Articles
In Asimov’s distant future on a faraway planet, the lines between machines and humans have become very much blurred; these robots can develop feelings, and some humans even fall in love with the machines.
Is this the future ahead of us? Robots are getting ever more sophisticated. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), they learn and evolve. Already they beat us at Chess and Go, while – more practically – they are becoming indispensable for running warehouses and factories. Their potential is huge: helping astronauts in space, diving deep into the oceans, driving autonomous cars and trains, and going where humans can’t, such as dangerous mine shafts and radioactive sites.
But, first, robots have to learn to collaborate – with us, and with each other. Our cover story explores collaborative robotics, and how so-called ‘cobots’ are beginning to really give us humans a helping hand.
Overall, this month’s issue has a robotic theme. Robots have been around for a long time, of course, but most of them have been performing tightly prescribed tasks. They simply could not operate outside the confines of a factory. Robots, however, are now transforming many areas of our lives – such as agriculture, despite all the messy biology that comes with it. This is another topic we look into in this issue.
As most of you, our readers, are mechanical engineers, the chances are that you have seen Robot Wars on TV. Well, the show has made a comeback, and we take a look at the 21st-century fighting machines.
When it comes to fighting robot wars, though, I don’t expect “Terminators” to stalk our streets any time soon. Still, robots pose a security risk, because our helpful, intelligent friends are also eminently hackable.
When cyber criminals unleashed the WannaCry ransomware attack recently, we may not have been surprised to see the odd university department or doctor’s surgery crippled. However, who would have expected that a well-known and already patched vulnerability could bring manufacturing facilities to a halt (as happened to Nissan in the UK and Renault in France), cripple FedEx in the US, mess with the display boards of Germany’s national railways, and force much of the UK’s National Health Service to return to pen and paper? We examine what manufacturers have to do to avoid falling into cyber traps in the future.
Maybe robots will provide the solution for that, though. IT staff are always prone to missing an upgrade or failing to schedule an update, which gives hackers the opening they need. That’s why AI and robots are set to be central to our cyber defences. All we have to hope for now is that future HALs and T-800s will respect Asimov’s three laws of robotics and happily work, live and love alongside their human overlords.
And, last but not least, I invite you to meet Carolyn Griffiths, the new president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and a pioneer for safety on railways around the world.