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I was honored to moderate a panel at CES 2024 to discuss how robots are being put to work every day while safely operating in the presence of consumers and the general public. This discussion did not focus on consumer robotics but rather took a look at some of the applications where autonomous machines interact with consumers.

The panel included Laura Major, chief technology officer at robotaxi provider Motional; Bertin Nahum, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Surgical; and Gerard Andrews, senior product marketing manager for robotics at NVIDIA.

Laura Major discussed the safety considerations and difficulties in deploying driverless robotaxis and how they need to safely operate to maintain public trust.

“Safety is really central to the mission of autonomous vehicles. Our goal is to improve the overall safety on our roads … we see many fatalities happening every day with human drivers because we get distracted, we get drowsy — any number of reasons for accidents that we can prevent with robots. And so that’s really our ultimate goal. But safety is an important part of our development process, too. And so we go through a very rigorous verification and validation process. Simulation plays a critical role in that overall process. With every software release we build, we can expose that that new software to a year’s worth of driving data that a human driver would have in within one hour and give that feedback back to developers.”

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Bertin Nahum described the advances in surgical robotics and how robotics are being deployed into the surgical theater to help assist surgeons with both everyday operations as well as highly specialized and cutting-edge therapies.

“The good thing about robotics, and this is where it takes all you know, is that robotics is going to help physician performing exactly whichever plan was done. So this is where simulation is really compatible with a robotics. Because, you know, once upon a time, we were in a situation where no matter how accurate you could be in planning, whichever treatment had to be done.”

NVIDIA looks to empower robots at work via simulation

Gerard Andrews explained some of the other consumer-facing robotic applications that are both delighting consumers and helping to automate a variety of applications to enhance the consumer experience.

“At NVIDIA, we’re really excited about the intersection of generative AI and robotics. I feel like we are just getting started on that journey. But the early indications are that the intersection of generative AI and robotics will be absolutely transformational. The biggest benefits that generative AI are going to bring to robotics is one of them is very tangible is just the fact that the robotics engineer or robotics developer is going to have a ‘force multiplier’ with generative AI, with their ability to run simulations to create assets to run simulations, to run code, to run scripts to create firmware to create test scripts with all the leverage and all the power of LLM.”

For a recap of the most interesting robotic solutions from CES 2024, check out the Top 10 Robots from CES this year.