internet"
LATEST ARTICLES
  1. 1
    I reviewed Marshall’s new Bluetooth speaker and it rocked my world with awesome audio and unbelievable battery life
  2. 2
    The 8BitDo Pro 3 is compatible with Switch 2 and could be a must-own retro gaming controller
  3. 3
    Microsoft’s Copilot Vision can now see your entire desktop – but it probably won't judge you for the clutter
  4. 4
    OpenAI really helped me finish my to-do list when it launched ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, and it can do the same for you
  5. 5
    Can a gaming laptop replace your PC? I put the MSI Titan 18 HX AI to the test for three weeks

TechRadar is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Contact Us
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Web notifications
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...