I feel that I have grown a lot as an engineer throughout this semester. From the beginning, when I had never touched a circuit board in my life, to now, I can say I built, wired, and coded my own autonomous robot. Even just looking back a few weeks, I can now see what I should have done to make the robot better than it was, like how we should have increased our right wheel strength from the start instead of playing with weights on one side. Or even just one week ago, on the final challenge day, I now realize we should have moved the maze we were assigned to to a cleaner part of the floor.
all in all, I feel like I am starting to understand what engineering is about, which is something I thought I knew before coming to Northeastern, but now I know I was wrong.
Ethical considerations
From our small scale self-driving robot I can now see why self-driving cars are such breakthrough in the world of robotics. To me it seems almost impossible to create a robot that can drive straight and correctly on so many different surfaces like concrete, snow, dirt, gravel, etc. Especially considering that our main issue was how dusty the floor was which caused our robot to spin out and turn right.
This makes me think about the effects of autonomous robots in our lives and what the future looks like.
I think that autonomous robots will be largely mixed into our daily lives in the near future; a perfect example of this is self-driving cars, as these were inventions created in our lifetime that are now being mass-produced by tons of companies. I think that products like this will help improve our efficiency and will help us innovate new things much faster than before, but it's not all good. The integration of autonomous robots will also put a lot of people out of jobs, for example, these self-driving cars that used to require you to be present and have a driver's license are now being added to apps like Waymo, which is Uber with no drivers, which could potentially put many drivers out of jobs.
But these robots bring up two major issues. One is biases in robot coding. This is because a robot can only be as unbiased as the person who coded it, which is extremely dangerous in things like self-driving cars. The second is who is accountable when these robots cause harm. Robots will inevitably cause harm when they are used in everyday settings, and we can hope that the robots are never at fault, but if there is an issue with their code or a malfunction, there is a question of who is at fault.