Is automation the key to our future inspiration?

Manufacturing is undergoing a revolution. The focus on automation has swung from increasing productivity and reducing costs, to wider issues, including increased quality and greater flexibility in the manufacturing process, without reliance on a skilled workforce to support it. This ability to be flexible in production has led to rise of mass customisation.

Mass Customisation is the use of computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output. Those systems combine the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customisation. Still in its infancy, there is still some way to go before this model is fully understood.

Another form of manufacturing gaining ground is rapid manufacturing. This is an additive fabrication technique for manufacturing solid objects by the sequential delivery of energy and/or material to specified points in space to produce that part. This offers a bright future due to its huge advantage in speed and cost compared to alternative manufacturing techniques such as plastic injection moulding or die casting.

Outside of manufacturing, automation is having an increasing impact thorough robotics. We can certainly construct robots that work well in factories because the environment is created especially for them. However, putting robots into variable (ie domestic and social) surroundings is much harder.

Artificial intelligence was believed to be the key and robots needed a model of the world in their brains. However, experts predict this will take another century. Meanwhile, scientists are modelling machines on simple animals, which don't need such internal models of the world but can still function in it.

One area of robotics seen to have a bright future is that of swarm robotics, inspired by examples of group activities in nature. Robots could work in numbers together in mining, search and rescue, pollution monitoring or harvesting.

An area closely related to robotics is bionics. 26-year old Claudia Mitchell has become the first woman to be fitted with a bionic arm, with which she's able to perform functions simply by thinking about them. Eventually, the arm could even give Mitchell the sense of touch, with electrodes in the hand sending signals to her chest skin, which her brain would recognise as a sensation. From arms to armed forces, bionics looks to have a key role to play in the future.

A less heralded development is the rapid 'underground' growth of ‘The Maker Movement’. This is a rise of 'DIY' electronics and robotics 'makers' with an active interest in how automation is affecting our home life. One example of the movement's significance is the popular Roomba vacuuming robot which has been bought and hacked (i.e. making it do much more than vacuum) - so much so that the manufacturers released a special version of the Roomba just for “developers.”

On a more commercial level, legions of hackers are spending time trying to work on taking the successful open source software approach into hardware. If all hardware platforms were open what levels of innovation would that bring? Just think about mobile phones and the results could be revolutionary