We've been traveling around the country the past week, checking out some of the latest goings-on in the wide world of robotics. Amongst the most prevalent themes we've seen across the projects is a sense of real-world uncertainty -- which is to say that any number of things can go wrong when you take a robot outside of its laboratory comfort zone (one roboticist told us about a prototype that malfunctioned thanks to reflections off a nearby building). This is certainly the case in the world of manufacturing robotics, where it's hard to maintain any semblance of the sterile consistencies afforded by testing grounds.
