Automation and Collaborative Robotics

Understand the current and future research into technologies that underpin the increasing capabilities of automation technologies and their impact on the working world of the future.

Rapid advances in automation and robotics technologies are often reported in the trade and general media, often relying on scary headlines such as 'Jobs Lost to Robots.' It is certainly true that work will change with the advent of smarter and faster automated workers; however, the scope and scale of the changes is still unknown. Automation may seem to be here already, but we are only at the early stages.  

Automation and Collaborative Robotics explores the output of current research projects that are improving the building blocks of an automated world. Research into collaborative robotics (cobotics) is merging digital, audio, and visual data to generate a commonly held view between cobots and their human collaborators. Low-power machine learning at the edge of the network can deliver decision making on cobots or to their manipulations. Topics covered in this book include:

• Robotic process automation, chatbots, and their impact in the near future
  
• The hype of automation and headlines leading to concerns over the future of work
  
• Component technologies that are still in the research labs
  
• Foundational technologies and collaboration that will enable many tasks to be automated with human workers being re-skilled and displaced rather than replaced
  

What You Will Learn

• Be aware of the technologies currently being researched to improve or deliver automation
  
• Understand the impact of robotics, other automation technologies, and the impact of AI on automation
  
• Get an idea of how far we are from implementation of an automated future
  
• Know what work will look like in the future with the deployment of these technologies

Who This Book Is For

Technical and business managers interested in the future of automation and robotics, and the impact it will have on their organizations, customers, and the business world in general

Peter Matthews has more than 40 years of experience in IT business and has always looked to the future when working in CA's corporate strategy teams. He is currently co-leading the COBOTICS research project for the NSF Centre for Visual and Decision Informatics and contributes to the ALOHA and ENACT projects as part of the CA team, funded by the EU Commission's Framework Programs. He represents CA on the Big Data Value Association AI working group, a public and private association supported by the EU Directorate General. He has an MSc in social media analytics and has worked with early stage AI tools for 18 years. Part of his role at CA has included presenting on the future of work to school children as part of CA's STEM initiative.

Dr. Steven Greenspan is an innovator and scientist in information and communications technology (ICT) and is a co-author on over 60 utility patents and many peer-reviewed papers in ICT and cognitive psychology. As Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs and Vice President and Research Scientist at CA Technologies, he has been exploring the opportunities and technical challenges created by new and emerging ICT technologies for over 25 years. His current research portfolio includes differential privacy, IoT trustworthiness, AI ethics, and collaborative robotics, and he is the CA representative on the Industrial Advisory Board for the NSF UICRC Center for Visual and Decision Informatics.  He has a PhD in experimental (cognitive) psychology from SUNY Buffalo. His postdoctoral research at UC San Diego and Indiana University focused on user experience, psycholinguistics, and speech perception. He is a co-editor of the book, Applied Speech Technology.