Everything-Robotic by The Robot Report

The Future of Chinese-manufactured Apple Products

2012-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

China's economic miracle has lifted countless millions of supremely poor people out of poverty. But this progress has come at a price. The Apple Corporation's experience in manufacturing its popular iPhones, iPods and iPads in China - recently described in the N.Y. Times - has subjected many of those making Apple products to unsafe and unfair working conditions.

Apple has been good for China. It has provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for the 300 to 400 million Chinese anxious to leave their rural, impoverished existence and move to a city where they can get a paying job. When these migrant workers get that job they send home 30-50% of their earnings, and then they and their families back home buy, amongst other things, electronic consumer products like cellphones, smartphones and iPods.

Many of these jobs have been created by the Apple phenomenon whereby Apple keeps making trend-setting products through new and novel uses of technological achievement.

People want to buy their iPhones and iPads. Apple just had it's biggest ever quarter: 37M iPhones, 15M iPads, $46 billion revenue. Plus, as the economy has started to improve, people have more disposable income and are willing to spend even more for Apple products - 60% of which are manufactured and assembled in China, much of that by one large contract manufacturer: Foxconn.

Foxconn - whose parent company is Hon Hai Precision Electronics, a publicly traded Taiwanese company (TPE:2317) - is the hub in the center of this wheel of motion. It is in their factories in China where some of the components are built and much of the final assembly takes place. As recently reported by the New York Times, CBS, NPR, various watchdog groups and even an off-Broadway play, these factories are havens for worker mistreatment, suicides, unsafe conditions, low pay, and even child labor.

Suicides reached a peak in 2010 and Foxconn implemented solutions, including protective barriers, hotlines and counseling to help prevent further incidents. No suicides were reported in 2011.

Unsafe factory conditions, particularly working with toxins (polishing resins and cleaners) and dusts from metal shavings and other materials were cited as another example. Two serious explosions involving improperly ventilated aluminum shavings occurred in 2011 killing 20 and injuring 50. Subsequently, better ventilation systems and the replacement of workers with robotic polishing, sanding and spraying machines is beginning to take place.

Pay has raced to keep up with discontent and has risen from $0.25 per hour to $0.50 and then $1.00 and now, in many cases, $2.00 per hour. But in this excerpt from a report by a labor rights group, China Labor Watch, one can see the underlying problems:

The minimum wage in many factories does not meet the living costs of its workers. Workers cannot earn a living wage from normal working hours alone, and must work excessive overtime hours in order to earn enough money to survive. At one factory [not Foxconn] for example, workers’ minimum monthly wage was $138 in October 2010. There was a $6 deduction for dormitory accommodations, a $40.50 deduction for food and utilities fees, and a $15.30 deduction for social insurance, which left $76.20. If workers have other expenses or financial responsibilities, such as vocational classes or financial support of their parents (one of the main reasons migrant workers seek work in cities), it would be impossible to meet their living costs with only $76.20. In this situation, workers find themselves with no other option but to work excessive overtime.

Furthermore, many factories require workers to complete a fixed term of employment before they become eligible for a salary increase. Some factories required workers to complete at least a three month probation period and an additional three month evaluation before becoming eligible for a salary increase. Other factories require a year or longer before workers are eligible for an annual bonus. The difficulty, lengthy terms, and sometimes unpredictability involved in gaining a salary increase and bonus further reinforces workers’ dependence on overtime in order to earn a living wage.

Interviews by the press and various workers rights groups indicate that the main form of discontent is pressure and punishment from long hours at monotonous but intricate work in less than ergonomically friendly postures. 60-72 hour 6-day work weeks are the norm. The pressure comes from the demands to produce more, work more and complain less with punishment for infringements meted out in the form of financial fines, push-ups, public humiliation and attitudinal retraining classes.

Crowded dormitories, cafeterias, long and regimented lines, low pay and condescending contracts, have all contributed to a high turnover -- 20-30% at last report. This perpetuates the cycle of employing unskilled migrants, training them in factory work, housing them, and getting them onto the factory floor and assembly line as quickly as possible.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was outraged at the N.Y. Times. Two recent stories in the N.Y. Times were followed by pieces on NPR and CBS: (1) In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad and (2) How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. He considered the articles to be an offensive pseudo exposé. In an internal e-mail message to select Apple employes, Cook wrote:

We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It's not who we are.

For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers' manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am.

Foxconn, like many of the other suppliers, has denied many of the accusations and responded to periodic audits by saying that they've made or are implementing the legal changes suggested.

To be fair, one must keep in mind that China's internal labor laws are newly emerging and are different from ours - their minimum age and wage are different too. Their management style is significantly different as well.

The N.Y Times articles failed to note what may be Foxconn's most important long-term remedy to problems with its workforce: its plans to deploy one million robots. Foxconn appears to actually be ahead of the news cycle in this instance. Early in 2010 they realized that there would be increased demand for their products and services - particularly Apple products - and that they just couldn't handle more workers. Instead, they decided to deploy 1 million robots as part of their solution. Mid-2011 they launched an R&D facility and robot manufacturing factory in Taiwan to design, develop and produce those 1 million factory robots. Recently they confirmed their intentions to replace but not necessarily lay off 500,000 workers with those 1 million robots thereby moving those workers up the skill-level ladder to more experienced and higher paying jobs.

By any reasonable definition of product liability law, Apple products are Apple's products regardless of whether Apple subcontracts some or much of the effort. Apple is liable for any product failures that injure buyers. Consequently Apple is responsible for the actions of their suppliers to the extent that they are working on Apple's products. Thus it comes down to this: what can and should Apple and other companies do when their sub-contractors are not holding to acceptable Western standards?

Here are my two suggestions:

Apple could insist that dull, dirty and dangerous tasks be automated with robotics and other processes that eliminate these jobs and, more importantly, reduce the areas where injury and discontent are likely to occur.
The N.Y. Times articles implied that Apple monitors its contractors' costs and squeezes their profit margins to the lowest level possible and, when that happens, it becomes a major factor in these contractors subjecting their employees to unsafe and unfair working conditions in order to meet Apple's price. If, on the other hand, Apple provided additional profits to their suppliers but stipulated that those profits be passed down to their workers in the form of additional funds for safety, better work-hours, automation and higher pay, everyone would benefit and the Apple culture would be preserved. Some might argue that this solution doesn't address the competitive pressures of the marketplace. Apple's recent quarterly 28% net profit results - and their $92 billion cash hoard - suggest that, regardless of market pressures, Apple does have some ability to share their profits where they will do the most good for long-term growth, the welfare of their sub-contract workers, shareholder value, AND global public relations.

And a solution from the folks at Change.org - a petition to Apple to protect workers making iPhones in Chinese factories. As of this posting there are already 157,000 signatures!

Stocks of Robot Manufacturers Still Recovering

2012-01-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

Click image to enlarge

The latest ROBO-STOX™ chart - covering the four year period from 12/31/2007 to 12/31/2011 - shows that worldwide stock performance of robotic stocks over the last four years has been disappointing for investors.

Robotic industrials are still down 28% from their 2007 highs and did poorer than the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is also down 8.5% from 2007.
Service robotic stocks are down 15% from 2007 while the NASDAQ is down just 2.5% -- better than the industrials, and showing signs of steady improvement, but still hasn't regained their 2007 highs.
Industrials took a big fall from their 2007 highs with the doubly whammy of the collapse of auto sales and bankruptcies of auto companies. 2009 saw hesitation and some gains, and then a small rise in the latter part of 2010 was blown away with the Japanese disasters, Thailand floods and EU economic turmoil. Thus industrial robot stocks are still down 28% even though business is good.
The few publicly-traded service robotics companies fall into three main sectors: medical, defense/security and a mixture of academic and consumer niche products. Medical robotic stocks are booming; defense/security stocks are holding steady; and the remainder are all over the place.
Industrial robot companies represent 62% of the $9.3 billion robotics industry revenue; service is 38% of which 75% was for military/defense (data provided by International Federation of Robotics in their 2011 reports and press releases).

Publicly-traded robot vendors represent less than 20% of the total list of companies in the industry. Further reducing that number of stock opportunities is the fact that in many cases, robotics is not the primary business of the company. ABB (ABBN:VX) is an example - only 1/3 of their income is derived from robotics or robotic related activities; the same is true for many of the public companies, particularly those that provide drones for defense and underwater ROVs.

2012 is likely to be another volatile year for robot vendors, public and privately-held.

In the industrial sector, Foxconn (2317:TW) has confirmed that their new robot manufacturing facility in Taiwan will be producing about 1 million robots for deployment in their factories in China starting this year and continuing into 2013 and 2014. Foxconn's choice to build their own robots will have a major impact on robot manufacturers ABB (ABBN:VX), Fanuc (FANUY) and Kuka (KU2:GR) - companies that have manufacturing facilities in China or nearby and were anticipating selling to Foxconn.
Foxconn has not said whether or when they will begin selling their new line of robots to other companies.
Medical robot vendors outside of the U.S. will find much demand for their products which are likely to be unhampered by FDA and other regulatory bodies, eg, Mazor (MZOR:IT), an Israeli company with a well-received robotic device for spine surgery. In the U.S., competition and growth is thwarted not only by the slow and costly FDA approval process but also by Intuitive Surgical (of da Vinci fame) (ISRG) and InTouch Health (venture-funded; not yet public), both of which have wide-ranging patents.
Defense/security robot and unmanned vehicle vendors (air, land and sea) worldwide will find their products in much demand even though overall defense spending is going down.
Robot vacuum vendors like iRobot (IRBT), LG and Samsung, are finding that world demand for this type of robot cleaner is growing - but so is the competition. At CES 2012 there were 6 other Korean, Chinese and European competitors to the big 3.
Robotic lawnmowers are beginning to sell as their price comes down to less than $1,000 in the U.S. and less than $2,000 in Europe.
Service robot companies that focus on academia will find much competition and lower budgets for the year.
Engineering and consulting firms that provide automation integration services will start to feel pinched as robot manufacturers provide robots which are more intuitive and easier to train and integrate - the very reasons that caused there to be a need for outside integrator firms in the first place.

Consequently, for the robotics industry, all the ancillary businesses and all their stocks, I see 2012 as a year similar to 2011 (hopefully without the natural disasters of 2011), with bouts of sharp volatility but minimal upward growth.

Divergent Views on Communicating with Machines

2012-01-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft and Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman, Mercedes Benz

Much of what I saw at CES 2012 was about products being upgraded to “smart” under the premise that smart connectivity enables consumer convenience. It was definitely on the minds of most of those attending. That's why the CES keynote speeches were so well attended: they were slated to offer insight into the near-term future. But this year there were competing visions of that future. The industry leaders seemed to have divergent approaches to the development and marketing of "smart."

CES is a show focused on near-term product releases… those that will be launched later this year, in time for Christmas, and into next year. Throughout CES, almost all of the consumer products were demonstrating smarter products – smarter in the sense that they are connected to the Internet or a local net and have sensors or artificial intelligence that gather and process data and make decisions based on that information.
The Apple iPad, with it's multi-touch capability, has already changed our expectations as to how we interact with our computers, tablets and phones. And Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Kinect are leading us on to even newer ways -- smart ways of interaction between users and their devices.… all to add value to the product by providing convenience or entertainment to the buyer.
One of the most interesting areas of CES was focused on Digital Health - where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data that affects consumers. Digital Health was an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors, and the many new products and apps epitomized our "nurse in your purse" future.

To make my point I must first describe three seemingly disparate events:

Ford and NPR Press Conference:
Ford and NPR held a joint press conference to launch NPR’s new app which runs within the infotainment system (called Sync AppLink) on new Ford cars. NPR has the 1st and 2nd rankings of Morning Edition and All Things Considered among U.S. news radio programs. Their new app gives Ford drivers voice control over their NPR programming. In a menu-driven series of commands, a driver can call up the latest news of the hour, select a live stream of his or her favorite station, or access programs or topics from NPR’s large library of podcasts by using a set of simple commands like “hourly news” or “stations” or “programs” followed by the name of the program. The resulting selection may be playing on the FM band, streaming live, or streaming from the archives of NPR over the Internet. It could take as many as five commands to get the desired program. Underneath the Ford Sync system is Microsoft’s operating system. Executives from Ford and NPR, when asked about future improvements to the system, said that a more free-form natural language voice recognition system would be ideal but is not yet capable and reliable enough to work with safety and convenience in a car. But think how Siri would get to the same program in just one short sentence: “Find and play today’s ‘All Things Considered.’”

Keynote Speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:
Shortly after this presentation I went to the Steve Ballmer Microsoft Keynote Speech. Bizarre is a charitable word to describe this off-putting, fever-pitched yet unexciting sales pitch for everything Microsoft. Very little news, less information about new product introductions, and much puffery about the new Windows 8 Operating System coming sometime this year. Not a word about robotics even though Microsoft supports and sells a robotic operating system. Ballmer presented Windows 8 and Metro – the same systems that are limiting NPR’s app by not having a capable and reliable free-form voice recognition system similar to Apple’s Siri – as the cat’s meow; the very highest tech and best you can buy anywhere. I actually felt bad from the presentation - to see such an unappealing sales pitch while omitting Microsoft's vision for the future. [MS announced that this would be Ballmer's and their last keynote at CES - a fact which underscores how the shift toward mobile devices has kept MS re-allocating talent and resources to adapt.] As an aside, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine just did a cover story about Ballmer turning the company into a more relevant powerhouse with cooler technology and also a serious player in cloud computing. In that article, Businessweek describes what I saw: “For many, the lasting impression of Ballmer is the sweaty, breathless, booming clown seen in countless YouTube clips [or in my case, in person at CES]. He plays the cheerleader in an apparent effort to prove that no one can top his love of Microsoft – and he succeeds cringingly well.” The article goes on to describe Ballmer as pretty normal except in public presentations. Still, I left that night without any new information and with a headache and bad feeling.

Keynote Speech by Mercedes Chairman Dieter Zetsche:
The next morning I went to see Dr Dieter Zetsche present Mercedes' first-ever CES keynote speech, an inspiring, informative and well thought out “big picture” focus on the next generation of connected cars. When asked whether cars were going to become autonomously-driven commodities built to carry around consumer products, he responded that Mercedes builds cars that people want to drive and that will continue – but when the traffic or the road is boring, there will be a switch to turn on a temporary autopilot. Zetsche, in his interesting and responsible presentation, described the auto industry and Mercedes cars in terms of freedom and included new offerings within each of five “freedoms.”

Freedom not only from the horses, buses and trains of the past, but from the limits of distance, from the tethers of things local, to distancing yourself from your parents.
Freedom of time via connectivity so that seamless updates are pushed to in-vehicle communication systems negating the need to bring your car in for system updates. Their new MBrace2 system regularly updates and monitors their cars but also connects today’s digital lifestyle into a digital drive style.
Freedom of speech to communicate with your car in the most safe and expeditious manner. The current iteration of MBrace2 has a much enhanced (but not yet freeform) voice recognition system and in many instances the system will be proactive, eg, choosing to not answer phone calls or read messages at those times when the driver is fully occupied with hazardous driving situations.
Freedom of energy – where Zetsche described new hydrogen-based fuel packs just waiting for the national (political) infrastructure to support them.
Freedom of information where car-to-car communication can provide alerts about road hazards and conditions by taking advantage of the already present in-car virtual private network system and link.

All three of these presentations occurred before the doors for CES opened, and when I walked the massive exhibition space, those visions peppered what I saw with what I believed to be the immediate future in mobility, communication and apps. It is clear to me that despite Mr. Ballmer's sales pitch to buy today's systems and products because they were great, free form voice recognition (a la Siri) is the future of communication with our machines and "smart" is the pathway we are following to that end goal.

The most advanced manner of communicating with smart products is by voice and gesture. Today’s technology is menu-driven (like the NPR example) but the future is free-form and natural (think IBM’s Watson or Apple’s Siri). Hence the flurry of acquisitions into the language processing space: Apple’s acquisition of Siri; Google just bought CleverSense; Aldebaran recently purchased Karotz. New startups of note in this arena include True Knowledge and their Siri-like product Evi. Nuance (of Dragon Dictate fame) is already established in this arena. Nuance voice processing is repackaged and used by many car companies for their in-car systems including both Ford and Mercedes.

It appeared to be an afterthought in Ballmer’s presentation (Microsoft has been slow to react to it's popularity and multiple uses), but Microsoft’s Kinect voice and gesture recognition device was the wonder of 2011 and seen in many non-Microsoft boothes at the 2012 show. Hacked from its Xbox gaming origins, it provides a low-cost alternative to expensive LIDAR and collision avoidance systems, and all sorts of other applications. It is a wonderful invention that other companies are hacking and incorporating into their products. PrimeSense, the Israeli inventor of the Kinect device and it's software, has been doing a booming business selling the device for non-gaming applications, research and who knows what else.

Consequently, it was easy to see that at CES 2012 the path to the next level of "smart" products is through the use of better communication with those products - gesture and voice recognition, and natural language, to command and control them – just like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible!

CES 2012 and Consumer Robotics: Informative yet confusing... and bad food!

2012-01-16T14:56:00.000-08:00

CES 2012 was a mammoth display of the trend toward smart, connected devices for every form of consumer activity: toys, appliances, entertainment, health, mobility, etc. More than 20,000 new products were launched at this year’s CES and a large portion of them could be considered "smart."

“Smart” (robotic-like) products profess to add value, assure safety, and provide convenience through connectivity... claims that in many cases are true, particularly with in-car infotainment systems.

3,100 exhibitors, 1.86 million sq ft of exhibition space, 153,000 attendees of which 34,000 were international and only one good food stand (Nathan’s hot dogs – you can’t ruin a Nathan’s hot dog). Massive crowding, slow moving, loud, extravagant and wonderful. Thin TVs – so thin they looked like they couldn’t stand up by themselves without bending – 3D with and without glasses, projectors, smart appliances, and apps for everything from TVs to refrigerators to scales.

Consumer robotics represented a very small part of CES but had the same combination of glitz, glamour, marvelous stuff, misrepresentation, uninspiring products and hidden gems, just like the rest of CES. Robotics Trends hosted a Robotics Tech Zone but the action was well beyond their purview because many of the companies wanted to emphasize their consumer orientation instead of highlighting the robotic.

Romibo

One of the most interesting areas was focused on Digital Health - where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data for the cloud to process and selectively inform doctors or users of the results, and progress over time. The highlight of the area was Life Technologies $150,000 Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer, which, by the end of the year, will be able to sequence an entire human genome for about $1,000 in a few hours. Digital Health was also the only area where research was shown and where the NSF/Carnegie Mellon University Quality of Life Technology booth was located, an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors. Few fell under the robotics umbrella (most were digital apps and devices) except these three:

Romibo, a do-it-yourself robot for therapy, education and play.
PerMMA, a personal mobility and manipulation appliance for power wheelchair users.
Myomo, rehabilitation robotics and interactive gaming systems for stroke victim rehab.

Certainly the most publicity went to Tosy Robotics, a Vietnamese manufacturer of robotic and high-tech toys, for the launch of their new mRobo, a transformer-type boom-box entertainment robot with a two-hour meet-and-greet by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.

Tosy also showed their other robotic toys: DiscoRobo, a dance to the beat with lights toy, and Sket-Robo, a robot that draws.

Cubelets, $160, by Modular Robotics, had a small booth and a big hit for their educational robot construction kit. These magnetic blocks can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Since each cube has unique functions, you can build robots that drive around on a tabletop and respond to light, sound and temperature.

Parrot, a French manufacturer of hands-free wireless devices for cars and phones, was the hit of CES 2010 with their AR.Drone, a quadcopter with two cameras that is driven from an iPhone or iTouch. This year they upgraded the camera to enable hi-def video, improved their software for still and video capture, and added a range of games and customization accessories... all shown at a huge outdoor booth at CES.

iRobot launched their Roomba, Scooba, Verro and Looj vacuums, floor washers, pool cleaners and gutter cleaning robots at previous CES's, but at this CES they only had office visits for demos and marketing where they were also showing off their AVA concept robot and promoting their partnership with InTouch Health, a provider of telepresence collaboration for doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients and a place where iRobot's lower cost AVA robots could be armed with InTouch Health's hospital experiences and enable the resulting systems to be available to a larger audience.

More than 7 million robot vacuum cleaners have been sold thus far with real competition for iRobot showing up recently with a flurry of similar cleaners - all displayed at CES:

Look-alikes: (from left to right): Techko Maid, Agait, Ecovacs, xRobot, iclebo and Ottoro

iRobot Roomba, LG RoboKing, Samsung Tango
The big news is that both Samsung and Ecovacs (above) offer a self-emptying dustbin option.

But LG and Samsung entered the arena, and, with their large consumer client base, vast manufacturing and marketing resources, and an array of add-on features, has been selling their vacuums in Asia and Europe; not yet in the US. iRobot should feel their presence very soon.

Another consumer products manufacturer (of home theater systems), South Korean Moneual, also sells a robot vacuum and a more interesting $1,000 home mobile air filter / security device. The mobile air filter is also designed as a safety system for the elderly, it connects with a wrist band that can detect a fall and can call for help if one occurs.

