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.....