What are some of the emerging trends and opportunities in robotics for the next decade?

Interesting topic, not only the fact that soft robotics is super useful kn many ways. Farming industry or let‘s say food industry needs to handle with soft grippers to not damage fruits. i can tell because I was working in farming industry in Australia when I travelled. Also not only as farming robots but on sorting or packaging industry it‘s a common thing. Soft grippers in that case or as in surgery (different applies) is the FDA conformity that the food/goods/humans or whatever will not be infected with any kind of bacteria.

Soft robotics is a field within robotics that leverages flexible, deformable, and compliant materials and structures to emulate the properties and functions observed in natural organisms. These robots possess the ability to adapt to intricate and dynamic environments, mitigating risks of damage and injury, and unlocking innovative applications in healthcare, agriculture, and exploration. In surgical procedures, rehabilitation, and prosthetics, as well as in delicate tasks such as fruit picking and handling fragile items, soft robots demonstrate immense potential, showcasing the versatility and adaptability inherent in this burgeoning field of robotics.

Adding a small contribution to Constantin Weiss perspective, soft robots make robots able to change shape, adaptable, and safely interact with humans and delicate objects. So with this in mind, it could be used in several sectors, like: Healthcare - in surgical procedures, offering less invasive surgeries and quicker patient recovery. Wearable - rehabilitation, providing assistance to patients recovering from injuries or surgeries. Prosthetics - creating more natural and responsive prosthetic limbs. Assistive devices - providing assistance to individuals with mobility impairments. Exploration - adapting to challenging and unpredictable environments where traditional rigid robots might face limitations in space and/or subsea.

It is clear that mobile robots will work in swarms in the future. Actually, they already do (look at all those Amazon type fleets). What is interesting to consider is that the swarms will not only be applied to mobile robots but to fixed and mobile robots at the same time. In other words, mobile and fixed robots will be working together as a swarm to reach goals.

Recently, in the context of Human-Robot collaborations, there has been talk of NLP - it means Natural Language Processing. NLP allows robots to understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a more natural and human-like manner. Advancements in NLP have empowered robots to perform speech recognition, language understanding, and language generation, and offer multilingual support, enhancing human-robot interaction across diverse fields, including customer service, healthcare, and education. For example, virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, or Google Assistant are prime examples of NLP-powered systems that interact with humans through natural language. Currently this is one of the most hyped topics in HRI space.

Robots should complement the human ability... Humans and robots will rely on one another with communication and trust. The deeper the design for this the more intuitive the interaction will become.

Inspiration from nature to accomplish specialized tasks is basically using millions of years of trial and error learning. However, it has its limits. The differences in the goal of the design and the goal of what it's inspired by must be understood to fully take advantage of this approach.

Nature is probably the best inspiration for roboticists. This will led to some very interesting designs. This is one of the reasons that for legged robots the design that appears to be winning the commercialization race are based on dogs and chickens, not humans. As roboticists start looking at robots in environments not friendly to humans, they will more than likely look at animals that do thrive in those environments. For water robots, we are seeing very interesting designs using fish and eels as inspiration. Worms and moles are inspiring engineers to build interesting tunneling robots. It will be interesting to see how many robots are designed successfully after humans, because we are not the best designed creatures.

Few of the AI tools and robots help you defend your legal cases advising you on the legal and ethical matters, though this is a good way to gather information on your case but not an ideal way to approach since legal jurisdictions are passed on case to case not only on the evidences but depending upon the individuals behaviour throughout the proceedings, his gratitude and ability to address and tackle the concerns.

Perception. Prediction. Action are the three key domains in Robotics. As we tend to advance in the future. The opportunities of robotics applications are endless. The advice would be to not try to replace human with automation but to have an approach in improving the efficiency of the human by improving ease in tasks and gradually improve the quality of life

We will see more and more mobile robots. A great part of the fixed robots we see right now in industry will become mobile robots. Flexibility is key.

There is a significant trend towards intelligent automation. There is a need to provide robots with context, awareness and feedback from the process and environment they are operating in. In the aerospace and automotive sectors where accuracy is crucial, a guidance system like IONA will be able to help drive robots to the more accurate positions that are required. This will allow end users to gain sub mm accuracy with their robot processes.