A skinless Pleo showing it's complex innards

Pleo, the baby robotic dinosaur, was represented by both the seller (Innvo Labs) and the manufacturer (Jetta Co. Ltd.) that reincarnated the old bankrupt company, and was showing the new Pleo rb (reborn), with accessories and software enhancements.

Amongst the pseudo robotic products were three which act as a pedestal for the camera and video functions of iPhones and swivel or have wheels or tracks to move as wirelessly directed:

Xybotyx, a Colorado start-up, is launching a $111 wheeled platform and app for your iPhone that lets you drive your phone wirelessly.
Swivl by Satarii, is a $159 stationary platform for your iPhone camera or video. It swivels to follow you or can be remote controlled.
Romo by Romotive, is a $99 tracter-like iPhone holder which can stream video to your PC and also dance to music on your iPhone.

Karotz, by Violet (a subsidiary of Aldebaran, the builder of the Nao robot), announced the launch of their Karotz "intelligent internet companion" into the U.S. market with a $99 special price for the rabbit and 30% off all accessories. Ideal for learning how to develop apps with voice recognition and Internet connectivity, and now with Aldebaran stewardship, this interesting little device may hold a key to the future of human-robot communication.

Other vendors under the robotic umbrella included:

(from left to right): Windoro, Sphero, Ladybug, Mantarobot, Paro, Crawler

Windoro, from Ilshim Global, a window washing device.
Sphero, by Orbotix, a robotic ball controlled from your phone.
Ladybug, by JS-Robotics, a bug-like mobile device with collision avoidance sensors.
Mantaro telepresence robot, a mobile Skype platform using your own iPhone or iPad.
Paro, the therapeutic furry seal-like bot for hospitals and eldercare.
Crawler, by Topy Industries, an experimental tractor-like base for search and rescue.

Not exactly robotic, but for prototyping and DIY'ers, there were three 3D printers of note: Makerbot announced their new $1,750 two-color 3D printer, Essential Dynamics showed their $3,000 Imagine Printer that prints with a whole host of materials, including food, chocolates, silicone, cheese, epoxy, organics, etc., and the Cube from Cubify which offers both a $1,300 3D printer and also a service for those that just want to send their designs in and get back the finished product.

So there you have it -- 25+ robot vendors focused on consumer products -- less than 1% of CES -- and perhaps only one or two to rave about. Maybe next year....

Is 2012 The Year That Robot Applications Take Root?

2012-01-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

By Frank Tobe, Editor/Publisher, The Robot Report

Tell us what apps you want.

In July of 2008, the app store concept was launched by Apple and it has dramatically changed the mobile industry. Over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded between Christmas and New Year according to Flurry Analytics. That's about 60 percent higher than every week of December before Christmas, and marks the largest number of apps ever downloaded in a single week.

Robot app stores are now beginning to happen as well and visions of apps for tele-robotic safety and surveillance pop into mind, or light domestic duties, or…? My imagination runs wild at the thought and I imagine these new apps being easy to use, having multiple functions and a low cost.

But that is then and now is now. At present there are three significantly different approaches to an app store for robots (although additional “stores” are in the planning stage and many existing stores are making arrangements to expand beyond their own boundaries (like iRobot’s online store and Willow Garage's application chooser)):

MyRobots, by Canadian RobotShop, has opened a combination app store and online environment to permit robotics products to be monitored and updated seamlessly as well as providing a Cloud repository for applications that run from the Cloud instead of the robot itself. MyRobots’ slogan is “Connect your robots; reap the benefits.” The online monitoring aspect of MyRobots is similar to the MyMotoman Remote Monitoring Service initiated my Yaskawa Motoman America in August.
Robots App Store, by San Francisco serial entrepreneur Elad Inbar, is developing their store to be an online marketplace for selling apps and also providing developers their own sales portal. Robots App Store, in addition to attempting to trademark the hyphenated words “Robot-app”, has a wonderfully informative info-graphic explaining the need and market for robot apps. What it doesn’t explain is how the process will be different than what most of us have come to expect when buying apps from Apple’s App Store. It involves tinkering with development tools and operating system platforms – a turnoff for all but the most avid hobbyist.
RoboEarth, an EU public-private consortium, is using the Internet to create a giant open source network and database repository that can be accessed and updated by robots around the world. Focused more on academia and industrial applications, RoboEarth speeds up robot learning and adaption in complex tasks and can execute tasks that were not explicitly planned for when the robot was designed.

Service robotics – as differentiated from industrial or defense/security/space robotics - needs to provide inexpensive and efficient assistance to humans to be profitable in the consumer marketplace and emerge as a serious industry. We already have vacuum robots and adaptive cruise control bots, but there are thousands of other possible applications. Entertainment, embedded systems, eldercare and home assistance are certain to be amongst the first groups to benefit as the service robotics industry materializes.

There are two different approaches to providing those services:

C3P0

The Ultimate Humanoid Robot

A universal robotic tool that will be able to perform all the tasks we ask it to do, including social communication - a robot like C3P0. This is the goal of humanoid robots. At this time, humanoid robots are costly, difficult to control, slow and intrusive. Although human-robot communication is part of the lure, and there is much progress in that area, we are at least five years away from devices that not only speak but understand. IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri are proving that it can be done but their software isn’t yet available to front-end robotic applications and there is, at present, little comparable in the robotics world (although the recent ABC Nightline interview of Hanson Robotics’ Philip Dick robot shows there is serious ongoing development). Even when the two-way communication aspect is further developed and made available to roboticists, it will be many more years until the goal of a C3P0-like sophisticated humanoid robot will be ready.
A more near-term and progressive solution is to forego universality and design specific devices that provide limited, task-specific means to communicate and complete specific tasks… think Roomba.

Certainly #2 has more near-term promise and is where most of the market is focused for the rest of this decade. As service robots begin to meet the four core criteria of low cost, low intrusiveness, safety and modularity – which is happening almost daily with technology changes – an incredible number of opportunities for service robot apps can be foreseen. The key will be to make them practical, affordable and acceptable by humans as part of their day-to-day life.

Robots App Store:

At discussions with Elad Inbar, CEO of Robots App Store, I asked about the size of the marketplace and was surprised to find that there are 14 million service robots out there now, and it’s estimatited that by the end of 2014 there will be 24 million. If only 15% of them were able to buy two apps at an average price of $9.99, that’s $72 million in revenue. If they each bought five apps instead of two, the figure would be $180 million. If 20% purchased five apps it would be a $¼ billion business. How real and applicable those figures are depends on many complex variables: willingness of the buyer to tinker, quality of the apps, flexibility of the robots, price, disposable income, etc. In fact, apps for robots with an Apple or Android front end will not be available in the Robots App Store but will onlybe available through the Apple (or Android) App Store – which limits the market metrics… an example of this Apple exclusivity is the hundreds of thousands of Parrot’s AR.Drone quadcopters.

Regardless of the metrics, the process of developing and sharing apps can provide a giant leap toward rejuvenating the robots we have and teaching the audience (the buyers) that they can get what they want from their robot(s). Thus the buyer becomes more educated and demanding and the producers less capricious -- and more profitable.

From an infographic by Robots App Store showing possible app prices for various robots

Inbar’s Robots App Store is “focused solely on the personal and service robots marketplace because “industrial robots are very limited in their functionality… not to mention that they are oriented to quickly repeat the same tasks 24/7 unlike personal and service robots that can be extended to virtually everything! I believe in the consumers market – as they will grow like a hockey-stick!”

When I asked what kind of apps we will see once the store opens, Elad said, “We have more than 100 approved robotic developers working on apps for Romba, Pleo, AIBO, NAO, DARwin and others arranged in categories like Entertainment (dances, etc.), Story Telling (for kids), Utilities (like home search engines), Tools (like face recognition and such) and many others.”

Finally, I asked about the mechanics of porting an app or game from one robot to another. “ROS by Willow Garage, Gostai, URBI and others are trying to build a standard open platform OS that will run across all robots. We, as a marketplace, don’t take sides in this battle. We are serving every robot, ever developer, and every OS. But surely we’ll have to take sides one day when the critical mass will decide which is the widely spread and used OS…. Personally I believe that ROS is in the best position to become the de-facto standard and I personally love to work with their code. It is easy, simple and their libraries can be ported quickly between different robots – a huge advantage for every robot apps developer.”

MyRobots:

The goal for MyRobots is to get all robotic platforms to collaborate and operate together (regardless of their operating system) via the use of Cloud robotics. Although like other stores MyRobots will sell downloadable apps too, their main interest is to develop applications that will run on the Cloud thereby freeing computation time and resources on the robot and will make a single app compatible with many different robotic platforms.

Says MyRobot’s Mario Tremblay:

Cloud Robotics is the application of the cloud computing concept to robots. This means using the Internet to augment the robots capabilities by off-loading computation and providing services on demand. Being connected to the cloud also helps robots to collaborate with other machines, smart objects and humans. Through this collaboration, robots transcend their physical limitations and become more useful and capable since they can delegate parts of their tasks to more suitable parties. By combining increased communication capabilities to the ability and flexibility of running and storing part of their intelligence (i.e. software, behaviors and apps) on the MyRobots infrastructure, smart objects and robots become augmented and constitute a new and revolutionary concept for the future of robotic intelligence: Cloud Robotics.

RoboEarth:

RoboEarth is an EU-funded consortium of educators, research facilities and corporations working together to provide a world-wide-web for robot applications. RoboEarth, in development for the last two years, can be seen as a giant network and database repository where robots share information and learn from each other about their behavior and environment thereby showing a better way of robot collaboration and information sharing. RoboEarth’s premise is to out-source application development by tapping creativity and experience from wherever they can. Further, they believe (as do I) that more apps sold equates to more robots sold. Quoting Markus Waibel:

The central beauty of the App Store idea is that it enables a feedback cycle: The more devices (phones/robots) you sell, the more lucrative the app store becomes for 3rd party developers to program new apps. And the more new apps, the more devices you sell. In my opinion, robotics does not yet have critical mass to jump start this at the present time.

RoboEarth is fast becoming a large shared repository for maps, object models, task descriptions, robot models, semantic relations, probabilistic relations and “action recipes” (apps) within the global academic community. It remains to be seen whether the big robot manufacturers will embrace the technology for their products.

One unintended consequence of RoboEarth’s efforts may be within the used robots marketplace. Imagine the financial gain if an older, unused robot is rejiggered to have new equipment as well as easy to train software to put the robot back to work on new projects. Another possible beneficiary is the end user who will be less likely to retain an intergrator/consulting service if the robot can handle ongoing changes on its own.

The ultimate goal of RoboEarth is to enable robots to share and store what they discover about the world on their own Internet.

**********

As a personal aside, I live in a rural area outside of a medium-sized city. 4G LTE is planned for 2012-2013 for the city but not my area and I have to pay for a very unreliable T1 line to my office. It’s hard to imagine having a service robot doing its thing in my world while relying on the Cloud (as represented by my T1). Maybe the concept will grow on me with time but right now I’m wary and a bit afraid of the consequences.

**********

What do you want from a robot app store? Let’s compile a long list of “wants” and send them off to these app stores and see whether they can get them for us. Why should we wait to see if our app magically appears in their store? Let’s ask for what we want. Send them to me and I’ll combine them all and send them off to the stores.

Here’s what I would like:

For my old Pleo, anything that makes it do things it doesn’t already do.
For my AR.Drone, a programmable camera shoot over a grid that I draw onscreen from a starting point where I place the drone.
For my little iSobot, a complicated routine of fetch, grab and return.
And for my new Swivl, something sexy where it follows my girlfriend around the room and refocuses as the distance changes.

But I also want to buy a used two-armed Yaskawa Motoman and put it to work in my workshop doing ad hoc tasks. I’d love to be able to add a hardware component add-on (or two), be able to use ROS or some simulation software to test my apps, buy some additional apps that do the kind of tasks I need to do in the shop, and have all that work seamlessly and without line-for-line coding, excessive cost or too much fiddling.

What do you want? Send them to me and I’ll combine them all and send them off to the stores.

Lively international innovation summit about robotics

2011-12-23T12:05:00.000-08:00

In Lyon, France, 14th to 16th March, 2012. Save the date!

By Frank Tobe, Editor/Publisher, The Robot Report (www.TheRobotReport.com)
and Catherine Simon, General Secretary, French Federation of Robotics

Today’s devices are becoming smarter and connected. They sense their environment, process the data collected and act upon their decisions autonomously or semi-autonomously. The transformation is beyond productivity and enters our daily life in health, safety, transportation, communication, entertainment, chores and more. This trend is a real opportunity for disruptive innovations.

InnoRobo – 14^th to 16^th of March 2012, in Lyon, France – is gathering the thinkers and doers to their innovation summit to accelerate the emergence of such innovations.

InnoRobo promises to gather top range exhibitors from Asia, North America and Europe and will demonstrate more than 100 different robots, with 30+ displayed for the first time in Europe. The whole emerging robotic ecosystem (creators, technologies, component suppliers, distributors, high end research labs and educational institutions) will be participating in an energetic, open-minded atmosphere, sharing and exchanging with entrepreneurs, investors, reporters and researchers.

Of course there will be some uniquely French things that you won’t experience elsewhere:

In addition to the exhibition hall, there will be conference sessions with five major themes:

Synergies and convergence between Industrial and Service robotics:

Industrial robotics is known for its applications in welding, soldering, handling, painting and assembling, for the automotive, electronics, metal, plastic and chemical industries. But industrial robotics is evolving towards new industries as well as smaller firms. It needs to reinvent itself and produce more flexible, mobile, easily trainable robots to work hand in hand with human workers. The human robot interactions (HRI) in factories and Co-botics are hot topics demonstrating the synergies and convergence that are likely to happen between industrial and service robotics technologies and solutions.

Health and Medical robotics:

The growth of medical robots and surgeon/doctor augmentation devices since the mid-80s has been overwhelming, both as a field of innovation and research but also as a market for new products and services. Medical robotics is considered one of the success-stories of service robotics. It is a prominent segment of growth driven by demographic shifts, rising prosperity in developing countries and advances in medical technology.

Urban robots for citizens:

One vision for the future features a generation of robots designed to play various roles in urban society. Some robots will be guides, others will help the elderly, some will make sure megacities are safe and others will collect our rubbish and do various daily chores. Beyond this we envision intelligent robotics to solve our major societal challenges: mobility with an overwhelming urbanization, and sustainable development for our planet to survive our demanding energy consumption.

Cloud robotics:

Every file, document, database and digital information is now going through the “Cloud”. What does it mean for our future, with machine to machine communication, connectivity for each and every of our daily life object? The imaginary world of Matrix is not so far away: your personal robot can learn with a simple download from the Cloud how to fly a helicopter or cook the perfect dinner.

Human-Robot interactions:

User-centered design is a must for robots to truly become a mass market. Although technologies progress rapidly, and despite the impressive demonstrations of humanoid robots from Japan or elsewhere, we are not there yet. Hence the shape of robots has to be driven both by its functions and by our human expectations. A robotic dog which doesn’t sense my approach remains a gadget, a humanoid robot which cannot engage in a natural conversation will be a disappointment. What is the correct level of interactions with a robot? What is the ideal form factor associated to the functions it performs? What kind of robots are we ready to accept and cooperate with in our daily life? These major questions will be dealt with by researchers, ergonomists, anthropologists and roboticists at InnoRobo.

In short, InnoRobo is all about the emerging business of service robotics, where growth is projected to be a major economic driver of the 21^st century’s economy. Robotics will change our life, so it might be worth getting to know when and how. InnoRobo is a way to participate in that process.

For further information: www.innorobo.com

Robotics is a Highly Fragmented Industry With Few Common Standards or Platforms

2011-12-05T20:15:00.000-08:00

by Frank Tobe, Publisher, The Robot Report

with Manoj Sahi, roboticist and educator, India

Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use, and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when -- or even if -- this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world.
Bill Gates, Scientific American Reports
2008 Special Edition on Robotics

Bill Gates clearly defined what I see to be prevalent in robotics today -- that there really are two different worlds operating, often together, more often not:

Industrial robotics -- wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use. KUKA, FANUC, ABB and Yaskawa Motoman are amongst the mostly European and Japanese vendors providing handling, welding, cleanroom and assembling robots to the automobile, electronics and a few other industries. [According to the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Industrial Robotics 2011 report, 118,337 robot units were sold in 2010 bringing the worldwide count of industrial robots in place and working to 1,035,000.]
Service robotics -- faster-growing, with start-up companies and research labs producing innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and niche products for healthcare, dairy and agriculture, home and yard, space, defense, security and surveillance, and scientific research. [According to the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Service Robotics 2011 report, 2,203,241 total service-sector robots were sold in 2010 composed of 13,741 field or high-end service robot units (of which 45% were for defense applications), about 1.4 million vacuum and floor cleaners, 36,500 lawn-mowing robots and 753,000 entertainment robots.]

As Mr. Gates said, robotics is a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms even though there are well-financed pushes toward standard connectors, open-source software, modularity and shared libraries. Recently there's been a clammer for (and against) a universal open-source robotic operating system. The proponents main argument is that such a system is beneficial particularly for rapid prototyping in the development of new systems while almost all of the industrial robot manufacturers argue that their robots are performing mission critical tasks which require secure and fail-safe operating systems - which they have developed and optimized over the past 50 years.

The diversity of the arguments are, to some extent, merited based on the unique needs of the various end users:

Industrial, commercial, healthcare and defense users do need security, reliability and efficiency and robot vendors have a vested interest in protecting their value-added software and hardware solutions.
Academics and emerging businesses need openness and sharing so that re-invention isn't so prevalent as it has been in the past, and a full range of features and simulation capabilities are available so that far-ranging teams can collaborate on research projects using the same software.

Industrial robot control systems are complex in part because of the need to integrate the robot into the end user's manufacturing system, partly because of the many algorithms which need to be processed to make the robot and all of its moving parts work, and because, up until recently, it was necessary to distribute the computing workload of the various activities of the robot, but also because control systems haven't kept up with the availability of faster and more capable CPUs, connectors and communication methods. All of these are reasons leading to robot manufacturers becoming more OEM-like as most of them aren't too capable in developing engineering solutions for new applications (thus their dependence on system integrators).

Service robotics, on the other hand, are more mobile and self-contained, carrying with them (or communicating via wifi) their control system functions. They tend to be either mobile or portable and either loosely connected to the end-user's internal system or operate either autonomously or by modified remote control. Consequently, software like ROS brings lots of new capabilities which the original robot manufacturers are not able to do. Service robotic providers and research labs and facilities see the value and enjoy the benefits of shared open source development - they see it as good and useful for the overall robotics community -- yet most of the start-up companies lock down their finished products so that end users are assured that their products are safe, secure and reliable and the resulting software is reduced to enable the product to fully function but not be overloaded with unused functionality.

Adding to this fragmentation and complexity are a few macro-level near-term trends:

Commoditization of hardware, hardware modules, and software.

Markus Waibel, senior researcher at Zurich's ETH IDSC and participant in the EU's RoboEarth library-sharing project, feels that there is a good chance that we will see a split into companies specializing in robotics software vs. robotics hardware in the near future. This is evidenced by the current trend toward modularization and commoditization of robotic hardware. This happened in the early PC industry and there are obvious benefits. "Actually, I would go a step further and argue that this split has already happened in robotics research, with most research platforms at least supporting [Willow Garage's] ROS," said Waibel.
Tom Wagner, CTO of iRobot, says: "Open interfaces; not open source. That way 3rd party equipment and payloads can work harmoniously with iRobot and other robot manufacturer's products while still providing a safe, secure and reliable product to the end user."
Many needed solutions have already been solved yet are re-invented regularly within academia, partly because of cost, partly to aid in the learning process and sometimes out of just plain whimsy.
Forums for bringing together scientists, engineers, users and executives, such as the recent RoboBusiness 2011 event in Boston, attempt to thwart reinvention by being small and personal so that people have the time to explain their problems and explore various solutions. At that Boston forum, by having the time to meet and explore, one Boston agricultural startup was able to solve a vexing navigation problem by purchasing a solution module from another startup that had already solved that exact problem.

Industrial robot manufacturers are beginning to shift into the service sector. At a recent conference in San Francisco, KUKA, a large industrial robot manufacturer, announced that they were proceeding along a path outlined in an internal roadmap to enter the service robotics business. Although no other industrial vendor has indicated similar intentions, the progression to enlarge their businesses by adapting their robots and robotic solutions into the service sector appears to be inevitable.

Key points in KUKA's roadmap are enabling mobility with SLAM navigation, making their robots lighter in weight, sensitive to their surroundings so that they are safe for nearby workers, and providing motion simulator trainability for future applications.

Bosch also has a roadmap for developing robotic consumer devices that work within Bosch's existing product family. Cost, safety and convenience are their primary concerns. A laundry app is a perfect matchup of technology and Bosch's product line thus, at IROS, they were all over the Berkeley team that trained a PR2 robot to fold laundry.

SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) are seen as a major near-term market for robot expansion. This market needs easily trainable low-cost co-robots that are flexible and safe enough to handle multiple small-volume tasks alongside humans. This is the bread and butter application for SMEs. Incidentally, this is another example of robot manufacturers becoming commodity robot and module providers - in this case providing a large quantity of low-cost co-robots and letting the SME's provide their own customization and integration.

