Show off your bot at March’s Science Cafe

For many of us, our first introduction to robots was watching "The Jetsons."

From the humanoid robot Rosie to machines that would clean, dress and feed us, robots clearly held the promise to make life pretty cushy someday. And who didn't get a thrill when the cat appeared on Astro's automatic dog walker!

This month, Science Cafe New Hampshire will explore the incredibly interesting and extremely diverse world of robotics. Robots are changing quickly, and some of those changes may not be what we expect.

In May 2016, Chinese manufacturing company Foxconn announced it they had replaced 60,000 human workers with robots - and this is just the start. Foxconn got into the robot building business and aimed at innovations in its own manufacturing process first, which resulted in jobs lost for humans.

We can expect the pace of automation to accelerate and the workplace to continue to evolve as advances in software, materials and miniaturization occur.

A small sample of what may be coming includes microbots for first responders that work in small or dangerous places and can act together as a "swarm"; intelligent robots that can think and act more like humans, understand emotions, learn and are social; law enforcement and security robots; military robots; and modular robots that you control, adapt for a given problem and reuse to suit your needs (a la Legos).

Rehabilitative robots will provide therapy and exoskeletons will augment physical capabilities. Elder care, medicine and family life will be transformed as robots proliferate in the coming years.

Our relationship with robots will fundamentally change, as well. Early automation centered around factory environments and hazardous situations, but today, robots are emerging in all aspects of everyday life. Advances will still be made by delegating burdensome tasks to robots, but the more meaningful changes will result from human/robot collaborations and our ability to work together.

"Humans are good at some things, and robots are good at others," said Science Cafe panelist Joshua Rosen, of GreenSight Agronomics. "With the advent of the automobile, jobs were transformed from buggy whip makers to mechanics, from stablehands to car salesmen. When the automobile came along, the pie got a lot bigger, and in the end, people had more jobs, and better jobs."

Rosen said he feels that robots won't take our jobs, but rather will provide new opportunities for automation to improve performance and increase productivity. He gave three examples from his career:

- Robots used in agricultural management. Crops grown in containers could be moved, monitored and maintained by robots, making crop production more efficient and allowing farmers to use land not previously arable while improving crop quality and optimizing yield.

- Warehouse automation and the power of collaboration in which robots moved and maintained inventory while humans, with their far superior ability to identify products quickly, pulled products and filled orders.

- How his current company uses flying vision systems to collect and process crop data.

For example, golf courses appreciate and value having automatic data evaluations done on their greens and grass, helping them better use resources where they are most needed and not waste them where they aren't.

Rather than threatening our jobs, robots will open up new opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to make social and economic change happen. Science Cafe will explore what robots are doing today and where they're headed tomorrow, where collaborations with robots are likely to come about first, and how the coming close proximity to machines will affect both our work and play.

And this month, we're inviting budding robotics enthusiasts to bring their bots to this session. Seeing is believing, and here's your chance to show off your robots to a truly interested Science Cafe audience.

Dan Marcek is a co-founder of Science Cafe New Hampshire. He can be reached at dan@vetflix.org. Science Cafe is a free monthly meeting at which you can relax, have a drink and talk science with a panel of experts.