Robotics

For our project, we will be investigating robotics and how our future is going to change because of them. Robotics has been around for years, but we are just now seeing different signals of the acceleration and use of them. We are researching robotics because the way we do basic tasks today will be different because of robots in 10 years. For example, robots have been used overseas already to take over jobs. Such as the café in Tokyo where robots serve you food or in China where robots were used to deliver food, sanitize spaces, or take temperatures in order to minimize the spread of COVID-19. We have not seen this large of use of robots in the United States yet, but that does not mean it is not emerging quickly. We want to research how the use of robots will expand in the future and in what other industries and markets it will develop.

Stakeholders

Robotics is going to affect truly everyone. Amazon just announced the launch of Astro, a home robot, which will allow the average person to have robotic technology available to them. Although Amazon created something groundbreaking, it is not available to the average person and is for sure not cheap. We want to see how this will change in the future and if the technology will be simplified to the point it is widely available.

Domains

With robotics, we do not only want to look at how it will affect people, but how it will affect industries and domains as a whole. Domains, such as military, food delivery, package delivery, healthcare, environmental safety, sanitation, education, construction are quickly becoming automated and enhanced with robotics, which is why we want to expand on this in our project.

Additionally, three domains that we want to really investigate are the implication of robotics on healthcare, climate change, and political policy. Mainly, we want to look at how the education system is evolving to expand and integrate robotics, how robotics are going to aid efforts against climate change, as we see it is already helping, and what political implications robotics will have, which has already been seen in Germany.

Technology

Furthermore, robotics will also be used hand in hand with IoT, cybersecurity, big data, AI, machine learning, and blockchain, and we will be investigating in specific ways. Ultimately, we understand that robotics technology is nothing new; however, we know that this technology (some of what already exists) can be utilized in new ways that will have implications on a household, organizational, and global level. Our goal for our research is to focus on these implications and trends that are going to occur, and any forces that could be accelerating them.