Big consumer product companies such as Toyota, Samsung and others, have announced their intentions to enter the medical robotics and consumer healthcare marketplace in 2013 and 2014. This may have as much positive impact on the service robotics sector as Foxconn is having in the industrial market (see below).
Foxconn entering the robotics manufacturing business with their own manufacturing and assembly factories as clients.

They've announced a planned deployment of 1 million robots within 3-4 years.
Little is known of the details of the types, quantities or activities of the robots nor of the 500,000 human laborers that will be displaced.

The Cloud is being introduced into robotics as it is in other areas of business - a way to offload processing and data to a place better equipped to handle the high number of CPU cycles needed to process vision, recognition, communication and navigation, most often simultaneously.

It is into this fray -- this two-world ascendant industry of promise, fragmentation and complexity - that the question of whether a universal robotic control system is needed or not has been asked and not clearly answered.

There appears to be an obvious and logical answer:

Robot manufacturers will soon enable open-source systems such as Willow Garage's ROS to connect and front-end their proprietary internal operating system. Yaskawa Motoman has already done this.
They will also enable an as-yet undeveloped universal interface so that using specialized devices and modules from various 3rd party vendors can occur.
There won't be a commercial version of ROS nor a universal robotic operating system.
There will, however, within academia and the emerging service robotics sector, be a greater dependence and use of ROS because, as Markus Waibel says, "There are obvious economies of scale benefits - just have a look at the ROS contributors list and it is very clear that even now no single robotics manufacturer can match this brainpower."

Huge employer in China makes big step toward robots

2011-11-17T17:34:00.000-08:00

Copied and cross-linked with permission from:

The New Economy, November 17, 2011

Foxconn, a big contractor for Apple and others, breaks ground for robot facilities. It plans to replace 500,000 workers with 1 million robots.

Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in China's southern Guangdong Province in this 2010 photo. After a spate of employee deaths and complaints about working conditions, electronics manufacturer Foxconn has broken ground on new robot facilities. Within five years, it says it plans to replace 500,000 workers with 1 million robots. Photo: (Bobby Yip/Reuters/File)

By Frank Tobe, contributor

When the world’s largest maker and assembler of electronic components and products announced plans in August to replace Chinese workers with robots, some robot executives called it a ploy to keep their workers in line. The company didn’t want to build robots, they said, it wanted to control its workers, who had complained of tough working conditions and had a spate of suicides.

But earlier this month, officials from Hon Hai Precision Industry and its subsidiary, Foxconn, took the next step, signaling a potential sea change in the electronics industry. They broke ground for new robotics R&D and manufacturing facilities in a new industrial park in Taichung, central Taiwan. Foxconn, which made its name by using cheap mainland Chinese labor to supply the likes of Apple, HP, Sony, Dell and Nokia, says it will replace 500,000 workers with robots in the next three to five years.

The plan is so sweeping that its implementation would have huge implications for China and the robotics industry worldwide. It signals that Chinese labor may no longer have the low-cost advantage it once enjoyed and that the robotics industry is ripe for change.

Start with China. Most of Foxconn’s 1.2 million employees work there. So an automation plan that would replace nearly half the company’s workforce suggests that the cost of those workers is rising. In a press release, the company said mass producing assembly-line type robots was part of its plan to cope with labor shortages and rising wages.

Foxconn has special reasons for speeding up factory automation. During the past 15 months, at least 14 Foxconn workers have died in apparent suicides, most of them in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where harsh working conditions were said to exist. The company received so much negative publicity and scrutiny from labor groups and clients, Apple in particular, that it began a two-pronged effort to reduce labor costs.

Foxconn has been relocating factories closer to its source of employees, inland China and central Brazil, and is moving ahead with its robot development. The company expects its new robot R&D and manufacturing facilities to create 2,000 jobs in Taiwan. The new robots which will be deployed in China, will allow Foxconn to move displaced workers up the skill ladder to better paying and more interesting jobs. How many workers are kept on is anybody's guess. But with sufficient growth, Foxconn has an incentive to redeploy most of them, which would avoid having to hire, train, and house additional workers as production needs increase.

Foxconn’s move also represents a wakeup call to ABB, KUKA, and Fanuc – the world’s largest robot manufacturers currently. Its plan to develop robots on its own implies that the current lines of industrial robots are not flexible and easily trainable enough for the likes of Foxconn.

Foxconn’s move into the robotics business reflects how things are changing in the industry. The days when industrial robots had a small library of moves but precisely and reliably repeated those moves 24/7 are no longer. New tech is more personalized and manufacturing is following with small quantities of thousands of variants of base products. Robots have to keep up with those changes. At present they have not.

Foxconn’s plans are hugely ambitious, nevertheless. According to the latest statistics from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), there were 52,290 industrial robots in China of which approximately 10,000 were in Foxconn factories. Thus, the company is aiming to go from 10,000 to 1 million robots in three to five years.

That would nearly equal the number of industrial robots currently deployed worldwide –1,035,016, according to the IFR.

Some analysts remain skeptical that Foxconn really intends to build robots. It will concentrate on automation machinery instead, they say. But two sources – both claiming not to be able to provide details because of nondisclosure agreements – say the opposite: Foxconn is planning on entering the robot manufacturing business with a variety of flexible, easily trainable, and low-cost assembly-line robots.

China is the fastest-growing market for the use of industrial robotics, IFR says. It forecasts that industrial robotics applications in China will increase by 64 percent next year.

Swedish power and automation technology company ABB Group recently built a robot manufacturing facility in China, supplementing numerous sales and integration offices.

The stock of Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai, has fallen about 22 percent so far this year, but margins are improving as plant relocations are completed. One Barclay’s financial analyst says the next 12 months look much better. Factory relocation costs have still taken a toll on Hon Hai's bottom line profitability, though analysts say the expansion could pay off in the long-run, thanks to the lower wages that Hon Hai will be able to pay in these less affluent regions.

– Frank Tobe is editor and publisher of The Robot Report, a website that tracks the global business of robotics, and the Everything-Robotic blog

Lots of robots coming onboard in 2013, 2014 and 2015

2011-11-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

Pure science is an integral part of robotics and often leads to solutions for strategic needs for an audience of willing buyers. Here are a few examples of that process from companies with products scheduled to hit the marketplace in the next four years.

Harvest Automation

Servicing ornamental horticulture market ($35 billion industry)
Focused on nurseries and greenhouses and their continual need to move potted plants
Each robot to produce 10,000 hours of production and do the work of one laborer
Will be in field beta testing in 2012; full rollout of commercial product in 2013
This year's field testing quite successful
More than 10 prospective nursery clients signed on to be test sites and contributed to the development process
Fully venture funded until 2015 projected profitability

Foxconn - throwing all the other numbers out of whack

Building $223 million R & D and manufacturing facility to produce assembly-line robots
Plans to go from 10M present number of robots to 300M by end of 2013 to 1MM by end of 2015
Mammoth rollout in Western terms; but not for Asian factories
Hiring 2,000 Taiwanese engineers and scientists to make it happen
Foxconn has had problems managing all their employees (1.2 MM)
Replacing 1 million dull, dirty and dangerous tasks in their own factories with robots will eliminate 500M positions; Foxconn says they are planning to move up those 500M rather than lay them off; also saves necessity to hire 500M more workers
Robots will likely be low-level polishers, painters, welders and transporters with intricate assemblies still done by human hands

Sea Robotics

Office of Naval Research sponsored research to develop robotic underwater device to clean ship hulls
Science is to mimic the behavior of sea creatures
$1 billion in excess fuel and cleaning attributable to biofouling - barnacles and biofilm adhering to ships hulls
Hull Bug, Sea Robotics new robot, is a fully autonomous submersible that figures out how to efficiently traverse a complicated three dimensional environment consisting of the contours of a ship
Sensors determine clean or not clean thus robot can determine the surfaces it has yet to sweep
Other sensors inspect for barnacles and they are removed differently
Cool and descriptive video and an in-depth report on the details of the project
Currently being tested with deployment in 2015 across the US Navy's fleet

These three examples are just the tip of an iceberg of near-term robot deployments. Other announcements include hoped-for companies like Heartland Robotics and the commercialization of DARPA science projects such as the ARM Project which is slated to complete in 2014, to niche robot markets like the one to maintain and inspect high voltage transmission lines from the Electric Power Research Institute due to be deployed in 2014.

Heartland Robotics' project is a big hope for American-based robotics businesses if and when it produces a factory assistant robot - a co-robot - for small and medium-sized enterprises. Similar to Harvest Automation - Heartland has enlisted manufacturer partners to help them help each other. No field trials yet nor planned dates given.

DARPA's ARM Project is developing software and hardware that enables a robot to autonomously manipulate, grasp, and perform complicated tasks, with humans providing only high-level supervision. The ARM robot will be able to adapt to unstructured, dynamic environments. Imagine a two-armed security robot unzipping or unsnapping personal luggage and then rifling through searching for illegal objects and then closing it back up again.

All of this activity is online and heading for a bright robotic future and I haven't even mentioned the healthcare field where robotic assistants of all types are flourishing and in line at the FDA and European CE agencies awaiting approvals... but that's another story next month.

Emerging Underwater Businesses: Three Companies to Note

2011-10-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

By Frank Tobe. Publisher, The Robot Report

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Sentry ROV

We've read about their use in last year's Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill and their underwater repair work, traipsing the corridors and collecting rubble at Fukushima nuclear power plants, the exploits of James Cameron and his amazing underwater photos and movie about the Titanic, read the science journals about new autonomous drilling rigs and underwater platforms, and seen the recent finding and salvaging of the black box from the 2009 Air France crash. Just last week the largest ever cache of precious metal found in the sea - 200 tons of silver worth $230 million - was discovered along with the wreck of a British cargo ship sunk during the Second World War by a German U-boat.

Almost every day I find a press release reporting marine contracts of one type or another. For example Shilling Robotics just received an order for two 3,000m ROV systems for delivery to the South Korean navy. They will be used for submarine rescue and towing/salvage operations.

There's no doubt that the underwater robot business is emerging.

Underwater robots are very new and many of them are still in their initial phase of evolution. Most of them are actually inspired by the design engineering of nature. These robots look like sea creatures and have achieved a certain degree of motion but are still not good enough to gel with underwater sea life. Although the application and target problems are limitless, most of them are presently focused on specific areas like oil, gas, and mineral exploration, data collection and monitoring underwater changes, search and rescue, and military and defense scenarios.

Nevertheless, oceans cover two-thirds of the planet and largely remain unexplored. Has the time for a real underwater industry finally arrived? Where are the biggest opportunities? What are the major technical and business challenges? And which companies have already started impacting this new industry?

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) extend our ability to explore the deep sea much in the same way that space rovers have enhanced our understanding of remote planets. UUVs are now becoming cost-effective tools in applications ranging from deep-water survey for the offshore oil and gas industry to military operations to tracking sea life. The need for increased ocean observation for commercial as well as scientific purposes offers great potential for UUVs to enhance the performance of conventional ship-based operations, as well as the ability to operate in difficult-to-access areas such as below the Arctic ice.

Here are three American companies (from the online Service Robots for Government and Corporate Use directory of The Robot Report) which exemplify this emerging industry. Each has a different technological orientation, market presence and sales plan - but all are emerging companies in the marine robotics business. [For a thorough - but very expensive ($7,000) - analysis of the defense side of the unmanned maritime systems marketplace, including listing 80+ vendors and their products, Market Intel Group is offering their "Unmanned Maritime Systems Defense & Security UUV & USV Markets, Technologies and Opportunities Outlook."]

iRobot Corp., IRBT, NASDAQ

iRobot's Seaglider Robot

iRobot, pioneer of the cleaning robotic systems business and provider of the military's PackBot bomb disposal and other dangerous missions robots, has entered into marine robotics with a bang. iRobot has a balanced commercial, defense, research portfolio and is diversifying with cross-over products in the marine and healthcare sectors.

In a recent talk with David Heinz, iRobot's VP of Maritime Systems, interesting aspects of their Enhanced Seaglider unmanned underwater vehicle and their whole family of underwater products came to light. He is convinced that underwater is where iRobot is going to be spending a lot more time.

The Seaglider robot is a data collector. It measures temperature, salinity and other quantities in the ocean and is integrated with a global satellite system for automatic measurement and transmission of data. It is battery powered, capable of 3 to 4 dives and underwater glides per day and lasts for around 10 months on a single charge depending on the mission. More than 135 Seagliders have been delivered to various government agencies, US defense and research organizations. With high endurance, the Seaglider is a multi-mission robot which has survived and come back with shark bites and dents, working at a fraction of the cost of ship-based methods and at lesser risk. The price is in the $125,000 to $150,000 range depending on sensors and could go higher with more expensive payloads.

Lots of underwater applications are addressed by iRobot's line of maritime robots. Two of the most important are likely to be harbor defense and tracking of illegal underwater activities. Other applications provide data support in aquatic monitoring, supplementing (with the prospect of replacement) sonobuoy systems used by the navy, hurricane monitoring for oil platforms, mine warfare, harbor defense, eg, operating a picket line with triangulation software to alert drug agencies when drug trafficking is suspected, etc. It can also be used to detect underwater nuclear radiation and temperature monitoring and some development has already started in this direction. There are a few challenges; one of them is an inability to operate in shallow waters because the devices get sucked with currents.

Liquid Robotics, Privately Owned, Venture Funded

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider

Another interesting robot is the wave glider from Liquid Robotics, a company focused on serving the scientific and oceanographic research communities. A submerged glider connected with a surface float by a 7 meter long tether, it is based on a look-down concept and scans data from the surface and within 20 meters of the underwater glider. Wave gliders harvest wave energy for its thrust and that gives it an added advantage of not being limited by any on-board power source although the above-water float is solar powered and uses that power for satellite communication.

The Wave Glider supports a wide variety of sensor payloads and can keep station or travel from point to point. Data and instructions are transmitted to and from shore via satellite. Applications include climate science, tsunami warning, protected area monitoring, marine mammal observation, port and harbor security, transportation safety, maritime domain awareness, search and rescue, and commercial apps like fishery management, aquaculture, pollution detection and natural resource discovery. Military/government apps include naval oceanography, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, monitoring and managing economic zones, etc.

Teledyne Technologies Inc., TDY, NYSE

Teledyne Technologies is an aerospace/defense conglomerate and provides electronic and engineered subsystems for defense, space, environmental and nuclear applications. Robotics represent just a small portion of their overall revenue, however, three wholly-owned subsidiaries provide notable maritime products.

Teledyne's family of
marine robots

Teledyne Benthos provides a line of modular UUVs and ROVs including the Stingray and MiniROVER. These ROVs are used for mine warfare, in-situ biological sampling, port and harbor security and ship hull inspection. They are also used for under-ice surveying, interior and exterior pipe inspection, salvage operations and offshore structure surveys. Their clientele include military, oil and gas companies, oceanographic institutes and marine and biological science research organizations.
Teledyne Brown Engineering recently received a $53.1 million contract with the Navy to manufacture 100 Slocum LBS-G (Littoral Battlespace Sensing-Glider) gliders to acquire critical oceanographic data to improve fleet positioning during naval maneuvering. The LBS-G glider is a torpedo-shaped unmanned underwater vehicle about 2 meters long and uses changes in buoyancy along with its wings and tail-fin steering to glide through the water.

Teledyne Webb Research has a novel way of describing their Slocum line of gliders: "A unique mobile network component capable of moving to specific locations and depths and occupying controlled spatial and temporal grids." Mobile network being the key descriptors. These battery and thermal energy powered gliders are used for subsurface sampling, carrying a wide range of sensors, patrolling for weeks and months at a time, interacting with multiple vehicles with minimal personnel and infrastructure to study and map the dynamic subsurface waters "around the clock and calendar."

Perhaps the biggest opportunities for marine robotics, at present, are still with governments for their defense, security and oceanographic surveillance - and with big companies for their exploration of oil, rare earth materials, and maintenance and construction of underwater platforms. As marine applications expand to areas such as aquaculture and other commercial marketplaces, these robots will be constantly updating our current perception and understanding of sea life and the world beneath the water with lots of new findings. The current apps - all of which are performed autonomously for long periods of time at a fraction of the cost of present methods - are the just the tip of the iceberg in this emerging marine sector of the service robotics industry.

Robotic Gift Suggestions for the 2011 Holiday Season

2011-10-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

This holiday season, people are looking to get their money's worth from gift giving. Gifts need to be either truly phenomenal, practical or inexpensive. In the phenomenal category, what's more exciting than getting a robot as a holiday gift? The Robot Report, a site which tracks the business of robotics, has prepared this list of 2011 Robotic Holiday Gift Suggestions to please almost every family member:

For Grandparents and teenagers: Parrot AR.Drone QuadriCopter - $299
For Mom: iRobot's Scooba bathroom floor cleaning robot - $299
For Dad: Adaptive cruise control robot option for new cars - $599 - $2,495
For science-interested kids 10+: LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit - $273
For robotic gadget geeks 16+: Willow Garage's TurtleBot starter mobile robot - $1,499 -- OR -- Bilibot starter mobile robot with arm and gripper - $1,200.
For girls younger than 10: Penbo the affectionate waddling penguin - $45 -- OR-- Fijit the squishy dancing friend - $42
For the philanthropic: MyKeepon - $49 (part of the proceeds go to support autism research) -- OR -- donate a $280,000 PR2 to your alma mater's robotics lab
For readers of all ages: Selected books about robots and robotics - $10-$221

See below for product descriptions, prices and where to buy.

* * * * *

MyKeepon:
A small robot that reacts to touch and music.

MyKeepon Robot Toy
Reacts to touch, sounds and music

Originally developed to study nonverbal interaction and social development with autistic children, its $30,000 price tag kept it away from most.
Now reconfigured to be a toy, a portion of the revenue will be used to enable researchers and practitioners to use the $30,000 Keepon version of the robot in autism therapy.
Available exclusively from Toys R Us in the U.S. for $49.

Fijit:
A squishy robot that can dance and tell jokes.

Fijit by Mattel
Voice recognition, beat detection, 100 built-in phrases and jokes

Similar to MyKeepon but less altruistic, Fijit from Mattel is an interactive, pokable plaything for young girls.
Cute video of Fijit telling jokes and interacting with iPad.
$49 plus the cost of the app available at Amazon.

Sphero:
A sphere with inside lights that can be controlled with smartphone apps.

Sphero from Orbotix
iOS and Android game apps control ball

Coming to market in time for the holiday season, Sphero is a robotic ball controlled by your smartphone (iOS and Android).
Cute video of Spero ball and kitten interacting.
$129 plus the cost of the app from Sphero.

Penbo:

A penguin that waddles and sings with her baby.

Penbo and her Bebe
Lovable robotic toy from Bossa Nova Robotics

Specially designed for pre-teen girls, Penbo is affection to her owner and her baby.
She responds to touch and sound and has a pouch. Can operate autonomously or with remote control
$45 at Amazon.

AR.Drone:
Quadricoptor for in/outdoor use controled from your smartphone or tablet.

Parrot's AR.Drone Quadricopter
Rated #1 Consumer Electronics Product of 2010 and still going strong

Two cameras, front-facing and bottom-facing, stream live video to the screen of your tablet or smartphone for capture.
Augmented Reality (AR) apps enable dog fights and video games.
$299 at Amazon plus the cost of the apps.

Adaptive Cruise Control:
Automatically maintains a safe distance between your vehicle and the car ahead.

Adaptive Cruise Control
Available as an option from most car companies

With embedded robotic systems, cars keep getting smarter and safer all the time. Adaptive cruise control is a “smart” system that actively maintains a preset distance between vehicles rather than a preset speed. A laser or radar range finder sensor in the front of the vehicle measures the distance to the vehicle ahead, and the system automatically maintains a safe distance as traffic speeds up and slows down.
Available in higher-end versions from most car companies at prices ranging from $495 to $2,500.
Say or write on your card: "Hey Dad. If you are going to buy a new car, I'll pay for the adaptive cruise control option."
Lane awareness, night vision pedestrian detection, and car-to-car danger warning systems are in the wings.

Willow Garage PR2:
Life-sized robot able to navigate in human environments and grasp and manipulate objects.

Willow Garage's Pool-playing PR2 Personal Robot
For millionaires and rich alumni to gift to their alma maters

Open-source library of functions includes folding laundry, fetching beer, playing pool, etc.
Watch laundry-folding video here.
Ideal gift from alumni to robotics lab at alma mater.
$280,000 for two-armed personal robot; $200,000 for single-armed PR2. Both with integrated Kinect device.

Scooba:
A floor washing robot for bathrooms, kitchens and other non-carpeted floors.

iRobot's Scooba 230 Robot
Floor washing robot for bathrooms and other floors

Removes up to 98% of common household bacteria from hardwood, tile and linoleum floors.
Informative video of iRobot's Scooba 230 robot.
Cleans bathroom floors better than competing robotic products.
$299 from Amazon plus $13 for cleaning fluid.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT Kit:
Buildable, programmable robot kit with sensors, servo motors and a microprocessor.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT Robot Kit
Buildable, programmable full-featured functional robot learning/teaching experience

LEGO kit includes 612 pieces, 4 sensors, 3 servo motors, and 32-bit microprocessor with Bluetooth and USB links to PC and Mac software with drag and drop programming.
Instructions for 4 different robot configurations.
$273 from Amazon.

