End-User Innovation
Nano Engineering
Context and location aware devices
Ubiquitous Computing
Robotics
RFID The Ten Best Uses

The death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. According to U.N. statistics, the U.S. remains by far the world's largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as much value as No. 2 China. Since 1990, U.S. manufacturing output has grown by nearly $800 billion — an amount larger than the entire manufacturing economy of Germany, a global powerhouse. But growth does not mean jobs. While sales soared (at least until the recession), manufacturing employment sank. Using constantly improving technology to make more-valuable goods, American workers doubled their productivity in less than a generation — which, paradoxically, rendered millions of them obsolete. 

Innovative companies will also stay home thanks to America's superior network of universities and its relatively stringent intellectual-property laws. Consider, for instance, the secretive and successful South Carolina textilemaker Milliken & Co. While the rest of the region's low-tech, backward-looking textile industry was fading away, Milliken pushed ahead, investing heavily in research and becoming a hive of new patents.

Sales of industrial robots have risen to record levels and they have huge, untapped potential for domestic chores like mowing the lawn and vacuuming the carpet. Last year 3,000 underwater robots, 2,300 demolition robots and 1,600 surgical robots were in operation. A big increase is predicted for domestic robots for vacuum cleaning and lawn mowing, increasing from 12,500 in 2000 to almost 500,000 by the end of 2007. IBot’s Roomba floor cleaning robot is now available at under $200.00.

In the wake of recent anthrax scares, robots are increasingly used in postal sorting applications. Indeed, there is huge potential to mechanize the US postal service. Some 1,000 robots were installed last year to sort parcels and the US postal service has estimated that it has the potential to use up to 80,000 robots for sorting.

Look around at the “robots” around us today: automated gas pumps, bank ATMs, self-service checkout lanes – machines that are already replacing many service jobs.

Fast-forward another few decades. It doesn't require a great leap of faith to envision how advances in image processing, microprocessor speed and human-simulation could lead to the automation of most boring, low-intelligence, low-paying jobs.

Marshall Brain (yes, that's his name) founder of HowStuffWorks.com has written a couple of interesting essays about robotics in the future, well worth reading. He feels that it is quite plausible that over the next 40 years robots will displace most human jobs. According to Brain's projections, in his essay "Robotic Nation", humanoid robots will be widely available by 2030.

Advanced technologies for e-manufacturing