Re:AI and Robotics in Agriculture in Japan [video]
by Animats on Thursday June 08, 2017 @03:54PM
(#14516728)
They dominated the first DARPA robotics challenge because of this and got bought up by Google.
Which screwed them up. That still annoys me. Google bought up most of the leading robotics startups in 2013 and ran them into the ground. I wonder what happened to the people. Did they end up in other parts of Google, probably working on making people click on ads?
Re:AI and Robotics in Agriculture in Japan [video]
by jayjay71 on Thursday June 08, 2017 @10:04PM
(#14518712)
Many of them left. Some are still there working on things related to robotics, such as Verb Surgical. I'm sure a few became more traditional software engineers, although I don't know any personally.
Well that's a somewhat discriminatory way to look at things. A counter-example to some of the stuff you said about Japanese robotics is the work SCHAFT has done[0][1]. SCHAFT was a spin out company of the Tokyo JSK lab that came up with some revolutionary new electrical actuators. They dominated the first DARPA robotics challenge because of this and got bought up by google. There are european robots that explore new algorithms and technologies[2][3].
But if you really want to talk about robots that make cars, Japan leads the world at making them. And this is what matters. Sure, America might have the best biped robot in the world right now, but Japan has the tooling to mass produce it on a large scale.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3JCd7ooILo [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwoFjzLZ5rQ [2]: http://roboy.org/ [3]: http://www.rsl.ethz.ch/robots-media/anymal.html