Development trends in robotics

Abstract

Robotics has been a very fast growing field especially in the last years. In the late 1970s the first industrial applications of stationary unintelligent industrial robots were realised. Since the beginning of the 1990s a new generation of mobile, intelligent, cooperative robots has grown up. This new generation opens new applications areas, e.g. in production automation, in agriculture, in the food industry, in household, for medical and rehabilitation applications, in the entertainment industry as well as for leisure and hobby. Current developing trends are humanoid robots and robots supporting people in everyday life. Other intensive research areas are cooperative robots, bio inspired robots, ubiquitous robots and cloud robots. The following paper is divided into three parts: current state, future development trends as well as visions in robotics. © 2013 Springer Verlag Wien.