INSIGHTS
Sean Gallagher: The Fourth Industrial Revolution Emerges from AI and the Internet of Things: "IoT has arrived on the factory floor with the force of Kool-Aid Man exploding through walls.... Smart, cheap, sensor-laden devices paired with powerful analytics and algorithms have been changing the industrial world.... Companies are seeing more precise, higher quality manufacturing with lowered operational costs; less downtime because of predictive maintenance and intelligence in the supply chain; and fewer injuries on factory floors because of more adaptable equipment. And outside of the factory, other industries could benefit from having a nervous system of sensors, analytics to process 'lakes' of data, and just-in-time responses to emergent issues—aviation, energy, logistics, and many other businesses that rely on reliable, predictable things could also get a boost. But the new way comes with significant challenges, not the least of which are the security and resilience of the networked nervous systems stitching all this new magic together.... And then there's always that whole 'robots are stealing our jobs' thing. (The truth is much more complicated—and we'll touch on it later this week)...
...It's a robot! It's stealing my job! (Actually, it's doing carbon fiber layup, which is exactly the kind of time consuming task that we want robots to be doing.)...
MITRE has partnered with several robotics startups—including American Robotics, which has developed a fully automated drone system for precision agriculture. Called Scout, the system is an autonomous, weather-proofed unit that sits adjacent to fields. All a farmer has to do is program in drone flight times, and the AI handles drone flight planning and managing the flight itself, as well as the collection and processing of imagery and data, uploading everything to the cloud as it goes. That level of autonomy allows farmers to simply look at data about crop health and other metrics on their personal devices, and then act upon that data—selectively applying pesticides, herbicides, or additional fertilizers if necessary. With some more machine learning juice, those are tasks that could eventually be handed off to other drones or robotic farming equipment once patterns and rules of their use are established. Scout mirrors how human-machine teaming could work in the factory...
-- via my feedly newsfeed
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