Global Technology – July 2016
Once they’ve mastered the skills of “toddlerhood,” humans are pretty good at what roboticists call “motion planning,” which might involve the thinking needed to slip their hands around a screen to connect an unseen cable. For robots with multi-jointed arms, motion planning is a hard problem that requires time-consuming computation.
Consider this. When you think about a car assembly line, the entire environment is carefully controlled so that the robots can blindly repeat the same movements over and over again. The car parts are in exa.....