Full citation: foxglove.dev/blog/the-future-of-robotics
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The robotics industry is at a turning point in its history. Until now, robots have been primarily deployed in controlled environments such as factories and assembly lines, and we are now at a stage where advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision are helping robots evolve beyond compliant drones.
Robots today can navigate cities, explore the ocean, mow lawns, and even perform surgery. They were able to extract meaningful patterns from previously unfathomable pixels; they were able to improve themselves. They make dozens of invisible, complex decisions in the blink of an eye—detecting objects, predicting the future, and planning their next steps.
So how will our daily lives get through this tipping point as robotics permeates more areas of our lives? What are the biggest challenges we haven't solved, and what possible benefits have we not yet enjoyed?
A Brief History of the Industrial Revolution
To understand how robotics will revolutionize our world, let's first explore how previous industrial revolutions have redefined our lives and rewrote our political and economic destiny.
The first industrial revolution of the 18th century, often referred to as the farm-to-factory revolution, used the benefits of the agricultural revolution to pave the way for large-scale industry. Population surges due to improvements in agricultural technology and increased privatization of land have prompted many to migrate en masse to cities in search of work. Factories and mines harnessed the growing workforce to mine new energy sources such as coal, and invented new machines such as the steam engine to mechanize mass production in industries such as textile manufacturing.
A century later, the second industrial revolution focused on the production of steel and the use of electricity gave rise to entirely new industries, such as automobile production and communications technology. It was responsible for key inventions such as the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and the telephone. The revolution is also distinguished by its unprecedented speed of production—it doesn't just produce goods mechanically; it produces them in batches.
The advances driven by the first two revolutions enabled people to enjoy cheaper goods, more wealth, and a higher standard of living. This trend has continued in our recent industrial revolution. The digital revolution of the late 20th century effectively moved information online. It utilizes inventions such as electronics, computers and the Internet to automate the entire production stage. It enables businesses to globalize, outsource and expand at an unprecedented rate.
Each of these revolutions was driven by an emerging technology—steam power, electricity, the almighty internet—that took human work out of human hands and accelerated it beyond linear growth. They seem to have a huge impact on society overnight - they redefine entire work systems, make certain jobs obsolete, and spawn entirely new industries. These revolutions aren’t just “bigger and better”—they are paradigm shifts that redefine labor and production for a generation.
The revolution of our generation
Despite the huge technological leaps that the digital revolution has brought, many jobs and industries today are still manual and labor-intensive. This will change in the current industrial revolution. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not simply automating things, but building technologies that combine knowledge from previously unrelated disciplines to transform entire production systems at an exponential rate. It enters fields previously dominated by human experts and builds technologies that surpass humans — often by orders of magnitude.
This cross-pollination of our state-of-the-art discovery opens up a world of possibilities. We see digital technologies interacting with the physical world, the Internet of Things and 3D printing. We are also seeing digital tools that can solve biological problems, such as medical software used to detect disease and develop vaccines. Of course, we have physical robots run by digital minds—from warehouse robots to self-driving cars .
If there is any interdisciplinary field that will play a huge role in defining the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is robotics. The field is developing "collaborators" who can think, reason, and learn with us. With advances in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and hardware, we are now able to rely on the knowledge of our new “feeling” colleagues to solve new problems.
How Foxglove Contributed to the Revolution
It's awesome to recognize that roboticists are solving problems that we thought were intractable just a few years ago. Having said that, we still have several categories of challenges to solve - from generalization and hardware challenges, to deploying humanoid robots for particularly complex tasks.
Our team at Foxglove is tackling a less discussed challenge in robotics - building powerful developer tools. We think making robots is a lot harder than it needs to be. With a lack of off-the-shelf options, roboticists have to contend with applications that are difficult to integrate, fragmented or overlapping resources, and a steep learning curve for existing tools. In short, robotics currently feels like building websites in the 90s - we're not delivering value to our users, but solving basic problems like how to buy and install our servers (or in our case , how to make our tool work).
Foxglove's guiding mission is to bridge the gap between industry tools and their needs. As we develop exciting new technologies, we need equally novel ways to solve and iterate on them. By reimagining the next generation of robotic tools, we hope to help roboticists — across industries, use cases, and audiences — accelerate their development and bring their products to market.
Processing robot data is a particularly important part of robot development. By gleaning insights from their data, engineers can understand how their robots are performing and where in the stack they may need to tweak algorithms or eliminate bugs. Rich interactive visualizations - like those in Foxglove Studio - give roboticists a barometer by which they can assess and track their progress. An intuitive interface for organizing, tagging, and searching data, like the Foxglove data platform, helps them spend less time wandering aimlessly through petabytes of data and more time separating meaningful signals from noise .
Foxglove has been working with robotics teams — spanning industries such as space exploration, self-driving cars, and ocean research — to build solutions that can be rolled out across the wider community. Our goal is to remove friction around managing and exploring data, regardless of your specific team's use case and audience.
What the future looks like
As robotics can be applied to almost every industry in the world, it could disrupt them to varying degrees. It’s exciting to think about the explosive growth we’ll experience in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—especially as robots reliably free up more time for us to focus on our unsolved problems.
While Foxglove is just one company in a sprint into the future, we're excited to contribute in our own way. We focused first on helping people visualize and manage their bot data, but the possibilities are endless. We don't know what else to discover, but we know this revolution will redefine our lives - and we want you to join us.