Willow Garage TurtleBot:
Programmable mobile robot kit with Kinect sensor, iRobot Create mobile base and a microprocessor.

Willow Garage's mobile starter TurtleBot
With (A) mobile base, (B) 3D sensor, (C) PC and (D) TurtleBot hardware

TurtleBot uses off-the-shelf, low-cost hardware components that includes Willow Garage's open-source SDK based on ROS (Robotic Operating System), an iRobot Create mobile platform, Microsoft's XBox Kinect sensor, an Asus netbook PC and gyro.
The TurtleBot SDK integrates all the software you need to get it running and comes with advanced capabilities like mapping and navigation.
$1,499 assembled; $1,399 in kit form. (Can be purchased without netbook and/or iRobot mobile platform if you already have either of them.)

Bilibot Project's Bilibot:A robot starter robot at an affordable price.

Bilibot Project mobile starter Bilibot
Comes with an arm and gripper, mobile platform, netbook, ROS software and a Kinect device

Started at MIT through exploring uses of Microsoft Xbox's new Kinect sensor, the Bilibot Project is producing this sophisticated robotics platform at an affordable price. The project has assembled the various components and integrated all the necessary software with ROS.
Designed primarily for the education and hobbyist communities, the Bilibot is a robotics platform for exploring and creating.
$1,200.

Book Selections:

Best sellers, thought provoking, scary, insightful, detailed - this hand-picked selection of books about robots will provide hours of interesting reading and valuable additions to robot fans libraries.
Available from Amazon - $10 to $221

Notes from IROS 2011 San Francisco

2011-10-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

San Francisco city view from aboard the IROS 2011 sunset dinner cruise party boat

By Frank Tobe. Publisher, The Robot Report

The week long IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011) was host to more than 1,500 roboticists and robot-interested people from 40 different countries, including a prominent group of well-known speakers and exhibitors.

The conference and exhibition, in addition to the presentation of hundreds of scientific papers about robotics, included field and dinner trips which took advantage of San Francisco and the Silicon Valley's unique venues. Monday had a field trip to the robotic labs at UC Berkeley; Tuesday had a sunset dinner cruise in San Francisco Bay; Friday and Saturday had field trips to Adept (a manufacturer known for their ultra fast parallel robots), and the robot and AI labs at Stanford; and Wednesday had a dinner at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park with a peek at the Picasso masterpieces presently being exhibited.

The science of robotics was the principal draw for the attendees to the conference: to present and also to hear new technologies in and about robotics. Fascinating new developments in micro manufacturing to produce super-small devices (millirobots); replacing robotic mechanisms based on mimicking biology (biomimetic robotics); breakthroughs and incremental improvements to research robots of all types; and the many uses of Microsoft's Kinect device were in evidence throughout the conference rooms and exhibition halls.

I'm not a robotic scientist and The Robot Report mainly tracks the business side of robotics even though the science and research side feeds their product development. My background is computers, programming, software and systems. Consequently I'm not the best judge of what was new, groundbreaking, disruptive or just plain whimsical at the conference. I did, however, see and hear a few things that were of interest to me:

A talk by Bernd Liepert, from KUKA Laboratories in Germany, describing KUKA's roadmap from industrial robots to entering the service robot marketplace. This is the first time I've heard any executive from any of the major robot manufacturers even acknowledge their interest in entering the service robot field.
The UC Berkeley micro manufacturing process for making all types of tiny search and rescue and surveillance robots.
Seeing the Kinect device hooked up and working with many personal robots (Asimo, PR2, etc.) and UAVs copters.
The mix of languages overheard - only 40% of the attendees were from the U.S.
Competition for da Vinci's turf by robotic surgical devices from startups in China, Germany and Japan.
Crowd fascination with swarming robots, quadcopters, and UAVs of all types. I always follow the crowds at trade shows to see what is drawing their attention - and these three drew the largest number of gawkers. Harvard's Kilobot booth was of particular interest to the conference goers.
Many were interested in the ability of underwater robotic devices to sample, analyze, track and upload data that shows movement of various underwater things (sound, minerals, mammals, currents, salinity, foreign matter, etc.).
There were many discussions about collaborative control of multiple robotic devices and unmanned vehicles.
Three open-to-all Plenary Sessions covered design, bio-robotics and self-driving cars with notable robotic experts Bernard Roth, Shigeo Hirose, Gerd Hirzinger and Marc Raibert for design, Ruzena Bajcsy, Alain Berthoz, Heinrich Bülthoff and Mandyam Srinivasan covering bio-robotics, and Henrik Christensen, Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on self-driving cars.
Finally, there was much discussion about how the "cloud" would impact robotics by offloading processing and libraries from the bot to the cloud and whether or not (and how) this was workable.

Click to see 15 photos taken at IROS 2011 by the Denver Post.

Many exhibitors were showing personal and other types of robots for use as educational tools to learn the many sub-disciplines involved in robotics. Lesson plans for both students and teachers accompany their robots. Companies like these (with the exception of KUKA, where educational products aren't intended to make a profit) are limited in their growth potential because there are so few schools with the money to buy their product. Unlike robot manufacturers that produce hundreds and even thousands of robots a year, these companies build just a few.

Other small company exhibitors provided specialized robots for scientific research yet no matter how altruistic their research objectives might be, their marketplace is quite limited. This was the essence of IROS for me: as much as incremental improvements in the science of robotics is necessary, much of the material presented didn't solve any mass market need nor disrupt any present production or process methodology. One exception was Aldabaran's Nao robot. There are over 1,500 Naos in the field with avid fans providing software apps and updates and demanding fixes where they are needed.

Consequently whenever I asked any of the conference exhibitors when will a real personal robot be available to perform consumer applications (like doing the laundry, dishes, household cleanup, and cleaning the bathroom and toilet) at a price that people are willing to pay, the answer was always the same: "It's five years off."

"ROS Everywhere!" says Willow Garage's Steve Cousins

2011-09-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

Pieter Abbeel was one of this year's MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR 35) award winners as was Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. Pieter and his team at UC Berkeley programmed a robot to learn how to perform tasks such as folding laundry without detailed instructions. Brian oversees development of the Willow Garage open source ROS software used to control the robot. Photo credit: Technology Review, Winnie Wintermeyer.

Brian Gerkey
Director, Open Source Development
Willow Garage

By Frank Tobe. Publisher, The Robot Report

Willow Garage's ROS (Robotic Operating System) provides a collection of software libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. ROS provides device drivers, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and advanced libraries to help application engineers understand camera, video and 3D data.

ROS is open source and free to use, change and commercialize. The system is used by a growing number of popular personal service and research robots including one at the University of California in Berkeley (shown in the picture above) that learned how to process a basket of laundry from washing to folding. Gerkey believes ROS will allow entrepreneurs to create new commercial applications for robots even if they don't have extensive robotics expertise. Gerkey said in the write-up about his Technology Review TR 35 award, "The goal [of ROS] is to help people who have ideas for what robots can do in the marketplace by providing a common language for robots."

The industrial robotics industry is confronted today with the modification of production processes due to the trend toward individualization of consumer products. This requires that handling of robots be much easier, with greater flexibility and rapidity, and that accuracy has to be increased.

Thus it was a big leap forward last week when Yaskawa America's Motoman Robotics Division signed a collaboration agreement with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to port Willow Garage's ROS to the Motoman line of industrial robots. This is the first authorized porting of ROS to an industrial robot. SwRI plans to develop, demonstrate and release to the open-source community an interface between Motoman robots and ROS thereby taking this award-winning software beyond the realm of universities and research and into the world of business.

SwRI (Southwest Research Institute) is an independent, nonprofit, applied research and development organization based in San Antonio, Texas, with more than 3,000 employees and an annual research volume of more than $500 million.

Yaskawa America Motoman Robotics division offers arc welding robots, spot welding robots, painting robots, handling and other robots. It's most recent two-armed handling robots are being implemented in the automotive industry in Germany and Japan.

W. Clay Flannigan, Manager of the Robotics and Automation Engineering Section of SwRI, said:

We are working to build a general purpose interface between the broad manipulation and perception capabilities of the ROS framework and the highly reliable architecture of industrial robots. We plan to implement the interface at a low-level within the existing robot controller that enables the capabilities of the ROS manipulation stack, while maintaining the safety inherent in the industrial controller. By providing the solution as open source, we hope to build a community around the use of ROS in a wide variety of industrial applications. Ideally, the community will expand to encompass more robots, sensors and industrial controllers, and we hope to contribute to the process.

We plan to release the source in the first quarter of 2012.

Motoman Dual-arm Robot
Future versions of this robot may have a head
containing camera's and a Kinect device.

Erik Nieves, Technology Director for Yaskawa America's Motoman Robotics Division, explained why Yaskawa America is pursuing an open source controller interface for it's Motoman line of robots:

Yaskawa's strategy is to offer many controllers for the many different audiences and applications that our robots address. This ROS adaption is in line with that strategy.

The next step for industrial robotics is to be more sensor aware; to be able to accomodate the many new capabilities showing up in the service sector. It's clear that ROS is able to handle all of these and it saves our programming department from writing drivers for each and every possible configuration. We want ROS for these next generation devices which will come first to ROS.

A near-term goal of the project is to demonstrate advanced material handling solutions that leverage the path planning, grasp planning, and perception frameworks within ROS to enable robotic solutions that would be difficult or expensive with current solutions. One can only imagine the longer-term future. Perhaps ROS could become the universal robot controller that most end users wish for. Perhaps the days of the clunky teaching pendant will soon be replaced by an iPad or tablet running an ROS applet.

ROS is not the first attempt at a free software for robot control. Orocos, an EU-funded project along the same lines, began in 2001 and has evolved into a commercially utilized package for use in the machine-tool industry (although the Berlin Racing Team of the 2007 Urban Grand Challenge Competition used the Orocos Real-Time Toolkit as framework for building software components and ended up one of the semifinalists selected by DARPA). Because of its applicability to industrial applications, the realtime Orocos framework has grown into the machine control field and outgrown its robotics roots.

Steve Cousins
CEO, Willow Garage

Willow Garage's CEO Steve Cousins, in addition to providing the colorful title to this article ("ROS Everywhere!"), commented on the import of the SwRI Motoman ROS porting project. He explained that current-day industrial robots often don't need the extensive vision, mobility and navigation capabilities available in the growing world of service robotics. But vision and navigation systems are the next level in the evolution of industrial robotics as they branch out of the automotive industry and into all the other areas of production and material handling, and ROS is a good entry system to program, simulate and implement these new industrial and material handling applications using all the new navigation and vision features.

Yaskawa's Motoman line of robots will, by using ROS, at no significant research cost on the software side, be able to add features to their existing robot manipulators enabling them to compete in terms of handling new manufacturing processes. ROS and Willow Garage are getting a boost to the credibility of ROS by this very real and timely proof of concept. Also getting a big boost are the many industrial integrators who add a wide range of industrial expertise to the ROS community thereby making both groups stronger.

China's Mammoth Intro to Robotics

2011-08-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

by Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi

According to Xinhua, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will deploy 1 million robots over the next three years to improve efficiency and reduce labor for tasks better suited to a robot. The robots will be used to do traditional industrial robot work such as spraying, welding and assembling.

What does it means to robotics industry?
Engadget suggested that ABB would get the contract to provide the robots, perhaps in partnership with Foxconn itself. More companies may be involved; very little information has been provided thus far. We’ll have to wait and watch. Certainly, this is big news for the robotic manufacturing industry. If for no other reason, Foxconn’s deployment will more than double the world’s industrial robot population. And it will do so outside of the auto industry. Next Big Future blogger Brian Wang says, "This seems to be the start of a renewed push to automation in industry. If other companies in China follow, then we could see ten times or more the number of industrial robots."

Why is manufacturing so important to national politics?

In America, manufacturing has been the engine of growth since the Industrial Revolution, and developing great products a national pride. Manufacturing within one’s own country helps reduce the trade deficit and promotes healthy economic growth through profits, wages and sub-contracts. At present, manufacturing represents 21% of America’s GNP and more important, 50% of exported goods. There is also a security/defense component to sustaining a capable homeland manufacturing resource.

Outsourcing weaponry, technology and high-tech R&D is subject to the whims and events of foreign powers and not under a country’s own control. Many nations understand the necessity for their homeland manufacturing and have initiated stimulus programs to sustain that capability and also to promote the use of new breed of robots to enhance it. American is late to the party with it’s AMP and NRI programs, but has just funded $500 million, $70 million of which is for robotics research relating to co-robotics.

The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) and National Robotics Initiative (NRI) focus on the importance of sustaining a strong homeland manufacturing capability which, in addition to helping offset negative trade balances, enables the manufacture of its own high-priority (military, defense, security, space and highly technical) products. America is just beginning to fund what other countries have been funding, in larger amounts for many years now, Korea in particular.

Is the Foxconn pronouncement a wake up call to America?
In 2009, Harvard Business Review published "Restoring American Competitiveness." Here are a few excerpts:

Beginning in 2000, the country’s trade balance in high-technology products—historically a bastion of U.S. strength—began to decrease. By 2002, it turned negative for the first time and continued to decline through 2007.

America has lost or is in the process of losing the knowledge, skilled people, and supplier infrastructure needed to manufacture many of the cutting-edge products it invented.

Even more worrisome, average real weekly wages have essentially remained flat since 1980, meaning that the U.S. economy has been unable to provide a rising standard of living for the majority of its people.

A recent cover story about “Speedup” in America by Mother Jones magazine provides poignant examples of how this trend has affected American workers.

Yes, there is a growing body of real and alarming evidence proclaiming the need for change – but, with America’s polarized and contentious Congress and fearful populace, nobody appears able to do anything about it. Are robotics and Foxconn the wakeup call? Probably not. It's more likely that the Standard & Poor's credit downgrade from triple A to double got everyone's attention. It sure was felt in the stock market - and robotic companies fared as well as all the others... they lost significantly, dramatically, and did serious damage to investor confidence and their investment portfolios.

If this explanation from Standard & Poor's isn't a wakeup call, I don't know what is:

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process. We also believe that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration agreed to this week falls short of the amount that we believe is necessary to stabilize the general government debt burden by the middle of the decade.

Moody's, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, chimed in saying:

Though the U.S. economic recovery looked healthy at the beginning of the year, a series of events have hurt business, consumer and investor confidence, Moody’s said. These include surging prices for food and gasoline, natural disasters in Japan, Europe’s debt crisis and, most recently, the U.S. debt woes.

[Moody's] now expects real gross domestic product to increase at an annualized rate of about 2% in the second half of this year and just over 3% next year. The economy needs to grow 2.5% to 3% a year to create jobs fast enough to keep the unemployment rate stable.

How are the industrial robotic companies reformulating to stay competitive?
A new breed of flexible industrial arms is on its way. Almost all major companies in industrial robotics are trying to bring to market a similar kind of robot to cater to the needs of new-age manufacturing. Traditional companies like ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa Motoman and Fanuc are trying to bring their robots out of their cages in a step by step manner of evolution, while new entrants and researchers are trying to build entirely new kinds of revolutionary devices.

ABB's FRIDA two-armed robots, from the ABB website

The evolutionary robots are the 1-2-3 armed robots which have evolved from their older versions. These robots are highly suitable for large scale fixed factory-line processes. They have high precision but less flexibility to be a co-worker and need a lot of evolutionary steps to be able to accomodate medium scale dynamic environments.

Courtesy iClipart.com

On the other side are the revolutionary companies such as Heartland Robotics whose focus is to develop robotic assistants - the so-called "co-robots." These will be more affordable, easily trainable, safe and flexible for human environment but not as precise as the evolutionary ones. And they will address the needs of the biggest manufacturing sector in the country: SMEs - small and medium-sized enterprises. This video, made by the EU SME Project, visually highlights those needs.

Will robots make a difference?
Certainly the Foxconn deployment will be a boon to one or more non-U.S. industrial robot manufacturer (America long-ago lost this market - a market started in America - to foreign competitors). Foxconn's actions might speed up the use of industrial robots in other high-volume production situations, but it's not a market-changing phenomena. Instead, one thing is clear - that the service robotics market, where most of the growth in robotics is happening, and which is not dominated by any single company or country (as is the case with industrial robots) is the market where there is hope for American manufacturing.

If any competitive breakthrough product(s) are to offset Foxconn's plans, and the very-likely roll-out of the other foreign industrial robot makers to parlay Foxconn's actions with new-industry deployments of their own, particularly in Asia, if some new true robotic assistant is developed that is low-cost, lower cost of entry, easy to train, flexible, and safe to work alongside humans, the first to market will create a whole new arena, a whole new marketplace, with new manufacturing jobs, and a whole new product family ushering in the "real" robotic age. That's why everyone is so interested in Heartland Robotics. They are a privately-funded start-up focusing on a large, untapped market with a low cost product family perfectly matched up to the needs of the market. If they can pull it off, there's hope. If not, some other company, somewhere else in the world, will do so and the global SME marketplace will be theirs.

Robots help keep costs down and productivity high. The cost of entry isn't prohibitive but involves changing the mix of labor from skilled to very skilled. They are and will continue to be a staple in the manufacturing arsenal. Further, maintaining a homeland base of manufacturing is important for security, jobs, the balance of trade, and as part of sustaining a middle class. Robots can help, but national leadership can inspire the changes needed for America to play the role it has in the past, and wants for the future... a role which includes an ever-increasing use of robots in all facits of society.

Recent Breakthroughs Are Enabling Consumer and Low-cost Commercial Robots

2011-07-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

by Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi

The consumer robotic market has been on a roller coaster ride of evolution and market penetration. The amount of money companies and consumers were paying for robots and the features that they were getting ultimately did not match up. Low-cost service robots have similar problems. The technologies and robot components being used were highly expensive and had to be downgraded to make the cost acceptable. Thanks to a few breakthroughs that are happening in the domains of sensing, electric actuation, communication, open source software and Internet, consumer robotics is on the threshold of entering a new phase of affordable robots.

Kinect 3D for Xbox

The radical game changing sensor, Microsoft's Kinect 3D for Xbox 360, available at a mere $150, is a dirt-cheap way to bring depth sensing and 3D vision to robots. It is a motion sensing input device and works by projecting an infrared laser pattern onto nearby objects and, through some amazing software, provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities. These are awesome abilities to incorporate into a robot, and Windows SDK from Microsoft promises to make it even easier. Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. The device has shown compelling potential for use in live 3-dimensional videoconferencing and telepresence applications. Kinect may not be good enough for highly complex robotic systems for industries, defense, etc. but for sure it is a breakthrough technology for consumer robotics – enabling low-cost vision functionality - which will lead to many more breakthroughs and applications.

Series Elastic Actuators

For the last 30 years, industrial robots have been used in manufacturing processes but these are too dangerous, too rigid and too unpredictable to work alongside humans just like a team member. They need to understand human presence and touch. The series elastic actuator is going to help make that possible. Series Elastic Actuators were invented at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. According to Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and founder of Heartland Robotics, "The use of series elastic actuators changes the whole approach to manufacturing robots. It makes the robot able to safely interact with people."

So what is so special about series elastic actuators? They incorporate an instrumented elastic spring component between the motor and the object or load. Although this is a small change, it makes a huge difference to the entire equation. It improves the quality of the actuator package while reducing its cost. The robot is more efficient and has better force control stability. Nature is the best place to find examples of such actuation. Animals commonly utilize the elasticity of tendons to store energy in one part of a locomotive cycle and release it in another, with the muscle doing much less work overall than would otherwise be required. A number of robots have been built incorporating series-elastic actuators, NASA’s Robonaut 2 and Heartland Robotics’ as-yet unnamed workplace assistant are examples. In consumer robotics, a robot cannot work in isolation from human beings and other life forms yet it must not hurt them while interacting. These actuators – and their low cost - have got that potential and are making it possible.

Telepresence and Service Robots

Highly accelerated growth in communication technology is enabling telepresence robots to reach consumers in a lesser time than predicted by market pundits. The internet, wireless communications and display interfaces are becoming faster, reliable and economical. Utilizing these developments, telepresence robots have started sharing floor space with humans in offices and hospitals. With the entrance of big players like iRobot and emergence of companies like VGo, Luna and BiliBot, the party seems to have just started.

