In surveying top roboticists across industries, AMD uncovered consensus around three critical pillars underpinning successful automation projects - synchronization, integration and decentralization.

Foremost is precise timing enabling deterministic reactions to sensor data within milliseconds. This foils latency, allowing safe navigation or split-second adjustments when collaborating beside humans. Startup Radmantis applies such real-time responsiveness in aquaculture, using AI to instantly grade passing salmon and sort them underwater via robotic gates.

Equally vital is constructing modular subsystems that coordinate into a greater functionality whole. Student competitors in STEM programs like FIRST Robotics Competition become well-versed in dividing teams and robots by specialization to merge later seamlessly. The orchestra metaphor applies suggests one university mechatronics engineer - various components must integrate despite working independently.

Finally, distributed intelligence beats centralized control requiring simpler components to each handle lower-level duties. For example, BattleBots team Switchback explains an independent arm processor determines optimal trajectories so the master controller simply requests a position, not plotting movement itself. This prevents single points of failure and constraint.

Modularity also permits rolling subsystem upgrades without full robot redesign. As with timing, BattleBots is rife with abrupt impacts that could incapacitate an entire bot lacking compartmentalization. Segregation and empowerment provide resilience.

"Things true in robotics often apply in life," says AMD. "Youth interest in robotics teaches timeliness through prompt reactions, team coordination despite partitioned effort, and dividing complex problems into distributed solutions."

Whether pursuing automation careers or not, generation Z learns transferable skills from democratizing capability, much as global supply chains disperse manufacturing across specialized sites. These insights promise to transform more than robots suggested AMD.

Timing, integration and distribution are central pillars of AMD’s own accelerated data center architecture and adaptive embedded computing strategy. The company sees its EPYC server processors, Ryzen laptop chips and Radeon data science GPUs echoing the same principles now revolutionizing robotics - the importance of when, the sum over parts and decentralization’s edge over old centralized designs no longer suited for increasingly digital, dynamic application demands.