Modern Automation (B): Robotics

Driven largely by advances in perception and situational awareness, robots in the 2010s were gaining functionality that allowed them to be applied to fundamentally new types of work. The expanding range of new tasks that could be completed by machines had significant implications for businesses, the workforce, and society. This primer grounds conversations about these implications by describing the advances in underpinning technology that moved the boundaries of where robots could be deployed and illustrating real-world examples of the new types of activities that robots were becoming able to perform.