The Edge Trends Committee sponsored a free seminar entitled “The Future of Robotics- A Panel Discussion” on Thursday, April 17, 2014 at 7:30 a.m. in the UCSD Extension Classroom.
The panel included:
- Dr. Ramesh Rao (Director of the Qualcomm Institute and UCSD Professor)
- Dr. Santiago Horgan (Chief of Minimally Invasive Surgery at UCSD Medical Center and Director of UCSD’s Center for the Future of Surgery)
- Dr. Jack Silberman (Area Quality Manager for Canada and Latin America with Abbott Diabetes Care and robotics researcher in education, NASA, biotech, and medical devices)
- Geoffrey Butler (Aircraft Stability and Control Professor at SDSU and Unmanned Aircraft Researcher at General Atomics)
- Moderator Becky Vincent (Founder and majority owner of Vincent Enterprises)
The attendees learned about a wide variety of robots and their uses. For example, there are field robots that explore volcanoes, unmanned aircraft used by the military, robotic submersibles used to explore the ocean, and medical robots that can help doctors perform safer surgery.
The audience and panelists had an interactive and entertaining discussion (including show-and-tell!) on why robots are here to stay and what the future evolution of them might look like. Overall, it was an educational and fascinating panel discussion with many memorable moments, one of which was Dr. Rao predicting that “spectrum will be more scarce than oil”.
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