Great story in NY Times today about the cooperation between humans and robots. The next generation of robot system systems will be Co-robots where they cooperate with humans to perform tasks that may be difficult to perform by humans alone as they require heavy lifting, high precision or the tasks are highly repetitive. Humans are still incredible in terms of perception, dexterity, cognition and reasoning, so the combined human-robot system offers a number of added advantages.

One of the challenges is also is also to provide easy programming. A traditional industrial system will have a cost break down of ~25% for the robot, ~25% for auxiliary hardware and 50% for software. Through new programming paradigms it is possible to design systems that are much faster to program – the Baxter robot is an example of a new generation of such systems.