Big Companies, Through Strategic Partnerships, Stimulus and Investment, Are Joining The Party

Industrial and special purpose robotic manufacturers are beginning to enter the service robotics marketplace. iRobot and Adept, two large American robot manufacturers, are good examples. Adept recently acquired Mobile Robot to add mobility to its products and establish a lower costing service robots line of products. iRobot has a high-end range of products which it sells to defense and security organizations worldwide along with its range of consumer products (Roomba, Scooba, etc.). What it doesn’t presently have is a mid-range set of products.

iRobot started a new healthcare division earlier this year and recently announced a partnership with InTouch Health. InTouch Health already has produced and sold their mobile robotic telepresence solution to over 400 hospitals. InTouch Health’s hospital clients can contact doctors or other specialists based hundreds or thousands of miles away, and give medical professionals unlimited reach through their system of robotics and communication devices. This new partnership between iRobot and InTouch Health will help to explore more potential opportunities. The AVA mobile platform from iRobot is a much lower-cost and technically sound robot which is likely going to enable InTouch to lower their cost and selling price thereby bringing their products to a wider marketplace, perhaps even branching out into other areas of business where telepresence communications are a necessary solution. According to Moji Ghodoussi, a VP at InTouch Health, "It is indeed a great partnership and we are very excited and looking forward to great things." It is a win-win for both companies and is surely going to add more value to telepresence while bringing down robot cost considerably and adding a user-desirable front-end device (tablet). Soon we will find telepresence robots far more effective than making phone calls or sending e-mails.

App Stores, Open Source Software and Repositories

The App Store concept pioneered by Apple, which is changing the face of many industries, has already started showing its colors in robotic applications. Thousands of videos can be found about controlling robotic devices using iphones and Android based tablets. Initiatives like RoboEarth, an EU-sponsored project, are beginning to provide a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and environment. This will enable a better way of robot collaboration and information sharing. It was not a surprising move when Google and Willow Garage announced cloud robotics during Google I/O 2011. The first pure-Java implementation of Willow Garage’s ROS was released. This new library was developed at Google with the goal of enabling advanced Android apps for robotics. The library, tools, and hardware that come with Android devices are well-suited for robotics. Smart phones and tablets are sophisticated computation devices with useful sensors and great user-interaction capabilities. Android devices can also be extended with additional sensors and actuators thanks to the Open Accessory and Android@Home APIs. iRobot has partnered with Google to have Android apps run on its iRobot AVA mobile robotics platform and is open to a similar arrangement with Apple and it’s iOS for iPads and iPhones. At present Willow Garage is also leading the open source library development of The Point Cloud Library (or PCL). The PCL is a large scale, open project for point cloud processing containing numerous state-of-the art intelligent algorithms. This project is funded by Willow Garage, NVidia, Google, and Toyota.

Contests, Prizes and Hackathons

Consumer robotics current group of skills are brittle and some fail if a small change is introduced in their constrained environment. Many believe that the bottom up approach of training the robot in one task at a time and building libraries of tasks will help them to be more versatile and effective. Others feel that a breakthrough is needed in Artificial Intelligence for a flexible perception. Events like ‘hackathons’ and other contests and prizes are helping to realize this much needed breakthrough in flexible perception. All of these activities, partnerships, collaborations, and product announcements are the tip of the iceberg as robotics break into the $5,000 to $15,000 price point – a place where businesses can afford to experiment with these new tech devices.

All these breakthroughs are pointing towards a better and bigger service robotics market in two to three years. The key will be to make them practical, affordable and acceptable by humans as a part of their lives. The way big companies are utilizing their profits, investing, and showing their interests is highly encouraging as is the recent spate of manufacturing-focused government stimulus programs in America, Korea and the EU.

[Frank Tobe is the owner/publisher of The Robot Report and this blog (Everything-Robotic).
Manoj Sahi is a young entrepreneur from India, co-founder of a robotic start-up company and a graduate Mechatronics engineer.]

Robot Industry Stock Information Lacking

2011-07-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

In early 2008 I asked my Merrill Lynch broker for a list of stocks of American robot manufacturers. He couldn't provide me with more than two. So I went online with Bloomberg and found a list of 120 companies involved with automation. When I researched them, there were only a few in the U.S. and fewer still where robotics was the principle business.

Today, in the article which appeared under the NASDAQ banner shown above, it is clear that things haven't improved since 2008. The list is full of errors, omissions and was selected by market cap -- yet most of the companies are conglomerates with only a small portion of their sales from robotics, thus market cap is meaningless as regarding robotics. As a consequence, not much of the information is of value even though the topic is relevant.

Their list of 10 robot stocks included ABB, Sony, Panasonic, Phillips, Raytheon, Aetna, Dover, Moog, Elbit and iRobot.

Only four of the ten are U.S. companies.

iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) derives 100% of its revenue from robotic products, mostly military (PackBots), but also consumer-related (Roomba vacuum cleaners).
Raytheon (NYSE:RTN), an aerospace/defense company, has many kinds of robotic products: drones, exoskeletons, vision systems, etc. Still, robotics represents only a very small portion of their overall revenue.
Moog (NYSE:MOG.A), another aerospace/defense contractor and systems integrator, derives some revenue from the manufacture of sensors, haptics, unmanned aerial systems and ancillary products.
Dover Corp (NYSE:DOV), a machine manufacturer, gets just a small amount of their revenue from robotic grippers and components.

Aetna, the American health care company listed, doesn't have any robotic activity whatsoever. The researcher confused Aetna with Aetna Group SpA, a privately-owned Italian robotics manufacturer. [I wrote to the analyst about this error and he replied that he is going to correct it asap.]
ABB (NYSE:ABB ADR) is a Swiss conglomerate; robotics represents only 18% of total revenue.
Honda (NYSE:HNC ADR), a Japanese auto company, presently has no robotic products for sale, although it is a big user and has many under development, the most prominent of which is Asimo.
Panasonic (NYSE: PC ADR), also Japanese, is a multi-product company with robotics representing a small percent of the total.
Koninklijke Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG ADR), from the Netherlands, has few robotic products which represent only a minimal percentage of their revenue.
Elbit (NASDAQ:ESLT ADR), an Israeli defense contractor, is actively involved in unmanned aircraft, surveillance and other robotic systems - nevertheless robotics represent less than 20% of gross revenue.
Missing from the list were the world's biggest robot manufacturers: KUKA (ETR:KU2 London Stock Exchange) and Reis (privately held) (Germany), and Denso (TYO:6902 Tokyo Stock Exchange)), Yaskawa Motoman (TYO:6506) and FANUC (TYO:6954) (Japan).

Globally, there are slightly more than 250 publicly-traded robot manufacturers. In the U.S. and Canada, the list is small but quite interesting. Here are 16 - in addition to the 4 shown above - to whet your appetite:

Healthcare:

Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG) and its da Vinci Robotic Surgical System are being installed at major hospital operating centers worldwide. Its stock is up over $100 so far this year!
Mako Surgical (NASDAQ:MAKO) has a robotic arm interactive orthopedic system for knee implants.
Accuray (NASDAQ:ARAY) and its CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery System is an up-and-coming robotic radiation treatment methodology.

Defense/security:

AeroVironment (NASDAQ:AVAV) is a provider of unmanned aircraft, systems and services.
Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC), Rockwell Automation (NYSE:ROK), General Dynamics (NYSE:GD), Boeing (NYSE:BA), Teledyne (NYSE:TDY) and Textron (NYSE:TXT) in the US and Macdonald Dettwiler (TSE:MDA Toronto Stock Exchange) in Canada are all involved in robotics to some extent - but only a portion of their revenue is derived therefrom.

General robotics:

Adept Technology (NASDAQ:ADEP) gets 100% of its revenue from robotics in manufacturing, food processing, automotive and warehousing applications.
Many American publicly-traded engineering and consulting firms provide robot integration with value-added customization and services.

Ancillary businesses to the robotics industry:

Trimble (NASDAQ:TRMB) provides advanced positioning product solutions and component parts as does Hemisphere GPS (TSE:HEM Toronto Stock Exchange) in Canada, particularly for the ag industry.
FARO Technologies (NASDAQ:FARO) provides 3D measurement and inspection arms and scanners.
Cognex (NASDAQ:CGNX) is a provider of machine vision products.

Since my experiences in 2008, and because of a personal belief that the robotics industry is the place to invest for the future, I have carefully compiled a proprietary list of global publicly-traded stocks reflecting all aspects of the robotics industry. I monitor and report upon these stocks monthly in a performance/comparison chart, the Global Robo-Stox™ Comparison to the NASDAQ Index, the latest version of which can be seen and reviewed on The Robot Report website.

Driverless cars Demonstrated in Sweden

2011-07-07T00:33:00.000-07:00

Test Vehicles Demonstrated at HAVEit's Final Event, June 21-22, 2011

Last month in Borås, Sweden, the European Union's HAVEit (Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport) consortium, celebrated the final event of their multi-year research project by displaying driverless cars and trucks. HAVEit was set up to develop and demonstrate future driving possibilities.

Volvo demonstrated Road Trains. Platooning is the buzzword for moving trains of vehicles to reduce congestion and improve fuel economy - which Volvo expects to be on European roads by 2020. "This is easier than what Google is trying to do," said Erik Coelingh, a technical specialist at Volvo, to Fast Company. "What we are trying to do is take a step in the middle between the adaptive cruise control cars that we have today and the Google car that we will have in the future."

Volvo's trucking group demonstrated Automated Queue Assistance (AQuA) which relieves truck drivers of the monotonous task of driving in traffic queues. When the system is activated the driver can lean back, relax and monitor the system’s performance while AQuA controls the vehicle. “Those traffic queues are not only environmentally unfriendly but also a challenging task for drivers as many traffic accidents can occur in these monotonous circumstances as the driver’s alertness gets reduced," says Achim Beutner, Volvo Technology specialist. DARPA and the U.S. Department of Defense are attempting their own version of platooning in the near future.

Volkswagen demoed it's Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) so you can take your hands off the wheel while cruising down the highway. The system pairs Lane Assist with cruise control, and can be overridden by the driver at any time. The TAP system's Pilot Mode uses radar, laser, camera, and ultrasonic sensors to maintain a safe distance between vehicles, start and stop in traffic, and slow down before a bend.

Just last fall, Google announced that its engineers were working on software for self-driving cars. Google's self-driving cars logged 140,000 miles in California, driving -- with a trained driver and software engineer on board -- around Lake Tahoe, across the Golden Gate Bridge and along the Pacific Coast Highway.

In support of all these developments, Nevada passed a new law enabling driverless cars in that state and issued a mandate to their Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to create the licensing and regulations required to administer the new law.

The goals for all these activities are similar: to increase traffic safety and reduce fuel consumption while optimizing safe automation. As a long-time user of adaptive cruise control, I've been a fan of this kind of embedded system into the car's navigation, safety and entertainment system and watched with fascination as these types of systems have won approval and become mainstream.

An Inspiring Conversation with Amir Abo-Shaeer

2011-07-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

Amir Abo-Shaeer is a high school physics teacher in Santa Barbara, California. But he is not just any physics teacher. He is the founder and Director of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy, is the 2010 recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellow award, and is the lead character in the book The New Cool by Neal Bascomb which tells the story of his high school's winning entry in the 2008 F.I.R.S.T. robotics competition.

Amir and I spoke recently about robotics, his program and his views about teaching, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), the importance of making things, and American kids.

When I asked him what he thought about President Obama's recently announced AMP program - $70 million of which is for robotics - I was a bit surprised when he said he wasn't up on this. He explained to me that his focus has always been on education; not on developing robotics. He described how robotics has offered the ideal means by which to teach his students physics and engineering, and the FIRST program has given them the opportunity to utilizes skill sets that they can handle. Amir stated that inspiring kids to make things - to create things - was his number one priority.

In fact, Abo-Shaeer has incorporated the FIRST robotics competition directly into his 4-year curriculum. The entire senior class makes up the school's team and the class project is to create, build and compete. Amir said that he chose the FIRST program because it already exists, it has a successful track record, and it is exciting to the kids.

When I asked Amir whether he had read Suzanne Berger's essay on why manufacturing matters, he said that he hadn't but that he agreed with her position. He verbalized his concern that if Americans continue toward a service economy, there doesn't appear to be anything figured out - any national strategy or retraining program - for that portion of the middle class displaced by the loss of their jobs to offshore manufacturers. He also said:

I personally think it's a national security issue that we're not producing what we use. Every country should be capable of reasonably supporting itself. Yet we are leading the charge for one country (China) to make everything by our offshoring all of our products.

China could have something go wrong; not evil or with malice; just something that would cut off our products. It's important that we not be held hostage to that kind of disruption.

If you get people excited, they can figure out our problems and create businesses along the way... like harnessing the sun's energy. We need more creative people in science and engineering working on this.

Science, engineering and technological advancements are what made us embrace science in the past; we can do it in the future by getting our kids into the pipeline, properly trained and motivated.

Goodtime Clock IV, by George Rhoads, Santa Barbara Airport

Part of Abo-Shaeer's 4-year program is teaching art and creativity. In the 9th through 11th grades, the focus is art, engineering and architecture; the 12th grade is for robotics.

Kinetic sculpture (like the one by George Rhodes at the Santa Barbara Airport) is fun and exciting - to figure out how it works; to make their own version.

My personal mission is to broaden awareness of creation as a way of life: art, engineering... to make something; to create something.

The junior class will build kinetic sculptures which will be offered for public spaces in the Santa Barbara area. These are the kinds of projects I'm searching for - stand-alone things like that; robots are just a prop along the way of trying to teach the kids how to do everything - using their hands.

Another part of Amir's program is partnering with local businesses which can provide mentors, financial support and internships for the students. Raytheon, a national company with two divisions in Santa Barbara, is a good example of how this works.

Since we've begun the program we've gone full circle with Raytheon. They've provided mentors, financial support and internships to our kids. And now that the first few have graduated college and returned to Santa Barbara, Raytheon has hired some of them. That's how it works.

Abo-Shaeer has a plan to grow his program throughout California. He's creating a curriculum and bringing in teachers and helping them grow their own programs.

We are successful. You hear all the time that our kids don't want to do science. But they do. We aren't really marketing our program and they are still turning out in good numbers. With our new building we can now accept three times our original number of students. They want to do it and are excited about it. We're letting 100 of them in each cycle. Our attrition rate is zero! We're demonstrating that kids love this kind of stuff - and 50% of our students are girls!

I've had students that couldn't cut paper with a scissors. But when they leave the program they can build anything with confidence!

Abo-Shaeer is an energetic speaker and seems to be a natural at getting people excited. Although he's not that into the business of robotics, he's interested in whatever it takes to keep kids' attention. He wants everyone to understand and embrace his message: American kids can be interested in science, technology, engineering and math. They can make things with their hands. They can find excitement in STEM in that context. And their combined creative energy can solve problems.

[As an aside: Amir reminds me of the reason I chose to learn glass blowing many years ago. John Burton, coincidentally he was from Santa Barbara too, won an Emmy award for his philosophizing while glass blowing - talking about the same things that Abo-Shaeer talked about with me: the value of making things with your hands, the creativity unleashed, and the joy of learning and accomplishment. I wrote and asked whether he gave private lessons and when he said yes, drove 90 miles each Friday for many years - enjoying my time with him, learning new skills, making lots of different things, and seeing my skills expand. I forgot to ask Amir who inspired him....]

Robots at the Tepco Nuclear Facility in Fukushima, Japan

2011-07-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility - Before Twin Disasters

How did it come to be that Japan's nuclear power authority didn't have any emergency robots ready to assist with damage and control? Why were they caught unprepared?

In the days after a giant tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi’s cooling system, the prime minister’s office and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the plant’s operator, wrestled over whether to inject cooling seawater into the reactor buildings to prevent catastrophic meltdowns, and then over how to do it.

With radiation levels too high for workers to approach the reactors, the Japanese authorities floundered. They sent police trucks mounted with water cannons — equipment designed to disperse rioters — to spray water into the reactor buildings. Military helicopters flew over the buildings, dropping water that was scattered off course by strong winds, in a “performance, a kind of circus” that was aimed more at reassuring an increasingly alarmed Japanese population and American government, said Kenichi Matsumoto, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

What became clear was that Japan lacked some of the basic hardware to respond to a nuclear crisis and, after initial resistance, had to look abroad for help. For a country proud of its technology, the low point occurred on March 31 when it had to use a 203-foot-long water pump — shipped from China, an export market for Japanese nuclear technology — to inject 90 tons of fresh water into the No. 1 reactor building. But perhaps more than anything else, the absence of one particular technology was deeply puzzling: emergency robots.

“The plant operators said that robots were not needed,” said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 77, an engineer and a former president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s most prestigious academic institution. “Instead, introducing them would inspire fear, they said. That’s why they said that robots couldn’t be introduced.” [NY Times]

There are significant cultural differences between Japan and Western countries, some hundreds of years old and others more recent.

The "robot journey" in Japan has been the discovery of fantastic entertainers, tools, and, ultimately, friends in robots. Because of this rich tradition, Japanese are especially able to see robots as something more than mere tools, buckets of bolts, or steel and silicon. They can welcome them as partners in everyday life with surprising ease. [Tim Hornyak, from his book Loving the Machine]

In the present situation two powerful themes are influencing decisions on a daily basis: a belief in the safety of nuclear power developed from 50 years of PR, and Japan's seniority system.

“In Japan, we have something called the ‘safety myth,’” Banri Kaieda, who runs the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said. “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.”

As a result, he said, the nuclear industry’s “thinking about safety had a poor foundation.”

Japan’s government has concentrated its propaganda and educational efforts on creating such national beliefs in the past, most notably during World War II. The push for nuclear power underpinned postwar Japan’s focus on economic growth and its dream of greater energy independence. [NY Times]

Japan's seniority system often gets in the way of productivity and efficiency. Teachers complain that principals and administrators, having been rewarded their positions based on seniority rather than merit, are often ceremonial leaving the real work for teachers to pick up.

RC Bobcat and Talon from QinetiQ and Packbot by iRobot

In the case of Fukushima, both iRobot and QinetiQ, companies that volunteered equipment to Tepco, instructors found that senior Tepco employees were chosen to be trained to operate the American and British robots yet they were less suited to the task than the 20-year olds who had gamer experience. The remote-controlled PackBot and Talon robots and the RC Bobcat tractors, all used gaming consoles to operate their devices and the senior employees were slow to learn. In a recent Webinar on the issue by Robotic Trends, the trainers found that 20-year olds learned in less than a day while it took the older Tepco employees many days to gain the same level of competence.

Tepco is still involved in the containment process and will be for many months. Simultaneous to their activities, and in addition to Japanese investigations, the international nuclear community is evaluating what went wrong and how it might have been handled better for future nuclear power plant "incidents."

International, as well as Japanese, standards broke down. France, with 58 plants in operation, has a robotic emergency response capability yet Japan, with 54, does not.

The Group of Robotics INTervention on Accidents (INTRA), maintains a fleet of robotics machines capable of intervening, in the place of man, in a major nuclear accident, in and around the industrial buildings of its members. It also assures the continuous training of robot pilots within the installations of company members. [Group INTRA website]

The US, with 104 nuclear reactors, doesn't have a robotic response group (like the French one). Each utility has it's own set of procedures and guidelines monitored by the AEC. But the industry does have public relations websites emphasizing the safety of American nuclear power plants. One site, run by the Nuclear Energy Institute, uses keywords safe, secure, reliable and responsible with only cursory descriptors of actions and plans that make our reactors safe or secure or reliable or responsible.

Hence the question: does America have it's own 'safety myth' in relation to nuclear power?

If machines can't eat it, machines shouldn't make it!

2011-07-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

So says the ad for Carl's Jr. (promoting their chicken patty sandwich).

The robot in Carl’s Jr’s new ad is one of many ads and films which attempt to portray robots as symbols for the evil, giant, alien machines that apply crumbs and other not-nice stuff to chicken patties, hot dogs, tortillas and other food, beverage and candy items before they’re packaged and shipped.

Along the same theme, Stephen Colbert did a schtick about Robo-Slackers—“the #1 threat to America” -- saying:

They 've already taken away our factory jobs; now they're after our stoner, burnout jobs!

Skip forward to 3:26 to see the bit.

Nevertheless, and humor aside, robots ARE involved in food processing and packaging and it's beneficial to almost everyone. Food quality, safety, labor costs, sanitation, product waste, and productivity (often in uncomfortably cold work areas) are the drivers. KUKA, ABB, FANUC, Adept and a fleet of integrators are the providers. Working together, they are enabling large food and beverage processors to better handle their hot dogs, baked goods, meat and poultry products and candy. It’s one of the rising areas of robotics, partly because the robots are much faster than humans doing the same task. In fact the robot manufacturers are pushing the technology as a means of eliminating the need for human contact with food products since workers are a major source of contamination in food factories.

Almost every aspect of food processing is a prospective area for robotics integration. Sorting and packaging lettuce in Spain; milking cows; in cheese production they stir curds, transfer cheese moulds, and turn, cut, portion, package and palletize; selecting, stacking and packaging sausages or hot dogs or candy; etc. In use in the EU and Japan, and seeking approval in the US, Japanese-made robot deboning machines are working in refrigerated rooms deboning chicken legs and ham thighs three times faster than the fastest butcher.

Pres. Obama Launches AMP with $70 million for Robotics

2011-07-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Manufacturing is not merely about giving people jobs. The next generation of technological innovations is intimately tied to production processes. (MIT Technology Review)

This new partnership will make sure that tomorrow's breakthroughs are America's breakthroughs. (President Obama at CMU)

With much fanfare, and a trip to the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, President Obama launched a new Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) which includes an initiative for robotics in the form of a $70 million strategic plan focused on enabling new abilities for factory workers, healthcare providers, soldiers, surgeons and astronauts to carry out key hard-to-do tasks with co-robots... small, safe, easily trainable and flexible lightweight helper robots as developed by the SME Project in Europe and in development by Heartland Robotics in the U.S.

