Abstract:

Traditional industrial robots show up without any software besides a compiler or interpreter for a robot motion language, and no external sensors or safety systems.  Systems integrators and consultants are used to define how the robot will operate in a production line, sensors and interfaces to other machines are procured, and a specific new program is written for the application.  In this talk I will describe a new way of thinking about industrial robots, where they came with sensors, machine interfaces, a User Interface, and in intelligence software stack that together provide most of the control that is needed to get the robot to do useful work. 

Factory workers then show the robot what it is to do, in task coordinates rather than robot coordinates, and the robot is able to carry out the task and notice anomalous situations.  The robots are not very intelligent by the standards of AI researchers, but they are robust and reliable, and just a little intelligence makes them so much more powerful than traditional industrial robots.