Anywhere the future of work is being thought about, debated, forecast, and fought over, there are conversations going on about the role automation is going to play. The primary question that shows up in virtually every conversation takes on many forms, but the gist is always the same—will the robots free us up for better jobs, or will they simply take our existing ones away?
While words and phrases such as “robot,” “self-driving car,” and “artificial intelligence” are in fairly wide use these days, it’s much less common to come across the term “autonomous system.” And yet, robots and self-driving cars are both autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence is a big part of what makes them possible. So why is “autonomous system” not a more familiar term?
The results are in! Matthew DeHaven, a current Robotics Software Engineering Nanodegree program student, has taken first place in the KUKA Robotics Challenge. This former graduate of Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program will head to Munich next month to visit the KIT Robotics Lab in Karlsruhe (where his winning submission was run), and also attend the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference.
Matthew was one of only a small handful of students to successfully pass the challenge simulator during the contest portion, and he had the both the fastest time on the simulator (36 seconds) and on the actual KUKA robotics arm in the lab (59.1 seconds).
You can see his winning submission below:
Is there such a thing as too much choice? When it comes to learning, we don’t think so. But, having a wide range of learning options at your disposal can make charting your own path to career success complicated. Each of us brings a unique set of skills and experience to the table, each of us has our own unique sense of work values, and each of us aims to represent a unique value to prospective employers. But even with a clear end goal in sight, it can be challenging to determine what exactly you need to do to reach your career goals.
With 30 different Nanodegree programs available, Udacity offers a wide range of learning opportunities. But how do you know what to take, and when to take it?
That’s where Udacity’s “Schools” can help!
Today, we’re excited to announce a new challenge developed in collaboration with two valuable partners of our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program—KUKA, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It’s the KUKA Robotics Challenge, and you are invited to enter the challenge today!
At Udacity, partnerships help make extraordinary opportunities available for our students. Our partnership with KUKA and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will make it possible for students in our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program to remotely run their code on a robotic arm. The result is that our graduates will enter the robotics job market with a unique combination of practical experience in both software and hardware.
Through the partnership, our students will be able to write code, test their code in simulation, then watch as their code is deployed to a real industrial robot, in a real lab, via video feed.