Sanjit DangContributorShare on TwitterSanjit Dang is an investment director at Intel Capital.More posts by this contributorWhat holding back VROnline Commerce Needs An Offline ExperienceEvery year,Timemagazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convincedtheirproduct deserves to be included inTime &25 Best Inventions& list.
This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot namedJibo.Jibo — a so-called &social robot& — is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way.
In fact, they&re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile.And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture.An article written in 2015 by a former Pentagon robotics researcher looks more prescient by the day.That summer, Gill Pratt, who oversaw robotics technology as a manager of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said robot capabilities had crossed a key threshold.
Improvements in electric energy storage and the exponential growth of computation power and data storage, he argued, had enabled robots to learn and make decisions informed by the experiences of other robots.His expectation back then Robots would multiply like rabbits because they were no longer simple-minded, single-purposed machines.
And as robots learn more and more, Pratt argued, more people will have uses for them.Today, that exactly what we&re seeing.
Demand for robotics is increasingly broad-based.
Everybody seems to want them.To get a sense of this growth, consider: In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group forecast the global market for robotics would reach $67 billion over the coming decade.
Justthree years later, BCG last June revised that dollar figure upward & by another $20 billion.The DARPA horseDollars rise as use cases expandIndustry has for decades been a core consumer of robotics.
Today,the majorityof the world robots are still used in factories.What different is that those robots are a lot smaller, more perceptive and more collaborative than their predecessors.
And the flood of venture capital into the space ensures we&ll be seeing a lot more of them in our distribution centers and warehouses in coming years.Consider that between 2016 and 2017, venture capital investments in industrial robotsmore than tripled, from $402 million to $1.2 billion.
Five years ago, startups in this same space raised just $195 million.Also interesting about this current robotics explosion is that companies from a wide swath of other industries, from retailers to hotels, are embracing the benefits of smarter machines.
Theinsurance industry, for example, has begun using artificial intelligence tools like machine vision and natural language processing to handle claims.These expanding use cases help explain why Boston Consulting Group now expects the commercial robotics market to grow to $23 billion by 2025—34 percent higher than originally predicted.It consumers, though, who account for the biggest spike in demand.
BCG projections of the consumer market size rose by156 percent.
Many prominent firms, includingAndreessen Horowitz,Fenox Venture CapitalandSequoia, have noticed and have invested in educational and &entertainment robots.&As we speak, there a fierce race to develop self-driving automotive technology.
Autonomous vehicle startups raised $3 billion in 2017, more than three times the prior year take.
Robot teachers and companions are attracting attention, too.And we can&t forget drones.
Beyond their many commercial applications, particularly in security, personal drones are an increasingly popular gadget.
Chinese drone maker DJI alone has raised more than $100 million from US venture capital firms.(Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)Intelligence at the edgeAt their core, robots create a lot of data.
In fact, that the onlywaythey work.
And several trends in robotics will increase demand for more processors and an entirely new product architecture.The coming wave of robots will need to hear more, see more and feel more.
Each of those capabilities necessitates its own sensors, such as microphones, cameras and, to a lesser extent, touchscreen displays.
And each ofthoserequires its own processors.Then there the software underlying robotic capabilities.
We believe AI, computer vision, natural language processing and blockchain will be the key enabling forces here.Robots will also have a greater need to communicate — both via the cloud, and without access to it.After all, many, if not most, of today robots are only as effective as their internet connections.
And we expect the growing number and sophistication of robots will place enormous strain on network bandwidth, turning smart robots into slow ones.With all of this activity, it clear that the robot revolution is only just beginning.