Earlier this month, the SXSW interactive conference held a session on Cloud Robotics: Instant Scalability and Capability. The panel was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal as one of the moments that stood out at the conference:

The implications are vast: Robots could draw on the experiences of other robots to better perform tasks such as customer service or even surgery. Self-driving cars could be connected to a global library of maps and real-time traffic data. There could even be a robot app store for machines to instantly get new capabilities.

 

Robots could also become better human companions, since they would be constantly learning from the examples of others, says Ken Goldberg, a professor at University of California Berkeley, who studies cloud robotics and participated in a panel on the topic.

 

It sounds like the Matrix, but the development of self-driving cars and the “Internet of Things,” in which ordinary objects such as your refrigerator are connected to the Web, show how these scenarios are already under way.

 

Panelist Ken Goldberg has been involved in several CCC visioning activities on robotics. Most recently, last fall the CCC brought together participants from industry, academia and government to discuss opportunities in advanced manufacturing for robotics, automation and computer science. Read the report here.

Last spring, an updated robotics roadmap report, Robotics Roadmap 2.0, was presented to Congress. The updated report was a follow-up to the CCC-sponsored roadmap that was published in 2009. The roadmap led to the creation of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) in 2011, which is jointly sponsored by NSF, USDA, NASA, and NIH.