Rescue Robots are Imminent

by TODD STOLARSKI | June 11, 2015

The robot science fiction stories you may have read as a child and the Transformer action figures sure have come a long way. Tranformers is now a wildly successful movie franchise and DARPA spent last weekend in California doing this. As we cross off each day on our calendar, robots are integrating more into our day-to-day lives, and they are coming to our rescue. On June 23rd, BuiltWorlds and the Heartland Chapter of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), in conjunction with Techweek Chicago, will host Robots to the Rescue: The Evolution of Unmanned Vehicles.

By land and air, UAVs are making our jobs safer and efficient, but with more Big Data than ever before. While UAVs already are flying emergency supplies to remote disaster sites, performing precision agriculture, aerial photography, and site surveillance tasks, other driverless intelligent machines on terra firma are checking off chores while their list of capabilities grows daily. From futuristic earthmoving equipment to the imminent autopilot mode from the planet’s hottest car maker, Tesla, both the industrial and commercial markets now are poised for change that not long ago would have been dismissed outright.

Robotic technology now drives, flies, monitors, moves, inspects, lifts, and enables stakeholders to view detailed aspects of the built environment from vantage points never before available. Today, as the FAA and other legislative bodies scramble to keep up with an impatient industry’s regulatory needs, it remains a time of enormous promise and extraordinary technological opportunity.

The more tasks these unmanned systems perform, the more Big Data they collect, compiling useful information that hopefully will empower our global industry to be harder, better, faster, stronger…and increasingly more profitable.

Komatsu’s Zeravica will be in our house. 

Equipment giant Komatsu will be on hand as their Distributor Operation Development Manager, Goran Zeravica will discuss how all the information collected by the UAVs will help them moving forward as they are betting big on more intelligent machinery. With all of that Big Data collected comes big responsibility and Mr. Zeravica will present at Robots to the Rescue to speak about just how to manage it all.

Flying up in the sky, the en vogue UAV of the last year had been the dirty D word. Thomas Haun, VP Strategy and Globalization for PrecisionHawk knows all about that. His company has been at the forefront of drone technology and just how the US government has attempted to keep up with the rapidly evolving portion of the sector. Expect him to delve into how certain regulations have temporarily hindered aerial UAV growth throughout the United States.

Event sponsor Navistar will bring us back to earth to focus on how autonomous vehicles will shape the way humans move about our world on the ground as this feeds into the Internet of Things.

At Robots to the Rescue, our panel of experts from will dispense insights on this emerging market, trade stories on best practices and lessons learned, and predict where robots will be a year from now. There also will be drone flights onsite while we also expect a broader discussion of how this tech will feed into the Internet of Things, the wildly expanding category that includes everything from 3D printing and building security to your thermostat.

As our world of automation continues to grow, will we humans be on the outside, or inside, holding hands with the robots that may yet rescue us from ourselves? So, June 23rd will be your opportunity to take your place at the vanguard of this conversation. It’s time to flip the script. It’s not us versus them.  It’s us with them.

While assembly lines now stand ready to pump out the driverless fleets, and realtors queue up behind contractors to apply for FAA licenses, BuiltWorlds, AUVSI Heartland, Techweek Chicago, and event sponsors Navistar are excited to host Chicago’s first industry-wide, hands-on look at these futuristic tools that may soon be commonplace. So, come, spend an evening at BuiltWorlds, to take the next step forward, hand in hand along with our robots.

Check out the teaser video below!

Note: This article is from the BuiltWorlds archives. Some links, images, and images may not be os originally formatted.