A New Class of Machine Will Be Born Robotic

The industry has been talking about “smart manufacturing” for the last several years as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), digitalization, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and more have moved onto the plant floor. So what does the factory of the future look like? “Every machine in the future will be intelligent,” said Rodney Brooks, co-founder and CTO of Robust.AI, during his keynote presentation at the Automate Forward 2021 virtual trade show and conference. “All machines will be robots and will have artificial intelligence on them. It’s a long way from where we are today, but over the next few decades we’ll see old machines become robots and new machines start as robots. A new class of machines will be born robotic.”