Automaton

On July 26th, the MIT Museum here in Cambridge, Mass was full of some of the best and brightest roboticists in the area. The Boston chapter of TiE partnered with Robotics Trends to bring together experts to talk about the robotics industry and where it was headed.

Neena Buck, an industry analyst at MIT, and Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, introduced the robotics industry to the audience of mostly software entrepreneurs. Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot, gave a keynote about her company and the lessons learned over the last fifteen years. Finally, a panel spent some time answering questions from moderator Dan Kara and the audience. The panel was comprised of a Media Lab PhD candidate named Cory Kidd, also the founder of company Intuitive Automata; Joe Jones, CTO and Co-Founder of Q Robotics and also one of the inventors of the Roomba; Rory MacKean, R&D Manager at Mobile Robots (formerly ActivMedia); and Chris Wallsmith, CKO at Bluefin Robotics (he also has the dubious honor of being my boss).

The panel was fascinating, not just in terms of the answers they gave to the questions, but also to see what sorts of questions were asked by the not-necessarily-roboticist audience. A few interesting points and observations:

• Asia vs the US: there's a well known split in the attitudes toward robots in the US versus in Japan and South Korea. In Asia, it goes, robots are often humanoid (or canine-oid, in the case of Aibo), are meant to interact directly with people, and are thought of --and designed to be -- as pets or companions. In the US, robots are for "dull/dirty/dangerous" tasks like manufacturing or defense and are generally thought of as tools. This may be changing in the US, though. Helen Greiner had stories of Roomba customers asking for *their* Roomba to be repaired, not a replacement unit. Military PackBot operators give awards to the robots as though they are part of the human team and, like the Roomba owners, want their own robot repaired, not to have a new one sent to them. It will be interesting to see how these attitudes drive designs of the next generation of US robots, and whether the US and Asia begin to converge on their designs.
• The "killer app": there were many questions from the audience about what the panelists thought the "killer app" was for the robotics industry -- not a surprising question from those who work in software. What was surprising was the panel's almost unanimous response: there is none, because robots will literally be everywhere. Chris Wallsmith pointed out that robots are much like computers; that is, computers are everywhere -- your laptop, your cell phone, your car, your calculator -- but people don't call them computers. Similarly, he said, your car will be robotic, your kitchen will be robotic, your personal fitness trainer will be robotic... but they'll be called cars, kitchens, and trainers. Not robots.
• Training for robotics: a hypothetical investor in the audience asked what one should look for in evaluating the experience of people proposing a new robotic technology to VCs. The panelists all had different answers -- a background in psychology may help with the design of interfaces and interactions; a broad engineering base is needed to build up the electrical, mechanical, and software systems of a robot; membership in the target customer base lends credibility to the design. The only agreement seemed to be that a broadly experienced group is necessary for success.

So where is the industry headed? Everywhere, it seems. The good news is that not a single person in the room seemed at all pessimistic about the robotics industry; there's funding for startups, a healthy US defense research funding source, rapid growth of new technologies and new ways for people to interact with machines, and growing acceptance of robots working for and with humans. It's an exciting time.

For anyone in the Boston, Mass area, you might be interested in this event at MIT tomorrow (Wednesday) night, a session called "Robots: The Next Wave of the Robot Revolution" that will "explore the advancing robot invasion across all of those sectors." There's a panel of speakers from a few robotics companies, networking receptions, and recruiting (I'll be there representing Bluefin). There's a small registration fee, though it's free for students.

For the college-aged (and graduate-student-aged) among you, I wanted to point out that the NASA Robotics Academy is accepting applications for its 2008 summer program. Students are hired to work on projects in teams of 4-5 at either Goddard or Marshall Space Flight Center. The internship is residential (you'll live with other interns) and it does include a stipend.

I'm an alum of the 2005 program (its inaugural year) when I worked on a planetary rover design project with Goddard in conjunction with a lab at the University of Maryland; it was a good time and the trips to see other robotics labs -- we went to Johnson Space Center, MIT's CSAIL, and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute -- was unbeatable.

Also, you get a discount at the NASA gift shops. Just saying.

Application deadline is 15 January, and you'll need some recommendations, so get crackin'!

I found out just recently about Vision Robotics, a company in California with a pretty broad range of products (or eventual products), but all of them are based on computer vision and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) navigation technology.

Their agricultural products look pretty interesting; they're looking at developing a robot that can go through an orchard and pick ripe oranges off of trees, as well as one that can prune grape vines. The concept appears to be that one robot will scan the trees in each orchard row with its vision system, mapping out where each fruit is, while a second robot (I can't tell from the renderings if it's attached to the first one or not -- though they do like like two discrete modules) with the picking arms follows it and picks the fruit it has identified. I have to say, if anyone else is familiar with the Boomers from the anime Bubblegum Crisis, this thing looks terrifying.

I found out about Vision Robotics through a student at Olin College (my alma mater), where the company is sponsoring a senior project to develop an end-effector that can gently grasp and pick an orange off a tree without breaking the skin. The student also compared apples to oranges, pointing out that oranges contrast with the tree, while apples tend to blend in with the green leaves, making oranges an easier target for a vision system. Still, Vision Robotics does appear to be designing an apple picker as well.

On the home robots side, they've got patents on a vacuuming and mopping robot. Even though iRobot beat them to the punch on the concepts, Vision Robotics patented a design that uses a remote cleaning head that is much smaller and more mobile than the Roomba body; a module carrying power and other large, heavy components can stay out of the way while the connected cleaning head does its work. Unlike the Roomba, this robot (as conceived) also maps the room before vacuuming.

They also list an elder care "personal service" robot, though as with all of these elder care concepts developed in the US and Japan, their feasibility remains to be seen. The floor cleaning model is much better proven.

For anyone interested in moving to San Diego (or anyone already there), they list an open development position on their Careers page (linked at the bottom of their site).

Image source: www.visionrobotics.com

Robotics Trends, a web portal of many things robotic, has just re-launched its site. The new site does a really nice job of putting together a ton of information about industry, academia, conferences, jobs, and other resources and presenting it in an easy to read way. Check it out!

Robotics Trends also runs the RoboBusiness conference, this year 8-10 April in Pittsburgh, and registration is going on as we speak.

The world's robot population has reached 4.49 million, and that number should nearly double by 2010 to 8.37 million. That's one automaton for every person in Austria, whatever that means! But we've written about that already: we put together these numbers based on data from the latest edition of World Robotics, a survey by the International Federation of Robotics released late last year.

Now we're looking again at this number-filled report and highlighting some of its best stuff. We want to know: What kinds of robots are out there? Where are they toiling around? And how fast are the silicon-brained things multiplying?

First, a recap: The World Robotics study divides robots in two main categories: industrial robots and service robots. The first category includes welding systems, assembly manipulators, silicon-wafer handlers—you know, that kind of heavy, expensive, several-degrees-of-freedom stuff. The second category is divided in two subcategories: professional service robots (things like bomb-disposal bots, surgical systems, milking robots) and personal service robots (vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, all sorts of robot hobby kits and toys).

Below you'll find 10 statistics about the world's robotics market we thought you'd want to know. (All data from the World Robotics study except the world robot population figures -- see note [1] at the end.) The stats after the jump.