From early in his presidency, Pres. Obama has emphasized the need for manufacturing in America -- but he didn't specifically mention or include robotics until earlier this year. When the first manufacturing initiative was declared, the word robot or robotic wasn't uttered once. Nor were those words included in the two stimulus packages.

Robots will change the way we work. They will have intelligence and awareness. They will be teachable, safe and affordable. They will make us productive in ways we never imagined.

Robots will reinvigorate industry and inject new life into the economy. Making businesses more competitive. Keeping jobs from moving overseas. Demonstrating the power of American ingenuity.

Robots will change how we think about manufacturing. [Heartland Robotics website]

Professor Suzanne Berger wrote for MIT's Technology Review about why manufacturing matters:

Over the past 25 years, a fundamental change in the structure of production has taken place, as digitization and modularity have made it possible to separate R&D and design from production in industries where these functions had previously been integrated within corporations. The experiences of successful firms over the past 30 years make it plausible to think that manufacturing can be outsourced and offshored without any damage to the engines of innovation.

Given the spectacular success of companies like Apple and Dell, they were obvious models to emulate. Their example suggested that advanced industrial countries should focus on their comparative advantage in R&D, design, and distribution and leave manufacturing to less developed countries, with their large reserves of less educated, less demanding, low-wage labor.

[However], companies in wind and solar, biotech, new materials, batteries, and other emerging technology sectors suggests a number of reasons to question whether the IT paradigm will be workable for them. Already it appears that the challenges in scaling up these activities from laboratories through startups into full production of new products and services are different from the issues that software or electronics companies face in their transition from product idea to market. One obvious difference is that scaling up requires much more capital. Indeed, much of the most promising R&D and innovation in solar power involves cheaper and more efficient ways of manufacturing photovoltaics, a relatively mature technology. Companies such as Suntech have become major players in solar power by leveraging advanced manufacturing technologies.

A case for optimism is that radically new manufacturing technologies do appear to be within reach. The demand for new, cleaner energy sources, to name just one example, promises huge markets for technologies that can be manufactured cheaply enough to compete with fossil fuels. But for these ideas to be translated into advanced manufacturing and robust industries, we will require new policies—built on an understanding of why manufacturing really matters.

Thus the timing of President Obama and the launch of AMP. Last year, with the help and prodding from the AMRON group of educators and automation executives, and by Henrik Christensen and his Roadmap for Robotics, the new Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) was crafted and budgeted. With it's $70 million for robotics, it is patterned along the lines of public-private partnerships in the EU and throughout Asia: consortiums of research facilities, corporations and interested political figures, working together to achieve strategic breakthroughs that will roll out quickly.

While the last 25 years saw tremendous progress due to the Internet, the next revolution is considered to be robotics. Robotics has the potential to be a real-game changer for job growth and quality of life. Today the big commercial robotics programs are in Europe, Japan and South Korea. Through the National Robotics Initiative, the U.S. can regain the leadership position both in terms of basic research and application of the technology to secure future growth. [Dr. Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics at Georgia Tech]

* * *

On the downside, and a personal fear, is that politics is likely to thwart AMP's positive attributes by withholding the money that it takes to make things happen. There are many examples of this and the most recent is the Data.gov (Open Government Initiative) which was to upgrade and reform government databases and computer systems and make them transparant and available. It started with a bang and has done well but has lost much momentum because it's budget has been cut to less than 25% of what it was. Vivek Kundra, America's CTO, and the head of the program, resigned.

Not surprisingly, Kundra resigned. Why preside over a portfolio of shuttered initiatives? In a phone interview, Kundra acknowledged that he is worried about the program’s funding, but told me that he believes that the open data initiative has so much momentum that it is unstoppable, echoing the sentiment issued in his formal statement that he is “confident progress will continue.”

Whenever a program loses its key evangelist, it normally dies. The Open Government Initiative is likely to suffer a slow, inevitable death. [Washington Post]

* * *

Amir Abo-Shaeer, 2010 MacArthur Fellow

Not addressed in either the AMP or Robotics Initiative are the problems Americans face as their youth choose not to go into careers involving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). One young high school teach from Santa Barbara, CA is a practicing contrarian of that point of view and his story can be found here. His message is worth reading. He's a very persuasive and inspiring young man with an inspiring track record of successes.

Tough Transition from Industrial to Consumer/Service Robotics

2011-06-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

Will big industrial robot makers such as ABB, Fanuc and Kuka, transition and begin making products for the consumer and service markets? I'm beginning to think not. And here are a few of my reasons:

I've been impressed by the possibilities for power companies to reduce costs and expand safety and efficiency by adapting robots for high voltage transmission line maintenance and inspection instead of their present methods. Consequently, I researched and found some interesting Japanese and Canadian robotic solutions - and also an American one scheduled to debut in 2014 - and suggested these three options to the companies that presently perform line inspection and maintenance. I commented that this was the wave of the future and asked them whether they were going to use them. There was little, if any interest in doing so.

This lack of interest is not unique to the power industry. When I talked with the big industrial robotic vendors I received the same message when I asked about the possibilities of their producing social and work-place-assistant robots or using open or non-proprietary operating systems and even using non-proprietary devices like an iPad or tablet for programming and training.

The resistance is on many levels: job protection, revenue protection, technology and systems protection, and product protection. Notice the "protection" in each phrase? That's the main problem.

Bill Clinton, in a recent commencement speech at NYU, said that in the last 30 years companies have come to believe that they have obligations only to their shareholders.

The problem is that if you do that you ignore the other stakeholders.

That could be why wages have been virtually stagnant for the past 30 years, because the workers are stakeholders. It could be why communities have been unable to undertake economic transformations in many places, because communities are stakeholders. It could be why customers don’t care so much what the source of their purchases are, they’re stakeholders.

He clearly said that the world we live in is too unequal; that the world we live in is unstable; and that the world we live in is unsustainable. [Abstract of Pres. Clinton's commencement address.]

In thinking about what he said and what I heard from the robot executives in relation to using robots instead of humans or helicopters to maintain and inspect power transmission lines I realized that protection and lack of vision is endemic. When helicopters are used, companies that perform the service charge seven times the estimated cost of using a robot. Thus the profits derived are seriously more than would be derived from using a robot. Said another way, the profits from the sale of just one PacBot system is equal to the profits from the sale of 500 Roombas.

Protective and narrow thinking - as was expressed to me in many forms by the current vendors - is what will prohibit these vendors from transitioning into the different world of consumer/service robotics. That kind of thinking stultifies innovation and thwarts the goals of the corporation to all their stakeholders.

Consumer sales are whimsical, dependent on many variables. Manufacturing and selling 500 or 5,000 or 5 million consumer products is an entirely different process than selling a single defense contract which rarely if ever ramps up into numbers over 100.

Further, defense, space and security robotics are mostly in the domain of large aerospace companies or spinoff startup companies from university research centers and derive their profits as a fixed percentage of their costs and overhead... a formula that doesn't translate into the commercial sector.

Finally, most service robots involve interactions with humans in human/robot roles entirely different than in a factory setting.

Therefore, I believe that disruptive startup companies will spin out of research facilities and throughout the world of inventors and venture capitalists and provide product solutions to consumer needs that they want to purchase. Further, I believe that the business model for these new companies is entirely different than the model for old-line robotic manufacturers and also the aerospace industry. Consequently, this will be a worldwide phenomena. With my US hat on, it means that the US has a fresh start at an industry that is soon to emerge: small business and personal service robots and vehicles.

Coolest of the Cool - New Japanese Ball Drone

2011-06-15T01:16:00.000-07:00

Just when we mastered our AR.Drone - playing games and taking pictures and videos of our flights - along comes a new Japanese entry: a spherical reconnaissance scout - with a single engine and eight movable "wings." The drone can do 40 mph and is a lot of fun to boot.

Over 1 million people have watched this video thus far. It's an amusing Japanese newscast but needs no translation to see the capabilities of this new drone... speed and flexibility in particular. It bounces and rolls off of objects it hits or falls onto.

Built by Japan's Ministry of Defense, it is presently being refitted for autonomous operation and to carry video and still cameras. The commercial version - for security applications - is intended to sell for less than $1,000. The consumer version will be redesigned to enable an acceptable consumer price point similar to the Parrot AR.Drone.

The Critical Next Step In Robotics: AI

2011-06-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

Thus far, the biggest hitch in the development of commercially feasible and consumer-friendly robots is not the robotic devices themselves, but the artificial intelligence that manages their activities and communicates with their users and managers.

Andrew Ng, an Associate Professor at Stanford U's AI Lab, made a wonderfully illuminating 16-minute video about the problems and progress of AI and robotics relevant to this discussion. It's worth your time to watch it:

Ng's frustrations from the past - which he describes in the final moments of the video - are shared by all of us. However, his renewed optimism for the future offers needed insight into the problems of the past and the potential for the future. Since he's confident about the future of AI and robotics, we can feel some level of hope that at least Stanford U is likely to provide rapid movement toward what has heretofore been a serious stumbling block for robotics.

Dissecting the Controversy About the Robotics Industry

2011-04-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Where are the robots? Where's that $100 billion industry we've seen in the forecasts?

Since the 1980's we've seen robots outside of the factory - vacuums, drones, bomb disposal devices, embedded systems for cars, hazardous materials and location monitoring bots - but expected to see more. Our expectations are so much higher than what's thus far come to market that the industry is looked at somewhat cynically.

Some say the technology is not yet ready; others claim the economic drivers aren't there to propel the industry forward; still others say that more directed research and funding must occur before major robotic product solutions can happen. Yet even with massive investments by DARPA, the EU and many Asian governments, one can still ask, Where are the robots?

Well, here's where the robotics industry stands at the end of the first quarter, 2011:

Automate 2011, McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

At the Automate 2011 Conference and Trade Show in Chicago last week, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) held a press conference to reveal glowing reports about the robotics industry's recovery and prospects for the future. Although their focus in Chicago was toward industrial robots, much of the growth areas in robotics were in the services sector.

Industrial robots are defined as automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed or mobile for use in industrial automation applications.

Service robotics are all other robots and robotic applications and systems than industrial robots.

The IFR data showed that most of the industrial sector, excluding Japan, had recovered from the 2009 lows of the economic crisis. The U.S. and EU were not fully back to 2008 levels but very close. This was supported by an analyst for the Automation Technology Council of the Imaging Association. His charts showed growth of material handling applications throughout the recession and that welding applications diminished. Also, he predicted double digit growth for motion vision vendors for the next few years. He affirmed my analysis which showed that almost all robotic manufacturers are not American; only integrators are US companies. Quoting from a press release from the IFR: "The automotive industry will drive the automation levels in China. Other industries like plastics, food, and electronics are following."

The figures from both sources showed three remarkable facts:

A 127% growth in China, Korea and ASEAN countries.
The service sector didn't go down as much as the industrial companies did -- and it grew steadily during the recession.
Much of the growth in industrial robotics was due to the recovery and renewal of facilities for newer hybrid cars in the auto industry.

The data also showed that although electronics was the second largest application for industrial robotics, up-and-coming areas included food and beverage handling and materials handling in almost all emerging economies, particularly in Asia and Brazil.

Executives participating in IFR press conference

The roundtable of executives expressed a shortage of application engineers to support this growth. All of the participants were very sensitive to safety and to maintaining their core business supporting big factories even though they are aware that much of future growth will be in small and medium facilities. This appears to outsiders as slowness but they claim otherwise. They also were protective of their software and control systems suggesting that they are what makes their company unique and successful. Yet only one of them was displaying improved control devices (like iPad controllers). There was no opening for open source amongst them nor was there any real interest in the rapid development of fully human-like robotic hands saying that their applications just needed the right tool at the end of the arm rather than a resource-laden full-featured hand.

Yet these very same features were part of what is propelling the service robotics sector forward... think Robonaut2, DARPA's ARM project, etc.

Economic drivers propelling these and other service-sector robotics are:

South Korean iRobi Q teaching
assistant robot from Yujin Robotics

Healthcare & Quality of Life: to control costs, empower healthcare workers, and enable aging citizens to live longer in their homes.
Energy & Environment: critical to our future especially in the areas of automating the acquisition of energy and monitoring the environment.
Homeland Security & Infrastructure Protection: border protection, search and rescue, port inspection, inspection, maintenance and safeguarding bridges, highways, public water and energy systems and pipelines and other critical infrastructure components.
Entertainment & Education: address the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educational crisis and to become the veritable "fourth R" of education (see article about South Korean r-learning project).
Manufacturing & Logistics: further automate manufacturing and movement of goods, transform small scale or micro manufacturing operations and help maintain businesses from moving offshore by increasing productivity.

Exhibition Hall at InnoRobo in Lyon, France
Crowd is looking at Nao robots

At InnoRobo 2011 held in Lyon, France on dates that overlapped the Automate show, the service sector was presented to a youthful crowd of fascinated students and business people in technical conferences and an exhibition area filled with 100 unique and interesting robots and robotic products including 30 never before shown. Unlike the Chicago show where people were businesslike and established, the crowd at InnoRobo was youthful, energetic, enthusiastic and eager to make contacts and make robots.

Bruno Bonnell, President of the French Union of Service Robotics (Syrobo) and Chairman of RoboPolis, in his presentation at InnoRobo in Lyon, France, said that the service robotic market would multiply to 30 times the current rate this decade and be a $100 billion per year industry by 2020!

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China's governments are aware of these projections and have created robotic stimulus programs with this $100 billion industry in mind. Gaining market share will provide jobs and revenues to these strategic early planners -- America take note.

Two-thirds of present-day service robotics industry revenue is in defense, security and space but it is expected that near-term and future growth will be be in the five groups shown above (healthcare, energy, education, et al).

Presentation at City Hall in Lyon, FR

In a discussion amongst business executives, research people, and governmental officials at the InnoRobo forum and also at a City Hall presentation, one could easily see and feel the difference in focus between industrial and service robotics: from protecting, maintaining and growing a known industry to supporting and encouraging the entrepreneurial flare of start-ups, research and business growth challenges and scaling up of emerging robotic systems. The French governmental officials were not only responsive; they were backing their support with incentives as are most other countries wishing to be in this future burgeoning marketplace.

Market research indicates smart toys, educational kits, tutorial and teaching devices, home cleaners and lawnmowers are all reaching the price point for the mass market to accept and adapt to these consumer robotic products. Further, it was the general consensus at the business forum that there were two major trends underway:

Consumer robotics would precede personal robots, and
Expectations are greater than the market can presently deliver; thus being able to produce a robotic device that performs to it's advertised specs is paramount.

A key phrase described the desired robotic product of the future: an attentive partner. Let your imagination go with those words... and imagine an attentive partner in the factory, or at home, or at school. It needn't be humanoid, just functional; just a partner in your endeavors, attentive to your needs and timing. That's the dream - and based on the energy, investment and enthusiasm of the crowd at InnoRobo, that's what our near-term future is likely to hold for us: devices to help with schooling, eldercare and movement, assistance in medicine, surgery and in the factory as well as mobile and flying devices to help us protect and preserve our property and infrastructure.

In an editorial in the IFR World Robotics Service Robotics Report for 2010, asking the same question as mine (Where are the robots?), Nicola Tomatis of BlueBotics SA, a spin-off from the EPFL in Switzerland, asked (and answered) a question we are all asking.

My advice to the service robotics community is… Start new ventures, go out to meet users and experts, be open-minded and creative, and team up with the right partners to create the added value that will bring service robotics to success!

His response mirrors my thoughts entirely... which is why one of the periodic ads on The Robot Report is my personal ad asking readers if they need marketing, management and financing for their robotic endeavors.

The real facts about Korea's kindergarten teaching robots

2011-03-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Sang-Rok Oh, KIST advisor

In a presentation at InnoRobo, the Innovation Robotics Summit held March 23-25 in Lyon, France, Sang-Rok Oh, from the South Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and an advisor to the government on r-learning, described the early childhood project that many of us have read about. Most of the stories, however, have elicited concern that our children are soon to be schooled by robots instead of humans.

This is quite a different message than Mr. Oh spoke of when he described the classroom use of the iRobiQ robot and how it supplements, augments and assists the teacher.

Teaching and tutoring English is one of the tasks, true, but the project is significantly greater. It is a paradigm shift to digital educational practices from traditional methods, to augmenting teachers with the teaching assistants they can't afford, and to relieve them of mundane tasks whilst freeing extra time for them to teach.

Yujin Robotics'
iRobi Q, teacher's assistant

There are 8,400 kindergarten classes in South Korea. By the end of 2011 3,000 of them will be involved in the r-learning program and equipped with an iRobi Q teaching assistant robot. Some classes will also have a Genibo robot dog. Mr. Oh says that by the end of 2012 5,000 classrooms will be part of the program.

His group at KIST, plus teachers and teacher groups, are working to develop additional tasks for the robots - tasks that take the mundane time-consuming chores from the teacher and distribute them to the students and the robot thereby making more quality teacher time available for the students. They are also working on adding content so that the children don't outgrow the platform.

He discussed delays due to the conservative infrastructure but stressed the commitment of the South Korean government to move forward with r-learning not only in kindergarten classes but onwards from there.

DasaRobot's Genibo

He showed a video of the kids checking themselves in with the robot at the beginning of the day (attendance taking) and getting the robot to photograph and store their art and other materials into their online digital library which their parents and teachers can see whenever they choose to log in. He also had a video showing Dasa Robot's Genibo robots being used to lead PE and story-telling sessions.

Kyung Shin, the President of Yujin Robots, the manufacturer of the iRobi Q, described the service robotics marketplace and used a phrase about their vision in building service robots that I think is fitting: that they be attentive partners... human-friendly attentive partners... in the various tasks of daily life.

The iRobi Q produced by Shin's company has an object recognition camera, voice recognition mic, sound replay speakers, IR, ultrasound, bumper and floor sensing sensors, emotional facial expressions, display and touch screen as well as learning, gaming and tutoring content.

Both speakers referenced the South Korean government's 2008 plan (the Special Law) and $1 billion investment involved in developing r-learning, English language proficiency, and agricultural automation. Mr. Shin also told of the Japanese government's program to stimulate agricultural automation, provide consumer-level and professional cleaning robots and to sustain Japan's 20% annual growth in providing worldwide robotics and also of China's focus on manufacturing, space, defense and cleaning and cooking robots. All of these public-private partnerships are jointly funded by governments and industry with the government spearheading scientific challenges.

Mr. Shin said that South Korea is attempting to achieve tech leadership within 10 years. [This is particularly timely in that the UK's Royal Society, their national academy of science, just released a study indicating that China would surpass the US in scientific output in the next few years, perhaps as early as 2013, but surely within this decade.] Other goals for South Korea are to export surveillance robots and to provide eldercare robots within five years and personal assistant robots within ten.

One way that the government's support is helpful is in enabling massive test markets directed toward achieving a national strategic goal - for example, insuring that Korean children are able to speak English so that they can be schooled abroad and bring their education back into play at home.

Part of the Special Law - and the $1 billion stimulus - is to launch up to 500 businesses and provide 80,000 new jobs in the robotics industry by the end of the decade.

Bruno Bonnell, President of the French Union of Service Robotics (Syrobo) and Chairman of RoboPolis, in his presentation at InnoRobo in Lyon, France, said that the service robotic market would have growth of 30X the current rate this decade and be a $100 billion per year industry in 2020.

These governmental (Japan's, South Korea's, Taiwan's and China's) robotic stimulus programs have been undertaken with this $100 billion industry in mind. Gaining market share in this industry will provide jobs and revenues to these strategic early planners -- America take note.

New details about Robonaut2

2011-03-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

From left: R2A, Ronald Diffler, Marty Linn and R2B

In a March 22 presentation at Automate 2011 in Chicago, the NASA and GM Team Leaders provided new details about Robonaut2 A and B, called R2A and R2B, the two products of their four-year collaboration.

Marty Linn, from GM, talked about the flexibility and quality that R2 will bring to GM's manufacturing lines. R2 will complement and support humans just as they will help the crew in the space station. It's designed to do work and will assist with ergonomically difficult tasks.

Ronald Diffler, the NASA project leader, displayed R2's hand dexterity, fine motion with tendon-like tensioning, and with a patented tactile system enabling haptic understanding of objects. R2s arms have springs for softness and stiffness control thereby enabling R2 to be safe around humans. Further, R2 has a 2-joint neck so that it can see fully down and around.

R2A watching launch of R2B

R2 has applied for 44 patents. Computing power and sensors are many years old because NASA requires the boards to be certified and other safety and bureaucratic delays. The actual flight of R2B to the space station was delayed for many months. But R2B is there, in the station now and R2A was there to see it launched.

GM will upgrade their new R2-like robots, which they intend to farm out to a robotics manufacturer, a "development partner," with the latest chips, cameras and sensors.

