The Robots Are Coming
A special on how robots will enter your everyday life
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Robot chefs making your food? A Japanese amusement park has created a restaurant with more robots than human workers. A robot prepares 'okonomiyaki' - savoury pancakes - while another makes cocktails or doughnuts. For Japan, this is deadly serious: the experimental robotic chefs at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park are not just a gimmick to draw tourists. They are part of a government-aided project to examine which kitchen and food processes can be automated. Japan's ageing population and strict immigration controls mean robots are a future necessity, not a gimmick.
Meanwhile, Moley will launch the world’s first fully-automated and integrated intelligent cooking robot in 2018 - a robotic kitchen that has unlimited access to chefs and their recipes worldwide. This robotic chef can cook over 100 different meals for you - and cleans up after itself.
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Will robots be cooking for you? Increasingly so, when you eat out as well as when you stay home.
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Gita will carry your stuff around
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Vespa makes cool scooters. Now it's doing something new. Piaggio Fast Forward is a new division to focus on the future. Its first product is Gita, a robot that carries your stuff and follows you around. Gita is a circular drum that's highly mobile, and can carry 18 kg of groceries or anything else. You wear a special belt, Gita follows. You can see it in action here.
Photo credit: Piaggio Fast Forward (adjusted)
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Vespa has a great history, but history won't deliver the future. It's making moves so that history is not all it's left with. What about your organization?
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Robots are slow and clumsy, right?
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Most of the robots you've seen are slow, lumbering, easy to topple over - right? Think again. Once droids stop mimicking humans, things change. And it turns out all robots needed were wheels instead of feet.
Boston Dynamics unveiled a very quick, very agile wheeled robot with legs to investors. The footage was leaked on YouTube. You can watch it here. I think you'll agree that if robots start moving around like this, their involvement in our lives will only accelerate.
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I ask again: what are you doing today that will be done better and more cheaply by a robot in the years to come? Please think about it and prepare for a different future.
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