We still don’t have robot butlers to do our bidding, but Epson is about to send robots to space.
Reality isn’t like a piece of science fiction, even though aspects of science fiction can pop up in reality.
For instance, we still don’t have flying cars, teleportation, or even robots to do our chores for us. We have robot vacuums that try to throw themselves off a patio, but we’re not living in some Isaac Asimovian world where robots make a huge impact on our day to day. Gradually, we’re getting there, with automation impacting our daily lives, but something like self-driving cars can seem like a ways off for most, so there’s still work to go.
And yet some companies are already thinking about what they can do to make robots a reality, and to make them part of our future.
Epson, a brand commonly associated with printers, is doing just that, investing in a robotics company that is making space robots. The company is GITAI — don’t worry, we’d never heard of it, either — and it’s essentially building a new industry, known as “RaaS” or “Robots-as-a-Service”. It essentially means that Epson will be involved in a business building robots made for space missions, farming out some of the labour to robots working outside of the planet.
If it sounds a little crazy that we’re there, the whole thing can sound very sci-fi, though it’s one that may become more normal as time goes on. And while seeing these robots working in space with your own eyes may not be something we’ll all get to experience, it is something sci-fi that is coming to real life sometime in the near future.