Linn, in an interview following the presentation, said that the real value of R2 for GM is the flexibility of the hands and lower arm springs. Motoman's two-armed robot lacks end-of-arm flexibility and sensors and arm tensioning thereby making it not flexible or safe enough to work side by side with humans as is the plan with R2 and GM.

A full body training suit was designed for simulation and training. An astronaut dons the suit and records his movements doing a task. R2 can then repeat the task and, if necessary, a programmer can enhance the recorded movements. Linn said that this simulation and training feature will be a valuable tool to help GM jumpstart the usual extended time for initial programming and safety simulation.

The Next 7-10 Years of IBM's Watson

2011-03-06T16:26:00.001-08:00

Jeopardy! Was Just The Beginning

Alex Trebek, Ken Jennins, Watson and Brad Rutter
Photo courtesy of Jeopardy!

IBM's achievement with their Watson system and software was more than good television:

It's a major language processing realization. Computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands.
The data management aspect lends itself to specialization, ie, medical sub-sets, legal data sets, call/support centers databases, etc. John Markoff, in a recent NY Times article on the subject, said "any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen."
The language processing is amazing, illuminating, and lets one dream of a future where the promises of human-robot (or for that matter, human-device) interaction and instantaneous translation is really going to happen soon.
A staggering amount of horsepower was harnessed to work harmoniously using massively parallel technology on 2,700 processors spread over 90 servers to enable the Jeopardy! win. Historically, this will advance to smaller devices within a few years. Ray Kurzweil, quoted in The Economist, notes that it was only five years after the massive and hugely expensive Deep Blue beat Mr Kasparov in 1997 that Deep Fritz was able to achieve the same level of performance by combining the power of just eight personal computers. In part, that was because of the inexorable effects of Moore’s Law halving the price/performance of computing every 18 months. It was also due to the vast improvements in pattern-recognition software used to make the crucial tree-pruning decisions that determine successful moves and countermoves in chess. Now that the price/performance of computers has accelerated to a halving every 12 months. Mr Kurzweil expects a single server to do the job of Watson’s 90 servers within seven years—and by a PC within a decade. If cloud computing fulfills its promise, then bursts of Watson-like performance could be available to the public at nominal cost even sooner.

And most importantly, right after the Jeopardy! win, IBM announced partnerships with a few hospital groups to provide diagnostic physician assistance using Watson's DeepQA software and data management methods. And their website displays other areas where Watson might be particularly helpful. IBM is bringing Watson to the marketplace.

It's important to keep in mind that inside a computer there is no connection from words to human experience or cognition. To Watson, words are just tokens. In parsing a question such as those on Jeopardy!, a computer has to decide what's the verb, the subject, the object, the preposition and the object of the preposition. It must remove uncertainty from words with multiple meanings, by taking into account any and all contexts it can recognise. When people talk among themselves, they bring so much contextual awareness that answers become obvious. The computer must use logic to "disambiguate" incoming tokens into choices which can be measured (scored) against alternative choices. And it must do all that within seconds.

What about robots and robotics?

The AI system managing a robot gathers facts through sensors or human input, compares this to stored data, and decides what the information signifies. The system then runs through various possible actions and predicts which action will be most successful.

Some robots also have a limited ability to learn. Learning robots recognize if a certain action achieved a desired result and store that information for the next time it encounters the same situation. Naturally, they can't absorb information like a human but in Japan, roboticists have taught a robot to dance by demonstrating the moves themselves.

It's important to remember that IBM isn't the only AI game in town. There are many companies and research facilities developing and providing AI software, the most visible of which is Google.

IBM 701 Computer
From Wired's Danger Room: Back in 1954, IBM announced that its 701 computer crunched a bit of Russian text into its English equivalent. A Georgetown professor who worked on the project predicted the computerized translation of entire books “five, perhaps three years hence.”

Thus was born a scientific (and sci-fi) drive that’s lasted 57 years, from Star Trek to Babel Fish to Google Translate: instantaneous speech translation. But even though no one’s mastered that yet, the Pentagon’s out-there research branch is asking for even more with its Boundless Operational Language Translation, or BOLT. As outlined in Darpa’s fiscal 2012 budget request. For the low, low starting cost of $15 million, Congress can “enable communication regardless of medium (voice or text), and genre (conversation, chat, or messaging).”

Not only will BOLT be a universal translator — the creation of which would be a revolutionary human development — but it will “also enable sophisticated search of stored language information and analysis of the information by increasing the capability of machines for deep language comprehension. In other words, a 701 translator that works.

So What's The Holdup?

There are many reasons for the delay in robotic training and interaction with humans - some of which can been seen in the mammoth resources it took IBM to achieve their Watson Jeopardy! victory. You cannot place those resources into a robot nor can you rely on a computer controlling a robot (or series of robots) via a wireless communication channel as they go about their various tasks.

Matthias Scheutz, an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science and Informatics and Director of the Human-Robot Interaction Lab at Tufts University, adds research funding to the equation saying:

The fields of robotics and human-robot interaction are growing, with the highest expected growth rates not in industrial, but service robots. Several countries (Japan, South Korea, the EU, etc.) around the world are heavily investing in service and social robotics. In the US, there are very few funding programs specifically targeted at artificial cognitive systems that would enable complex autonomous service robots. My hope is that this will be changing soon given enormous market potential of this area and the heavy investments other countries are making. To keep the US competitive and to enable, not Watson-like, but more modest, more natural interactions between humans and autonomous robots in natural language, we will need interdisciplinary funding programs that are aimed at developing the right kinds of integrated control architectures for these systems, which we are currently still lacking.

Scheutz goes on to say:

Computing power is obviously a critical component for a lot of AI technology (e.g., algorithms that are data-based and need to be trained on large data sets, or algorithms that have to explore large search spaces in a short amount of time). Equally important is the architecture of an intelligent system, the way in which different components operate and interact. And here is where we have made much less progress compared to the hardware side. Consequently, although the performance of Watson is very impressive and clearly a break-through, from an engineering perspective, it does not yet address the problem of human-like natural language processing as we will need it for robots. And while there will likely be applications in the context of recommender systems in the near future, it is not clear to me how the technology used on Watson can be put on a robot and make it have natural task-based dialogues with humans.

The EU, Japan and Korea have roadmaps which lay out the science that needs to be tackled before effective products can be produced. And they have national direction and public-private funding to make their plans happen. America does not yet have such a plan nor any national direction regarding robotics. And this is a critical holdup.

President Obama, in his State of the Union Speech, specifically excluded robotics when he discussed the need for strategic investment in key areas of innovation. How the President could overlook that not a single sector is devoid of the applications of robotics is one question. Another is to ask whether he is aware that 12 of the 13 major robotic manufacturers selling industrial and manufacturing robots in the US are off-shore companies.

Agriculture Automation is Progressing Slowly

2011-02-09T23:18:00.000-08:00

This week's World Ag Expo in Tulare, California was a massive agricultural trade show. With an expected 100,000 visitors (of which 13% were foreign), 1,600 exhibitors and 60+ acres (2.6 million sq ft) of exhibition space. Massive! Outdoors, indoors, trams to cover the distances and food stalls of every type, mostly with BBQ smoke stoking the desire buds... read on for the diet-killer of all time.

Everything was big: tractors, trams, even the show's sound system - see the speakers hanging from the crane.

Finding things robotic gave a different picture: a few vendors with inroads, fewer techie companies attempting to offer new products and not too much on display.

The big players were John Deere, Trimble, DeLaval, Case and AgLeader. Smaller vendors like Micro-Trak Systems, Raven and wholly owned subsidiaries like WeedSeeker (Trimble) also had booths.

At each of their spaces I asked the same questions:

How is your product being adopted?
Are sales okay, good, or great?
Do you see future sales rising more quickly (and if so, why)?

The answers were quite similar: with the rising cost of seed, sprays and labor, and the lower costs of automation sensors, software and tracking devices, automation systems are a steadily growing and necessary part of the overall ag business which most of the larger producers are adopting. As a result, most of the big vendors are seeing corresponding sales gains. Buyers are not early adopters. Instead they are just doing what's necessary to cope with rising costs and the need to automate to stay effective and competitive.

Sensor and motion-vision based systems - flow control type applications - are particularly slow to be adopted because, up until now, they have been excessively costly. Now, with costs changing, they are getting a second look.

All the sales people said that they estimate more than 50% of tractors are fitted with some form of Autotrak or EZ-drive unmanned nav/driver system. Yet there is no collision avoidance, nor has the liability for improper spraying or collision been resolved, nor are there night operation sensors, hence, these devices must still have an onboard "driver."

Trimble had a bull-pen with demo four-wheelers and one of the ag colleges was using a John Deere tractor simulator/training device - but generally there was little interest and no crowds for the tech stuff.

Yet Trimble's Connected Farm - a new system of software and communication services to wirelessly sync precision farming data - was one of the winners of the show's Top 10 Tech Innovations. Trimble was also a winner for their Yuma farm- and ranch-rugged tablet computer.

I ate sensibly at mealtimes. I've been on a diet and doing well until I encountered... the ultimate diet-buster! Using an unusual method of outdoor cooking, this booth shot my will power with one of their briquets.

Reduce the Deficit and Invest in Targeted Innovation

2011-01-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

I was disappointed with the section of President Obama's 2011 State of the Union speech regarding investing in selected new technologies for future growth.

I had hoped he would use the word “robotics” and include the necessity for an American robotics industry in his speech and it is unfortunate that he did neither. That he focused his investment scope to exclude robotics might just be the death knell for the American robotics industry because, without national strategic focus, things will go on as they have… VERY slowly and very dependent on Space and Defense for research dollars.

A thriving robotics industry provides jobs, helps the nation increase efficiency, profitability and productivity and upgrades the mix of workers involved. Yet America doesn't presently have a national robotics agenda. Europe does. Japan does. Korea does. And each of these countries is gaining success and momentum worldwide.

Tom Atwood, editor-in-chief of Robot magazine, recently stated:

Although the government is beginning to wake up and push for an expansion of robotics education in schools with the DARPA-funded FIRE (Furthering Innovation through Robotics Exploration) program at Carnegie Mellon and the NSF-funded DARwIn-OP project at Virginia Tech, these and similar programs, by themselves, are not enough for our country to maintain its competitive technological edge. We need a national robotics policy that is specifically articulated in a clear call to action by our executive branch, and we need backing of such a program by Congress.

Pres. Obama was inspiring in his speech and his directness to the issues of the day, and his reference to a Sputnik II moment was wonderful as he attempted to address the need for American students to become involved in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs. This is a serious issue and a major difference between America and all of the other countries in which robotics flourish: STEM education takes extra dedication, energy, time and persistence which is not happening with American students; in fact there seems to be resistance to pursuing a career in science (except for a career in medicine, or on the business side of math - as a quant - which, even today, still equates to enormously big bucks.) The Sputnik reference was eloquent but, at least for robotics, empty.

Microsoft Kinect - add-on device for Xbox game controller

He missed some great technology examples. One that I find particularly illuminating is the effect that the technology inside Microsoft’s new Xbox Kinect device has had. Kinect is a controller free gaming and entertainment experience. It enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 game system without the need to touch a controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands. Not only have sales of Xboxes exploded but so have the applications and uses - and sales - of the cameras and depth-perception software inside the Kinect. iRobot and WillowGarage are using the $50 Kinect innards in lieu of LIDAR range-finder machines costing upwards of $5,000. Check out iRobot’s new AVA concept robot. Hackers and inventors worldwide have been finding new uses for the Kinect that Microsoft didn't even dream of. Now that’s inspiring!

There are many things happening in robotics in America. There's work underway - with some successes thus far - to get an American robotics roadmap funded and implemented and there's been a steady trickle-down effect from the research dollars spent on defense and space by NASA, DARPA and the DoD. Medical robotics are on a tear. There is independent investment as well. In Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Massachusetts and Alabama, state-, corporate- and educationally-sponsored Robotic Centers are springing up to provide training in the programming, repair and maintenance of robots, as well as for research and testing. Alabama's recently opened Robotics Technology Park is a serious $73 million three-pronged endeavor to provide (1) an industry training program where technicians will be trained to work on robotic machinery; (2) a test facility for NASA and the US Army for research and testing of leading edge robotics for defense and space exploration; and (3) a facility to allow start-up companies to build and adapt robots for new industries. Imagine if this kind of state-inspired public-private forethought were done on a national level... now that's a Sputnik II moment.

Alison Diana at InformationWeek just did a piece on 12 Advances in Medical Robotics but failed to note that 2/3 of the vendors were not American. Eight out of the 12 were Japanese, Korean or European. The ratio of industrial robot providers in America is even worse: although integrators, engineers and consultants tend to be American-owned, the major robot providers (KUKA, ABB, Comau, Denso, Schunk, Motoman, Daihen, Reis, Fanuc) are all foreign-owned. That is also a Sputnik II moment.

English Teaching Robot

In South Korea, robotic guides and docents patrol the Presidential Museum as 70,000 monthly visitors experience an advertisement of the nation’s cutting-edge technologies that made it a global leader in chips, mobile phones, TVs, display panels, and robotics that combine them all. South Korea is into the 5th year of a 10-year $1 billion investment in robotic technologies with a series of national goals endorsed by their President.

An example of how a nationally-directed strategic program works is when a shortage of English teachers compelled the South Korea government to use robotic teachers. They are deploying them in 500 preschools in 2011, and 8,000 preschools and kindergartens by 2013. It helps address the lack of English teachers in rural areas or remote islands. Learning English represents a necessary educational step for competitive South Korean students, and especially those aiming to study abroad at major universities in the U.S. Now that's a Sputnik II moment.

This is what was missing from President Obama's speech: the recognition that part of the underbelly of America's productivity and efficiency is automation and robotics. It's a very necessary industry which needs national direction. Mark Ingebretsen, the new editor of Robotic Trends Business Review, adds an additional dimension to Pres. Obama’s exclusion of robotics, “the robotics that drive America’s economy and defense will be in the hands of other countries that have spent the early 21st century developing robot technologies.”

President Obama's call for action using the Sputnik II example is moot in relation to robotics without the formulation and acceptance of a roadmap and the establishment of a public-private consortium to implement it fully. A roadmap was presented in May, 2009 and some of it's provisions are slowly making their way through the halls of Congress. But there is no executive leadership thus far. If there were, Pres. Obama's Sputnik II moment would be a true call to action instead of pointless rhetoric.

Speed; 3D; 4G; TV everywhere - oh, and robots too

2011-01-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

Collage of robot consumer products shown at CES 2011

ROBOTS AND SMART DEVICES AT CES 2011 - LAS VEGAS

Robotics Trends, a division of EH Publishing, an events, e-media and technology publishing company covering the electronics, construction and robotics industries, sponsored what CES called a "Robotics Tech Zone" focused on robotic consumer products. Unfortunately, there were just a few. Nevertheless, there were some interesting things to see in the Tech Zone and more to see on the greater show floor at iRobot, Parrot AR.Drone, Audi and Ford:

iRobot's AVA
modular telepresence robot

iRobot showed their new upgraded line of robot vacuum and floor cleaners but also introduced an iPad-controlled mobile robot with a Kinect-type device as a communications controller. Additionally, iRobot is proposing that an app store be established for the robot (named AVA) so that customers can mix and match apps and add-on devices to customize the robot for their purposes. Read more (and watch a video about AVA) here.
The little WheeMe device by DreamBots, unavailable until Q4, gave a relaxing tickle as it crawled up, down and around a model's back, but definitely wasn't a viable massager.
Startup Orbotix displayed their baseball-sized Bluetooth Sphero which can be controlled by iOS or Android apps on your smart device. The apps determine the use of the ball in games, augmented reality or realtime.
Murata Manufacturing displayed their gyro-sensor'd Murata Girl unicyclist and Murata Boy bicyclist. Both are not ready for production and are concept pieces.
Cyberdyne demonstrated an abbreviated version of their HAL robot suit which assists in rehabilitation support and physical training, heavy labor support in factories and rescue support at disasters.
Anybots was displaying their QB telepresence robot which will sell at $15,000 mid-2011.
The new Pleo RB (reborn) by Innvo Labs, was as cute and functionally fascinating as the previous iteration of the lovable dinosaur. But the real story here is Jetta Manufacturing who rescued Pleo by launching Innvo Labs and reinvigorating the line with the new Pleo RB. Jetta was the manufacturer and packager of two US robotic products produced in China: Pleo and Autom.
Intuitive Automata's Autom, a personal diet mentor that interacts with you and tracks your dieting progress. Autom is manufactured in China by Jetta for an American company.
The furry Paro robot was there cooing.
VGo Communications' stylish VGo telepresence robot was roving the walkways around the HighTech Education booth.
French car component manufacturer Parrot was again showing last year's hit at CES, their AR.Drone augmented reality quadcopter visually controlled through an iPhone, iPad or iTouch.
LG Electronics' RoboKing floor vacuum was glitzy and did a good job of cleaning up and was accompanied by a group of smart home appliances (washer, dryer, refrigerator and oven) .
Neato Robotics' SV-11, another robot vacuum already on the market, was also on display.
Ilshim Global was showing their new Windoro window-washing robot, a pre-production product developed by Korean PIRO (Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics)
Tim Hornyak, who wrote "Loving the Machine" and now works for CNET, took a great picture of General Motors' EN-v concept car which incorporates Segway-like balancing technology, can autonomously drive in groups at highway speeds and is meant to be marketed in ultra-crowded cities sometime in the future.
Pictures for most of the above can be seen at CNET.

In addition to consumer products, Carnegie Mellon University and Frauhofer, Europe's largest application-oriented research institution, shared a booth to show various concept products like the one from a young grad student at CMU: a soft, inflatable arm that can safely manipulate objects in order to assist with personal care tasks for people with serious disabilities. Another CMU item was a modular snake robot that can climb trees.

Embedded systems added to standard appliances were displayed at the Whirlpool and LG booths and alluded to at a few others - from robotic baristas to refrigerator doors.

Nothing was as truly robotic as the car companies which were showing their new in-car navigation/entertainment/communication systems and plans for the immediate future. A big job what with the changing array of tablets and smartphones being added to the mix. Audi and Ford had enormous presentations including concept cars. Adaptive cruise control, park-o-matic, lane awareness, driver alertness - from sensors to processing to autonomous action and/or interaction with the driver. Fascinating stuff.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally described it best when he said:

Ford adds value to all the gadgetry when it consolidates them into intuitive, safe (eyes-on-the-road) and up-to-date in-car navigation, entertainment and communication systems that don't interfere with all the other technology in the car and enhance the driving experience for the user.

Watch the keynote addresses by Ford's CEO Alan Mulally and Rupert Stadler, Chairman of Audi at CES last week. Both are worth your time and both really give you the feel of this years innovation - and complexity - at CES 2011.

New Media - with all it's rough edges - clearly seen at CES 2011

2011-01-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

Guess which one is me taking notes

I spent three days at CES listening, checking, talking and walking. My focus was robotics and the showing was meager. There were few consumer robotic products at the show. A full list of those can be seen in "Speed, 3D, 4G, TV Everywhere - Oh... And Robots Too."

Consumer electronics are driven by demand, need, price and design (not in that order) but, so far, that kind of consumer market pressure isn't present for consumer robotic products. It is present for iPad-like products, 3D TVs, faster broadband, and in-car nav/entertainment systems. Intuitive and easy-to-use being the key criteria.

My 3-day visit exposed me to the complexities of network buildouts, in-car systems, conflicting OS's like iOS, Android (and the new Honeycomb), MS and all the others. But what I really saw was the new media at work - and it was fun watching them do so.

I'm really not an old-fashioned guy. I am, in years, older than the average media person attending CES. But I'm just as lean and hungry as they are to gather and report really interesting news. I did, however, feel really old when I was surrounded by the 5,000+ new and much younger media that flocked to and aggressively staked out their turfs at CES. Of that number, 1,200 were international. They were streaming while I was taking notes; they were videoing or big-lense photographing while I was trying to find my pocket camera; they were squatting in the halls munching their free boxed lunches while I felt hunger pangs but kept on walking, talking and taking notes on a very time-intense, crammed schedule.

iRobot's concept
telepresence robot Ava

My goals in attending trade shows haven't changed over the years. I go to see where the crowds are gathering (LG, Motorola, Blackberry's new tablet, 3D screens, in-car nav/entertainment systems, and NOT Microsoft (even though MS had a mammoth set of booths)); meet and greet acquaintances that I would never otherwise have the chance to visit with; sift through the hype and vapor to capture the "essence" of the innovations being displayed; hone in on my area of interest: robotics; and find a gem or two that I couldn't have found had I not been there in person. I did find that gem: What can you do with AVA (iRobot's new telepresence concept robot seen at CES)?.

***

CES is really two shows: one for the media and companies wanting to get out their stories (new products and plans) and another for trade buyers, interested people and trend setters. The media holds court for two days even before the trade expo opens to the public. And that's where much of the new-product information is presented, gathered and promoted.

On day one, two statistics-packed presentations showed that worldwide consumer electronics purchases in 2010 were up 3% and expected to increase slightly more in 2011. The trends for 2011 were even more interesting and included portability, dropping prices of smart devices, ballooning sales of e-readers, smart phones and tablets, and the integration of sensing technologies (accelerometers, touch screens, pressure, stabilization, GPS) with increased connectivity, computing power, etc. into all types of products and devices in and out of vehicles enabling more intuitive user experiences and data collection. These were followed by an evening mini-trade show - a teaser of the bigger show - held in a large ballroom at the Venetian.

