Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?

1 September 2015

Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics? In a thought-provoking article, Dr. Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager who oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge and several other programs in robotics, argues that we may be entering a period of rapid growth in the diversification and applicability of robots. He notes that the base technologies on which robots depend—particularly computing, data storage, and communications—have been improving at exponential rates, and that recent advances like Cloud Robotics and Deep Learning could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth: a "Cambrian Explosion" in robotics.

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