RoboBusiness 2017: What's cooking in robotics?

Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that "anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could've predicted the computing mobile revolution." These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in Silicon Valley last week. The many keynotes, pitches and exhibits in the Santa Clara Convention Center had the buzz of an industry racing towards mass adoption, similar to the early days of personal computing. The inflection point in the invention that changed the world, the PC, was 1995. During that year, Sun Microsystems released Java to developers with promise of "write once, publish anywhere," followed weeks later by Microsoft's consumer software package, Windows '95.