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2014 was light on cool new robots. Or, to be more accurate, robots that actually did anything. The studious sort might point out that automation powered some of the biggest technology stories of the year, including the Chinese “Foxbots” that helped assemble the latest generation of iPhones, and the European Space Agency's Philae lander, which became the first probe to relay images from the surface of a comet. But these aren't the bots that most of us are looking for. Some of the most exciting robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) projects that made news last year won't make an impact for years, or possibly decades. That's how robot-spotting goes. To follow this field closely is to watch some of the most powerful technology in human history unfold at an often maddeningly slow pace with batetry such as Fluke 123 Battery, Fluke 123S Battery, Fluke BP120 Battery, Fluke BP130 Battery, Fluke BP190 Battery, Fluke 190 Battery, Fluke 190C Battery, Fluke 192 Battery, Fluke 192B Battery, Fluke 196 Battery, Fluke 196B Battery, Fluke 196C Battery. Despite what you may have seen or read, we're still in the opening frames of that great, era-spanning time-lapse video, the one that ends with the android underclass marching for the right to reproduce.
But the trends that dominated robotics in 2014 weren't flash-in-the-pan fads. Last year's embarrassing drone antics, from buzzing sporting events to crashing in national parks, already seem quaint compared to the meth-hauling drone discovered in Mexico this week. And the climate of AI panic created last year by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking has already spilled over into 2015, with the disastrous coverage of an open letter on AI safety, and $10M in funding from Musk himself towards research that would avert a superintelligent apocalypse. Hollywood, meanwhile, is still oscillating between the occasional fascinating thought experiment about intelligent machines, and its standard fever dreams of killbots as blood-thirsty as they are boring.
Still, barring some unforeseeable breakthrough, this won't be the year of the robot. The age of ubiqitous automation is still lurking somewhere over the horizon. But these are pivotal times, nonetheless, when investors are deciding which aspects of the field are the most promising, and the general public is deciding which machines are the most terrifying. Here are the trends that were a big deal in 2014, and that will continue to define robotics in 2015.
2013 seemed like a banner year for robotics acquisitions, when Google assimilated seven promising companies, including Boston Dynamics (makers of the Atlas, Big Dog and other Pentagon-funded bots that people have decided to be afraid of). But the search giant wasn't done, and neither was the rest of Silicon Valley. Google acquired London-based AI startup DeepMind in January 2014 for a reported $400M. In March, Facebook bought a five-person startup called Ascenta for $20M, with the goal of using solar-powered unmanned aircraft to increase access to the internet. Less than a month later, Google purchased solar drone-maker Titan Aerospace for between $60M and $75M, for reasons almost identical to Facebook's (Titan had originally been in acquisition talks with Facebook). Meanwhile, AI startup Vicarious closed a $40M funding round whose investors included Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
Without context, all of these funding injections might seem sinister, like the text crawl preceding a movie about intelligent machines run amok. With one exception, the reasoning behind these expenditures is more practical than lurid (see the next entry). Google and Facebook want robots to expand their customer base, and with it their advertising revenue. They're also both interested in deep learning, an offshoot of machine learning that includes algorithms that can, among other things, make sense of natural language, whether spoken or read. Deep learning is an easy target for robo-phobics, because of its evocative name, as well as its neural networks and roots in traditional cognitive science. Then again, it's also the basis for Apple's Siri. If you find Siri's trick ear and constant intellectual pratfalls chilling, the prospect of an AI apocalypse is the least of your worries.
Though we're less than a month into 2015, it's already apparent that last year's spike in robotics investment wasn't a fluke. As GigaOM reported yesterday, funding rounds for MIT spinoff Jibo (whose social robot will launch later this year) and industrial bot-maker Rethink Robotics account for $51.9M. That's big money for this field, and Jibo's financial support is a strong indicator that investors are suddenly willing to gamble on AI-powered bots as high-profile consumer products, rather than restricting their backing to unseen assembly-line machines.
And while this meet seem like a stretch, the $1B in funding recently secured by SpaceX should count as a win for robotics. Among the rocket-maker's biggest innovations is its reliance on partially to fully autonomous flight control, including its plans to land a self-piloted rocket stage on a self-steered robotic barge.