149 Ever since Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis introduced the world to the Maschinenmensch (literally “machine-person”) created by the scientist Rotwang. The world has both feared and awaited the arrival of the humanoid robot forms. More Versatility Until now the dream of creating such machines has remained firmly in the realms of science fiction, that is until the liberating development of cloud based computing. The future application of cloud based processing probably will have its greatest impact on service robotics, as hardware and processing space gets migrated to non locate systems, thus freeing robotic engineers to create lighter and ever more versatile creations. When highly complex navigation and processing being offloaded to a virtual brains in the clouds, the basic manual capacities can be upgraded to pre-existing machines, thus reducing the cost and need to redevelop hardware. Future Robots will interact through wifi or bluetooth connectors and react in real time to their environments while sharing collected data to remote teams, sometimes across the globe. Possible Applications The new applications of such robotics are limitless in space exploration, fire and sea rescue and of course combat situations too dangerous for real life personnel. Watch the amazing footage coming from Boston Dynamics and work of Marc Raibert’s team. Service Robot Upgrades Service upgrades are one of the shortcomings of robotics industry, this shortcoming has been their dependence of pre-installed software on purchase. Cloud Robotics will enable a freedom for robots by relying on the cloud computing as extra sources of memory and processing power can adjust to future capabilities, much like your phone installing upgrades remotely today. Cloud robotics services that take the pain out of the robot development lifecycle are a vital step forward on the path to increased robot affordability and ease of development Donne Thomas
