Issue #60
Last Update October 22, 2008
Technology RoboBusiness 2007 by David Katz May 28, 2007 The RoboBusiness Conference and Expo, held in May in Boston, was a good measure of the penetration of robotics into our economy, and a good overview of what needs to be done in the field before robotics takes off the way personal computers and the internet has. The basic conclusion one comes to is that despite an impressive amount of technological progress this is still early days for the industry. Robotics is still looking for what is called in the computer business the "killer app". For the many military robots applications discussed, this phrase can be taken literally.
Currently, robots are used in factories to do repetitive work such as welding automobile frames, in the military and by the police to do bomb detection and disposal and as reconnaissance platforms, by consumers to vacuum floors and provide educational and emotionally engaging toys, and by disaster workers as rescue machines. Some work has been done in designing harvest robots that can distinguish ripe fruit from unripe, and pick only the ripe ones.
Redefining the term "robot", however, as Paolo Pirjanian, CEO of Evolution Robotics has done, gives a more realistic view of what he thinks is the coming robotization of society. He likens robots to computer chips: while computers of various forms, desktop, laptop, handheld and server, are readily seen today, the overwhelming bulk of the computers used are invisible, embedded in everyday gadgets to add intelligence and functionality. Your cell phone, DVD player, automobile, digital watch, camera or camcorder, and mp3 player all have embedded computer chips that control the device and enhance its function. Slowly, embedded robots are similarly taking their places in our everyday tools and devices.
Just what is a robot? What allows us to call these embedded objects robots, when they don't look like Gort or Robbie? In essence, a robot is a device that can sense its environment, make decisions pertinent to its tasks, and carry out these decisions autonomously. In addition, learning and communication with others (whether those others be humans or other robots) are increasingly becoming a necessary part of robotic definition.
The auto industry is probably the leader in embedded robotics. Volvo has an on-board robot that senses the distance to an object in front, and the speed with which it is being approached. If the approach speed and distance indicate the possibility of a crash, the robot takes it upon itself to change the steering and braking characteristics of the car to prepare it to brake or swerve more quickly and efficiently if the driver takes action. (It does not initiate the action, however. The car remains at all times under the control of the driver.) Similar autonomous decision making can be expected to be built in to a variety of devices over the next few years.
One field in which civilian and military robots overlap is in search and rescue. Robots have been developed which can find a wounded soldier and carry him from the battlefield. Similar robots can be used to find injured people under collapsed buildings and either notify human rescuers or get the victim out itself.
Much work is being done on robot/human interaction. People assign emotional values to subtle cues such as tone of voice, distance, posture and other visual and auditory presentations. Robots that present the wrong cues will get a negative reaction from people, making the interchange unpleasant for the person and inefficient for the robot. However, it has been found that a robot does not have to be anthropomorphic to engender a positive emotional response. The Japanese robot dog, Aibo, which has been engineered specifically not to be furry and cuddly, nevertheless engenders feelings of affection in its owners. Soldiers become attached to battlefield robots used for reconnaissance, and rescue, to the extent of being upset when one is damaged or destroyed.
In order for robots to break out of their special-purpose niches and become ubiquitous, potential designers (and users) must be free to concentrate on use, not construction. This requires a library of parts and behaviors that can be assembled off-the-shelf to cheaply create robots with new uses. Plug and play parts, software and hardware interfacing standards, and a repertoire of software functions are being developed. As standards are set, robots will become a commodity, a moldable tool of no great cost, just as the standardization of the IBM PC design led to the commoditization of computers. There are years of development ahead before this is a reality, but those years are passing swiftly.
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