INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Sanjit Dang
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Sanjit Dang is an investment director at Intel
Capital.
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Every
year,Timemagazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convincedtheirproduct deserves to be included inTime &25 Best
This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot namedJibo.
Jibo — a so-called &social robot&
— is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way
In fact, they&re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our
military, and on the last mile.
And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a
lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture.
An article written in 2015 by a former Pentagon robotics researcher
looks more prescient by the day.
That summer, Gill Pratt, who oversaw robotics technology as a manager of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), said robot capabilities had crossed a key threshold
Improvements in electric energy storage and the exponential growth of computation power and data storage, he argued, had enabled robots to
learn and make decisions informed by the experiences of other robots.
His expectation back then Robots would multiply like rabbits because
they were no longer simple-minded, single-purposed machines
And as robots learn more and more, Pratt argued, more people will have uses for them.
Today, that exactly what we&re seeing
Demand for robotics is increasingly broad-based
Everybody seems to want them.
To get a sense of this growth, consider: In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group forecast the global market for
robotics would reach $67 billion over the coming decade
Justthree years later, BCG last June revised that dollar figure upward & by another $20 billion.
The DARPA horse
Dollars rise as use cases
expand
Industry has for decades been a core consumer of robotics
Today,the majorityof the world robots are still used in factories.
What different is that those robots are a lot smaller, more perceptive
and more collaborative than their predecessors
And the flood of venture capital into the space ensures we&ll be seeing a lot more of them in our distribution centers and warehouses in
coming years.
Consider that between 2016 and 2017, venture capital investments in industrial robotsmore than tripled, from $402 million to
Five years ago, startups in this same space raised just $195 million.
Also interesting about this current robotics explosion is that
companies from a wide swath of other industries, from retailers to hotels, are embracing the benefits of smarter machines
Theinsurance industry, for example, has begun using artificial intelligence tools like machine vision and natural language processing to
handle claims.
These expanding use cases help explain why Boston Consulting Group now expects the commercial robotics market to grow to $23
billion by 2025—34 percent higher than originally predicted.
It consumers, though, who account for the biggest spike in demand
BCG projections of the consumer market size rose by156 percent
Many prominent firms, includingAndreessen Horowitz,Fenox Venture CapitalandSequoia, have noticed and have invested in educational and
&entertainment robots.
As we speak, there a fierce race to develop self-driving automotive technology
Autonomous vehicle startups raised $3 billion in 2017, more than three times the prior year take
Robot teachers and companions are attracting attention, too.
And we can''t forget drones
Beyond their many commercial applications, particularly in security, personal drones are an increasingly popular gadget
Chinese drone maker DJI alone has raised more than $100 million from US venture capital firms.
(Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty
Images)
Intelligence at the edge
At their core, robots create a lot of data
In fact, that the onlywaythey work
And several trends in robotics will increase demand for more processors and an entirely new product architecture.
The coming wave of robots
will need to hear more, see more and feel more
Each of those capabilities necessitates its own sensors, such as microphones, cameras and, to a lesser extent, touchscreen displays
And each ofthoserequires its own processors.
Then there the software underlying robotic capabilities
We believe AI, computer vision, natural language processing and blockchain will be the key enabling forces here.
Robots will also have a
greater need to communicate — both via the cloud, and without access to it.
After all, many, if not most, of today robots are only as
effective as their internet connections
And we expect the growing number and sophistication of robots will place enormous strain on network bandwidth, turning smart robots into
slow ones.
With all of this activity, it clear that the robot revolution is only just beginning.
