Moving Into The Wild

GE Research and its partners are pushing the limits of what’s possible in the development of advanced robotics and autonomous systems that live in “the wild,” supporting the warfighter, the field engineer, and a host of industrial workers. Industrial companies and governments around the world want more productivity, safety, and uptime for the processes, machines, and assets that enable them to achieve their missions. They are looking to robotics and autonomous systems as critical enablers to achieve these goals both in the factory and, increasingly, in “the wild” - that is, places where the environment and the tasks are complex, dynamic, and uncertain – think battle fields, city streets, power plants, retail stores, refineries, and railyards. Advances in several technology areas including computation, artificial intelligence, and energy storage are allowing us to deploy robotic systems in places that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Stay tuned for updates and insights on the enabling technologies, systems, and applications that we’re building at GE Research. In the near term I’m aiming to lay out some of the basics and will follow that up with details on what’s going on in the field and in the lab. Where are you seeing robotics and autonomous systems take hold "in the wild" in your industry?