robotics and AI

A lot of the stuff we use today is largely made by robots—arms with multiple degrees of freedom positioned along conveyor belts that move in a spectacle of precisely synchronized motions. All this motion is usually programmed by hand, which can take hundreds to thousands of hours. Google’s DeepMind team has developed an AI system called RoboBallet that lets manufacturing robots figure out what to do on their own...

...“Because it works so fast, it would be possible for a designer to try different layouts and different placement or selections of robots in almost real time,” Lai says. This way, engineers at factories would be able to see exactly how much time they would save by adding another robot to a cell or choosing a robot of a different type. Another thing RoboBallet can do is reprogram the work cell on the fly, allowing other robots to fill in when one of them breaks down.