Employment

In upstate New York, an organisation has called for a ban on self-driving cars from the state’s roads for fifty years. The Upstate Transportation Association (UTA) cites fears of job loss and damage to the local economy resulting from the switch to autonomous vehicles.

At the end of October a group of prestigious US universities collaborated on a document trying to put together a technical roadmap for Robotics in the US. Its central purpose is to update Congress on the state of the art in robotics and to help policymakers determine where to channel resources in order to realise robotics’ great promise as a technology. We summarise some of the main findings below.

At the end of May this year, the European Parliament issued a paper, calling on the Commission to update the regulatory framework surrounding the area of robotics, with a request to consider that some forms of autonomous robots should be granted the status of “electric persons with specific rights and obligations”.

A look at Wuhu National Industrial Robotics Park, at the centre of China's robotics industry.