Q&A. Will Autonomous Robotics Take Control?

At Hannover Messe, DirectIndustry e-magazine met with Dominik Boesl, Corporate Innovation Manager at KUKA, to talk about the major challenges facing robotics in coming years.

From the four robotic revolutions to “robotic governance,” what will be tomorrow’s robotics?

DirectIndustry e-magazine: You’ve called cobotics the second robotics revolution. What’s next?

Dominik Boesl: We believe there are 4 revolutions in robotics. The first one is what we have been doing for 40 years—how to weld and glue a car together as fast as possible. This is industrial automation with big machines that work in a cage.

Tomorrow, the robot will come to the workpiece.

Cobotics is the second revolution and it has just started. We took the robot out of the cage and we have the technology to safely interact with it.

The third revolution will be when the robots become mobile. So far, the work pieces are coming to the robot. Tomorrow, the robot will come to the workpiece. We are already sliding into this phase because we have robots with mobile platforms.

The fourth revolution will be when perception and cognition come into play. So far, robots can navigate freely. But they’re programmed. It’s smart but not to the point that it can watch what I’m doing and reproduce it.