Controlling Robots With Applications
In the last decade, the impact of AI technologies has grown enormously and is affecting every industry. From dish-collecting robots to medical diagnoses that use deep learning algorithms, the current technological revolution is fast and widespread. But controlling robots doesn’t necessarily require speaking machine language.
The clincher here is that there really is no standard definition for a robot. Most use it to grab people’s attention. It’s a lot fancier to call something a robot than call it a dishwasher. A dishwasher is no less a robot than that image of a shiny humanoid you have in your heads. To keep things simple, a robot is any machine that automates a process or a task with speed and precision. We still haven’t been able to program robots with enough ‘common sense’ to safely function in a dynamic world. The kind of robots you might encounter are ones that do work that is too boring, dangerous or plain onerous. Most of the robots of today’s world are of this kind. They can be found across industries from medical, auto, manufacturing to space. We have put over a million of these robots to work for us.
Now for more robots to become as common as our humble dishwasher, consumers will need to be able to control and monitor them easily. Some robotics vendors are leveraging mobile phones to build robotics smartphone applications. These are applications that leverage the cloud and smart devices to manage the movement of robots. These apps could use the camera on smart devices to capture a scene and then overlay markers on certain nominated virtual objects that can then be manipulated spatially using gestures, inside the app. These swipes, taps and finger-drawn lines on the mobile device’s screen will equate into corresponding actions or movements from the robots in the real world. Using the device’s camera, the scene is then captured once you set up the virtual stage in this way. After, by manipulating the scene’s virtual objects, the user can give commands through the smart device. With the help of WiFi, these instructions can then be relayed to the robots. To process these commands, the robots could be equipped with a primary controller like Raspberry Pi boards. The main pro here is that it doesn’t require specialized equipment. Unlike conventional methods used to interact with sophisticated teams of robots, these applications, by leveraging the capabilities of the mobile device in tracking and controlling the robots, removes dependence on laboratory-grade and industrial-grade equipment. Meaning, potentially, one could merely take his or her mobile with the installed app, click a scene, and conveniently start controlling a bunch of robots connected to the system. This tool can have major implications for better-integrating robots into many industries and everyday life.
Smartphones have become all-in-one devices with useful features like maps, communication, and electro-mechanical machine control. They house a massive inventory of technologies that can be used to control robots, be it sensors like accelerometer, GPS, Bluetooth, screen sensitivity to touch, camera, powerful processor or application development. Making use of smart devices to control robots will give us a sense of freedom in this world of machines. Smartphone control can also enable control of robots away from home and allows manufacturers to incorporate variables to improve the experience for the consumer more easily. The downsides are security issues. You don’t want anyone hacking in for fun and have your household robot turn on at 4 am every morning to wake you up.
All in all, it makes sense to take this approach, which would simplify the use of robots and democratize access. Besides, we already rely on our smartphones for many tasks from discovering a good restaurant, shopping for our daily needs, scanning QR codes to get more information, to navigating the streets. Now, imagine using your smartphone to command household robots with yet one more easy-to-use application.
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