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NEWS RELEASE
Technological revolution means robots no longer are the song of the future. The Governor of the Bank of England predicts today that up to half of British workforce face redundancy in the imminent ‘second machine age’. No wonder, the research of multi-robot systems generates serious buzz both for promising (albeit at times scary) results and for their application prospects in the real world.
According to a leading American roboticist Ken Goldberg, people are fascinated with robots because robots reflect people. And hardly anything defines humans better indeed than their ability to communicate. Recent progress in programming, language processing and machine learning allows robot to display more and more complex communication abilities. Underlying these advances are solutions to significant problems of different origins, including mechanical design, sensing technologies, maintenance and power sources. With improved efficiency and the elimination of a single point of failure, multiple robots outperform single robots in domains that require greater capability and knowledge and can duly interact with each other, sharing information and executing tasks.
But how the multi-robot system is supposed to handle increasingly complex and precise tasks? One fairly obvious answer to this question lies within the implementation of an innovative algorithm, which would expand communicational capabilities for multi-robot collaborative task. For the system to work, it needs to be less prone to error, fast, and reliable comparing to the any other, including, human approaches.
A ground-breaking research conducted by the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, just published in Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, reveals new findings in the emerging field of a multi-robot cooperative system design from its experimental side. In the article, – Vladimir Alexandrov, Konstantin Kirik and Alexander Kobrin propose the implementation of a hardware-based modeling system for multi-robot collaborative tasks focusing on the development and implementation phase of an algorithm/system creation. Their approach results in speeding up implementation iterations, ultimately leading to enhanced communicational capabilities of research objects. The Muscovite researchers concentrate not only on architecture and implementation of the research robot, but also on communication system with parallel radio and infrared bidirectional data exchange, and on strategies of implementation of simulation tool chain.
Due to significant progress made in the development of general problems concerning single-robot control and basic multi-robot behavior, many researchers shifted their focus to a study of multi-robot coordination and deep cooperation behavior. Robots themselves shall be capable to perform all necessary algorithmic steps. Therefore, using tightly coupled modelling hardware and simulation tool chain, that transfers the full implementation of algorithms onto the hardware, can bring certain benefits.
“The new methods are attractive, as they integrate different new ideas concerning the algorithm design process, event-driven robot software design, and an autonomous mobile research robot equipped with an advanced sensor subsystem”, says Professor Radu-Emil Precup, a specialist in development of new control systems and algorithms.
The original article is fully open access and available to read, download and share on De Gruyter Online.
DOI 10.1515/pjbr-2016-0003

About the Journal:Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes original research on topics broadly related to neuronally and psychologically inspired robots and other behaving autonomous systems.
About De Gruyter Open: De Gruyter Open is a leading publisher of Open Access academic content. Publishing in all major disciplines, De Gruyter Open is home to more than 500 scholarly journals and over 100 books. Formerly known as Versita, the company is part of the De Gruyter Group (www.degruyter.com) and is a member of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). De Gruyter Open’s book and journal programs have been endorsed by the international research community and some of the world’s top scientists, including Nobel laureates. The company’s mission is to make the very best in academic content freely available to scholars and lay readers alike.
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How industrial robots will shape the work to come
Industry 4.0 is one of the most discussed topic worldwide. All over the world, the race for innovation has become one on the main challenges that nations and companies have to face, working to create new policies able to take into account factors like Big Data, digitization and industrial robots.
According to many, the latter is about to revolutionize every piece of our lives, and is about to transform the world into something where everything is automated and interconnected, where everything is based on digital technologies, and where men and machines work together.
The age of the robot rush
Industrial robots fascinate as much as they worry, mainly due to the fear of a massive job loss. Nobody can really estimate the impact of robot automation and how this will affect global employment. Will humans be replaced in all their usual tasks? Will brand new jobs come out of this robot diffusion?
It’s no secret that robot sales increase exponentially in the last years, with Asia showing an enormous growth in terms of density. Nowadays, sectors like electronics or automotive build most of their working processes on automated systems, as evidenced by this Tesla Motors factory in Detroit where 160 robots work along with 3000 human employees, for instance. No wonder why it’s easy to see these technologies as a menace to global employment!Shall we then be afraid of industrial robots?Actually, there’s more to see under this threatening surface. History shows us how previous industrial revolutions reshaped the way we work and live.
If we take a closer look to the impacts of robotization, we notice that what is happening right now already happened 200 and 150 years ago, during the first two Industrial Revolutions. Although they are now considered as periods of unprecedented progress, their consequences were drastic for workers, as they witnessed they activity evolving towards something new.
That’s exactly what is happening today: we are moving into the unknown. And the unknown is scary.

What to expect from an automated coworker?
Some late trends in robotics present a more collaborative approach between human and robot coworkers – a trend that finds in Baxter and Sawyer its best manifestation. Industrial robots were traditionally perceived as replacements for humans, while collaborative robots stepped into the discussion showing a new way to interact with the machines, as they no longer work for humans but WITH them, making technology not only a tool to forge the world but a source of (still) unpredictable advancements.
It is still hard to predict which sectors (if not all) will rely on automated processes: right now, the range of possibilities is still wide open. In a few words, once the threat of a massive job loss is left behind, an astonishing world of opportunities is there to be explored, creating a workplace where human and robot could potentially cooperate, redefining traditional views of work and employment.

Check out TradeMachines infographic to learn more about it!
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A video of a giant humanoid robot is exciting, but there are questions about its origins. Continue reading →