As part of teh opening keynote at Autodesk University in Las Vegas, our CTO, Jeff�Kowalski, made the case that humans and robots can work collaboratively in the future. Prior to his presentation, we showed a humorous video by The Onion that presented a contrary opinion. There is a fear that robots are going to take jobs from humans. But more interestingly, humans and robots will evolve their capabilities by working together. You�re not going to lose your job to a robot, but you might lose your job to someone who is using robots in clever ways to augment their capabilities. We have an Applied Research Lab in at our Pier�9 office San Francisco where one of our big areas of focus is robotics���specifically, human-robot collaboration. We wanted to build a robot that could help a person working in construction do repetitive, high-precision tasks, without the need for robotics or computer expertise. Tasks like cutting out holes for outlets and light switches in drywall. So we put a trim router at the end of the robot's arm and gave him a natural language interface and artificial sight. That way, the robot's human partner can tell the robot what to do in plain English and with simple gestures. There�s no CAD, no CAM, not even a computer to interact with. Collaboration is alive the lab. Go to the original post...