The future of work
In the workplace, the factory of the future will become safer because “dumb” industrial robots and robotic vehicles will become “aware” of their surroundings and of the presence of a human – enhancing safety by ensuring that if a human enters the envelope of a robot’s movements it immediately understands what is happening and reverts to safe mode. While machine learning is being used to revolutionise task learning in factories and workplaces, there is still a need to keep a human in the loop to step in and override when necessary. We are getting to the stage where robots can be “taught” particular tasks such as the movement arc or the envelope of acceptable movement in a piece of work.
Likewise, we will have smart “to go” stores where you select your retail item, a vitamin drink perhaps, and when you leave the store it will be debited from your account, your loyalty points will be updated, and the shelf replenished, all from the actions of the sensors and cameras, and all without human interaction.
Conclusions
AI is driving the fourth industrial revolution. We live in truly exciting times where we can see the progress happening on a near-daily basis. The investment into AI and graphics is expanding at an exponential rate and new use cases are being developed by continuous innovation. It is compelling to witness these developments in computer and machine vision, adding intelligence to our world via sensors, edge devices and sophisticated performance IP
The use of dedicated chip IP for neural network acceleration is creating the “intelligent edge”, and we are seeing new “seeing technologies” being deployed there which will change our world.
About the author:
Andrew Grant is Senior Product Director at Imagination Technologies - www.imgtec.com