Day two was one 45 minute press conference after another - from 8 am to 5:45 pm - with every big name company (LG, Intel, Pioneer, Audiovox, Nvidia, Sharp, Casio, Cisco, Samsung, Panasonic, Motorola and Sony) announcing their new products, showing concept products and discussing how their plans fit into the overall changes occurring in consumer electronics in 2011. All those presentations were followed by Steve Ballmer's Keynote address over at the Hilton where he displayed the new Kinect xBox device (which enables controller-free entertainment), Microsoft's new phone software, the forthcoming convergence of phone/pad, PC and TV, and the weight of MS's 1 billion customers worldwide.

Day three - the first day of the actual trade show - is also media-focused in that all the exhibitors are anxious to get their 15 minutes of fame in all its forms: blogs, print, photos, videos and tweets.

Who would have thought that live blogging of the Verizon keynote would be of interest to a large enough audience? [Well, had I not been there in person, I would have been one of them. Why? Because the bandwidth to my office is too slow to watch the live streaming video, which I would have preferred to watch, that's why!] But there, sitting next to and behind me, were two young "reporters" from CNET who were live blogging the presentation, and doing research and inserting stock and just-taken photos. Fascinating to watch them at work as I took notes of the talk - and of them blogging it.

This brings up another subject: bandwidth. Since everyone at CES is tech savvy, they all had iPhones or smart phones or pads, tablets, PCs or notebooks. Many had multiples of these devices. Consequently, before each presentation there were announcements asking everyone in the audience, particularly the press, to turn off their wifi and other bandwidth-hogging devices so that the presenters wouldn't be thwarted with technical glitches during their presentations. These announcements came with cries from my seatmates and others of: "How can you invite us here to do our reporting jobs and then tell us to turn off the very devices that help us do that job?"

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg keynote
with guest Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner CEO

To me, the talk between Time Warner and Verizon CEOs Jeff Bewkes and Ivan Seidenberg described the essence of the show and of the changes we are likely to see in the near-term future. They talked about content and delivery. Time Warner has the content and talent and Verizon will soon have the fastest 4G delivery system. Delivery anytime, anyplace and to any device - only paying once for the content.

***

Las Vegas, January, 2011

I've been to three CES shows but this is the first time as a "press" person. I was having a coffee and met an AP reporter. I asked him if he had an engineering or technical background. Nope. Instead, he mostly covered disasters and was on his way back from one when they asked him to stop in Las Vegas and cover CES. When I asked if that was atypical of the AP reporting style, he said that this was the way things were these days - you go where it was the least expensive for you to go, and you learn about and research the subject as you are writing your stories.

It's true that The Robot Report tracks the business of robotics via it's website and delves deeply into the issues involved in the business side of the industry with it's blog Everything-Robotic. But does that make me a reporter? Loosely, the answer is yes. Is the Everything-Robotic blog a news source or a forum for my opinions. And are my reports and opinions comparable to those eminating from the NY Times, CNET, Spectrum or the AP? In today's changing media climate, the answers are yes, yes and yes. I got what I came for and am appreciative for the opportunity afforded me by having a press pass and I hope that I am able to convey the events, scenes and information I saw and gathered in easy-to-read stories for you.

What Can You Do With AVA (iRobot's new concept robot seen at CES 2011)?

2011-01-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

Las Vegas, January, 2011

iRobot had a booth at CES 2011 in Las Vegas to show their upgraded line of robotic vacuum cleaners and a few other consumer products. In addition to iRobot, there were other booths showing Korean and Chinese versions of robot floor-cleaning devices.

Ava, iRobot's telepresence
concept mobility device

But this little gem of a mobile robot - AVA was her name - was there at CES, in a little bull pen, and so was Colin Angle, who described and demo'd it. It was the hit of my trip to CES because my imagination went wild.

It's a concept robot built inexpensively from other products. An iPad is fastened on top - and since the new iPad 2's will have two cameras - one front and back - the iPad could be used for two-view applications, the telepresence visual agent. Affixed below the iPad is a Kinect-like device for navigation, gesture recognition and additional sensor input. This device could be used for a variety of apps like hands-free communication with the iPad, following the actions of a nurse, etc. Driving the whole thing is iRobot's core mobility device and nav system.

When I asked Colin about whether it was iRobot's version of a telepresence robot he said that it wasn't anything just yet - rather, it was a mobile device, cheaply made from user-friendly components, waiting for users to provide the apps for it to do their bidding. It's modular and customizable and wide open for applications. Then I asked him whether it was a home health device and he smiled and said that once it matured into something, their health robotics unit would be the first to make use of it.

PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff video-interviewd Colin Angle describing Ava:

The app store concept for robotic apps and add-on devices is, in my opinion, the right approach to maximize implementing mobile robots for various tasks. Willow Garage certainly supports the app store concept. Right now they're running a contest to find apps that combine an RGB-D sensor (a Kinect or Kinect-like device) with their ROS (Robot Operating System) to produce something new, interesting and fun. PS: The contest ends on January 23rd. Rod Brooks' is intending to launch a Heartland Robotics apps store for their new factory assistant robot.

Perhaps when the iPad2 is announced, iRobot will launch a similar contest to find apps and add-ons for their mysterious new robot named AVA. What kinds of apps and/or add-ons do you see for AVA?

Manufacturing With Robots: Prospects and Problems Ahead

2011-01-01T20:35:00.000-08:00

2011 is a pivotal year for industrial and service robots. In fact, we may see the marriage of industrial with service robots to be used as assistants in manufacturing. The recent launches in Europe of pi4-robotics' workerbot and Japan's Motoman's two-armed headless robot, and the anticipated 2011 launch in the U.S. of Heartland Robotics' factory assistant robot are examples of this trend.

Henrik Christensen (Director Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology) said in a recent ROBOTICA Forum:

In manufacturing only through use of automation can we reduce the need to out-source. Our workers are not going to be more effective in doing manual labor, but with the right tools they can be more effective and the motivation to outsource less pronounced. Companies are starting to realize that once you start an out-sourcing process it may result in all of the process going off-shore. That happened in textiles and apparel and the poster child in the IT industry is the IBM ThinkPad transformation to Lenovo laptops. Also the disk drive industry had a similar move to Singapore.

To be effective, robots have to be lower cost and higher dexterity. We are starting to see this - and the cost of integration is also coming down.

The recently released 2010 robotics industry reports from the International Federation of Robotics said:

Dramatic advances in robotics and automation technologies are even more critical with the next generation of high-value products that rely on embedded computers, advanced sensors and microelectronics requiring micro- and nano-scale assembly, for which labor-intensive manufacturing with [low-skilled] human workers is no longer a viable option.

Here are some quotes from the Heartland Robotics website that are more real than hyperbole:

Today's manufacturing robots are big and stiff, unsafe for people to be around, engineered to be precise and repeatable, not adaptable. Normal workers can't touch them.

Our robots will be intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They'll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive.

Similar wording can be found on the pi4-robotics website and Motoman's.

Today's industrial robots are truly expert systems

Lest we forget, industrial robots encapsulate years of translating the skills of craftsmen to the mechanical capabilities of robots. There's no other way that robots could have replaced their human counterparts were it not for the fact that the robot can do the same task equal to or better than the human.

Industrial robots in car factory

The know-how, where robots mimic human actions in the various aspects of the auto industry, represents decades of accumulated knowledge transfer by veteran craftsmen.

In welding, for example, the finish of welding varies, depending on the kind of metal used, its thickness and the power voltage. Craftsmen adjust the speed of welding by observing how sparks fly to get the best finish. From a story in Asahi:

About 10 years ago, Yasakawa (Motoman) started filming its craftsmen at work, using a high-speed camera to record their hand movements. The accumulated data was programmed into robots to enable them to perform tasks from several thousand options of welding that craftsmen had established over the years.

Because Yaskawa makes and uses robots at its main factory, it enables the company to pass along technical expertise from elders to their juniors.

"You can copy a robot, but not control technology that craftsmen created," said Junji Tsuda, president of Yaskawa. "(Exporting robots) is like shipping the craftsmen themselves."

"Chinese and South Korean makers are less likely to come up with such technology because they are more inclined to want results in the short term," said Akira Yoshino, the engineer-inventor of the lithium-ion battery.

Presently, robots in manufacturing are, except for the auto industry and welding apps, mostly involved in post processing and packaging rather than in the manufacturing process. [This latter point is not to be minimized - in fact, it is a booming area of robotics: picking, packing, packaging, processing, sorting and warehousing.]

But not general manufacturing!

The near-term future will see the gradual appearance of multi-purpose, flexible, easily trainable robots. We are likely to see the bridging between the expert systems of the past and these flexible systems of the future - in manufacturing in 2011.

I see three issues involved:

Robotics for Small and Medium-sized manufacturers and factories (SME's)
National strategies to solve important issues
Training and retraining people for the future

SME's are the life-blood of the middle class and the area of greatest jobs growth. SME's create new jobs, contribute to the community, and produce needed products.

Yaskawa Motoman
Two-armed Factory Robot

A few years ago, in Europe, the EU recognized the need to support SME businesses with improved robotics - robotics that were easily trainable, safe to work alongside, relatively inexpensive and flexible enough to handle all sorts of ad hoc tasks in any quantity. The EU invested in the development of SME robots because they felt that without their investment production efficiencies couldn't be maintained and more and more manufacturing would move offshore. The SME project ended early in 2009 and the consortium members quickly brought products to market that address the needs of SME's. These include two-armed robots, safety sensors and train-by-example programming. The EU also invested in the PiSa Project which had a similar goal. The pi4-robotics "workerbot" mentioned above is the result of that effort. Motoman's two-armed robot is an outgrowth of the SME project and is presently replacing older robots in the Mercedes factories.

America doesn't have a national robotics agenda (roadmap) just yet even though there is effort in that direction. Congress was presented with a roadmap in May, 2009. There has been some movement from the Obama Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy including some SBA funding and some targeted areas of robotic development funding opportunities from five different government agencies. But robotics are not yet on the national agenda - there's no U.S. Robotics Initiative as there is for other areas of development.

Nor is there a real training and retraining mechanism for keeping up with the changing technological landscape. Instead, we fear losing jobs rather than understanding that we will instead change the mix of workers (as is generally the case when robots enter the picture). Yes we have FIRST programs, and interesting robo-competitions all oriented to interest students in STEM education. But we are very lax in our science education overall and really don't have a national reeducation program for our workforce.

What America has is an entrepreneurial system of funding (which I described back in January ("Financing the Strawberry Project")) supplemented by irregular special purposes like national defense (DARPA), homeland security and space exploration. If an inventor/business has a good enough idea to get past the angel investors and on to the real VCs, he/she will get enough money to get it off the ground. It's part salesmanship, part product, and timing, rather than an outgrowth of a national agenda to help society.

It's great to wish Heartland Robotics well but it isn't right that they are America's only knight in shining armor (if it turns out that they really are). Also, if they are successful they will be contributing to the jobs issue by changing the mix of workers from low-skilled to highly skilled. Without a retraining program in place, there will likely be serious repercussions, a lot of bad press, and slowdowns.

Bill Gates, Samsung, the government of South Korea, Toyota, Ray Kurzweil and many others are predicting that there will be a robot in our homes, companies and cars in this decade. It truly is a political issue - one of technological complexity, national importance and economic strategy - to make sure that we don't derail ourselves with pettiness, greed, apathy and inaction.

The Robot Report's 2010 Top Robotic Consumer Products Gift List

2010-11-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Illustratrion from the cover of
Popular Electronics Magazine, December, 1958

USEFUL AND PLAYFUL ROBOT GIFT IDEAS FOR A MERRY CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY SEASON

With so many families struggling to make ends meet this holiday season, the most welcome Christmas gifts likely will be practical ones that provide a helpful service. That being the case, don't overlook the robots! They never tire of working for you and some can also be programmed to sing a medley of Christmas songs including “Jingle Bells” and “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”

There are robots that will vacuum your floors, keep your family car at a safe distance from the car ahead of it, fetch you a beer from your refrigerator, or stand you to a game of pool. There are even kits for build-it-yourself robots who will perform a variety of tasks depending on what you assign them to do.

So says Frank Tobe, of Santa Barbara, CA, editor and publisher of The Robot Report, a continuously updated Internet magazine you can read at www.TheRobotReport.com that brings readers the latest information about the constantly expanding world of robots from toys and tools to hospital operating rooms and battlefields.

For Mom:
iRobot Roomba and Neato Robotic Vacuum System

For example, you can program robot vacuum cleaners to do all your floors while you're out and come home to a fresh-looking house. There's Neato, priced at $399, and iRobot Roomba, for about $380 "that show off what a single-purpose robot can do," Tobe says. "They can navigate around the room without breaking anything and operate seamlessly on different types of floor surfaces."

For Dad:
Adaptive Cruise Control
Available as an option from most car companies

A robotic device that will make your family car safer is adaptive cruise control. Utilizing radar that is installed in your front grill, the device will automatically slow your car down if you are getting too close to the vehicle ahead of you. The version for a Ford is about $295 and the one for a Mercedes-Benz is $2,900 (which also includes parking assistance). "This is something every motorist who drives a car should have, particularly if you do long-distance driving," Tobe says.

For robotically interested:

LEGO Mindstorm

Robot Kit

A do-it-yourself robot kit is available from LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 that you can use to build as many as four robots that will do your bidding. LEGO provides 619 pieces and will teach you programming as you go along. It contains software sensors so that the robots can see, move (using motion detectors), and speak. "You can build it in the form of a humanoid or an alligator," Tobe says. "It's up to you and your imagination and kids as young as 10 should be able to construct with it. If you can dream it, you can build it." List price is $279.

For all ages:
Parrot's AR.Drone Quadricopter
Rated #1 Consumer Electronics Product of 2010

More on the fun side is the Parrot AR.Drone QuadriCopter, a remote-controlled flying-and-hovering machine that Tobe says "combines the best of many worlds, including autonomous flying, video gaming and augmented reality." It can be controlled by an iPhone, iPad or iTouch and features a number of sensors including frontal and vertical cameras and an altimeter so that the controller can set the flight height. This retails for $299.

For grandparents and their grandkids:
Pleo Dinosaur - previously Ugobe;
new version from Innvo Labs

Grandparents and their grandkids are showing a keen interest in Pleo, a scientifically accurate baby dinosaur "that looks, moves, sounds, and behaves like a living creature." Tobe says, "It is fully aware and cognitive and explores its environment and interacts with people. Pleo is equipped with sensors for sight, sound and touch. It feels joy, sorrow, anger and annoyance and expresses itself with realistic dinosaur sounds." Personality downloads include Holiday Pleo – where petting Pleo in a certain place makes him change his Christmas tune. A joy toy at $299.

For pre-teen boys:
WowWee's RoboRaptor with control unit

Speaking of dinosaurs, there's WowWee Roboraptor, a predatory robot "with instincts to match his wild technology," Tobe says. "His mood determines his behavior. He'll go into predatory mode, nervous and cautious mode, or friendly, playful mode, depending on how he wakes up. A laser tracking system allows you to draw his path and RoboRaptor will follow it without banging into objects like table legs.” For pre-teen boys. Price: $59.

For pre-teen girls:
Penbo and her baby Bebe

Specially designed for pre-teen girls is Bossa Nova’s Penbo, a Robotic Penguin and her baby that is affectionate to you and her baby. She responds to your touch and sound and speaks "Penguish," yes, 'Penguish." Press Penbo's ear and an egg magically appears from her pouch. Penbo calls for, and interacts with, her baby, plays hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo baby games and rocks her baby to sleep. Price: $82.

For little kids:
Zhu Zhu hamsters

For the little kids, ages 4 to 8, is Zhu Zhu Hamster, which has its own unique personality and whimsical sounds. "You can pet them, love them, and hear them chatter," Tobe says. "It's fun for children to provide them with accessories and watch them interact on their own timetable and agenda." Price: about $37 with accessories.

For millionaires and rich alumni:
Willow Garage's PR2
Personal Robot

Finally, for the millionaire who has everything but doesn't care to put another servant on the payroll (or the alumni wanting to make a useful contribution to his or her alma mater’s robotics lab), there's the class act of personal robot servants called PR2 from Silicon Valley’s Willow Garage (the "garage" in the name referring to the number of successful new products that got started in entrepreneur's garages). “This life-sized robot is able to navigate in human environments and has the dexterity to grasp and manipulate objects in those environments," Tobe says. "It can clean up with a cart, fetch a beer from the refrigerator, play a respectable game of pool and is programmable to meet your needs and ideas at any level." The PR2 robot comes with open-source free software and lists for $400,000.

Further information on the above gifts may be found on The Robot Report, which gathers industry news, tracks the business of robotics, and has developed proprietary (ROBO-STOX™) methods to compare robot stock performance to the NASDAQ Composite Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The publication also makes available a comprehensive world-wide database of public and private firms and research facilities involved with the robotics industry.

Media Information: Media interviews, contact Frank Tobe at The Robot Report, ftobe@therobotreport.com, or Sherwood Ross, media consultant to The Robot Report, at sherwoodross10@gmail.com or (305) 205-8281.

Do robots take away jobs or just change the mix of workers?

2010-10-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

All of us are thinking about jobs and the economy, and those of us that are techno-centric are also concerned about the discussion as to whether robots take away jobs -- or not. It's an argument that's been going on since the invention of robots. Hollywood has vilified robots while Asians think of them reverently. Nevertheless, the question is valid and disruptive. Disruptive in the sense that jobs are lost when a superior technology emerges - think workhorses when cars started to be mass-marketed. Our present digital era is a disruptive one.

Distributing the workload increases skill levels - think Microsoft Word versus stand-alone word processors, or travel agents when e-tickets and online airline websites surfaced.

Jeanne Dietsch, CEO of MobileRobots, said in her blog earlier this year:

Did people lose jobs to computers? Yes, a number of secretaries had to upgrade their skills, and executives who refused to learn to type had a tough time of it, just to cite two examples. But these jobs were replaced by tens of thousands of high-paying software engineering positions, plus computer installers, computer operators, data storage firms and more.

A very thoughtful and well researched paper about jobs and automation appeared in Good Magazine's "Automation Insurance: Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs:

MIT economist David Autor
MIT economist David Autor published a report that looked at the shifting employment landscape in America. He came to this scary conclusion: Our workforce is splitting in two. The number of high-skill, high-income jobs (think lawyers or research scientists or managers) is growing. So is the number of low-skill, low-income jobs (think food preparation or security guards). Those jobs in the middle? They’re disappearing. Autor calls it “the polarization of job opportunities.”

Princeton economist Paul Krugman is out there telling Congress to spend more money to create jobs. The former secretary of labor Robert Reich is arguing for tax breaks for the bottom brackets so people can buy stuff again. Here’s the thing, though: The erosion of the middle class is a phenomenon that’s bigger than the Great Recession. Middle-range jobs have been getting scarcer since the late 1970s, and wages for the ones that are still around have remained stagnant.

In his report, Autor says that a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is “ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree).” Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.”

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth—and you don’t see it addressed in news reports—is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

People say America doesn’t make anything anymore, but that’s not true. With the exception of a few short lapses, manufacturing output has been on the rise since the 1980s. What is true is that industrial robots have been carrying ever more of the manufacturing burden on their steely shoulders since they appeared in the 1950s. Today, a Japanese company called Fanuc, Ltd., has industrial robots making other industrial robots in a “lights out” factory. (That’s the somewhat unsettling term for a fully automated production facility where you don’t need lights because you don’t need humans.)

Research findings like this are just part of the current dialogue about whether robots are truly taking away jobs or just redistributing the workforce and increasing productivity.

Omitted from Autor's report, however, was that part of the dialogue which deals with investments in education and research and development. Because of intense focus (some might say greedy) on quarterly profits and production efficiencies to meet those quarterly quotas, we've had a decade where R & D has either been reduced or off-shored. Further, because of wars and other reasons, there's been less investment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education - budget cuts - although the Obama Administration has been showing signs of renewed interest in this area in the last few months.

John Dulchinos, CEO, Adept

Earlier this year John Dulchinos, the CEO of Adept, during an interview with GetRobo's Noriko Kageki, made a dramatic observation:

Did you know that there are a billion cell phones per year being made globally of which 200-300 million are sold in the U.S. but not a single one is built in the US? Ten years ago that was not the case.

If the industry can’t remain competitive, then there are no jobs. And robots are automating tasks no longer done by hand. But in almost all cases those people are redeployed into other applications in the plant and allow the plant to grow and get even more efficient.

Foxconn workers

Sad but true. Even iPhones (and iPads, Macs and iPods) are manufactured in China. As many as 400,000 of the workers at Foxconn produce Apple products. (Foxconn has been in the news because that's the place where there were so many suicides and suicide attempts.) Thus the question is whether companies can compete from nearby manufacturing facilities or must they, in order to produce a low-cost product, resort to off-shoring. Many think that robotics and government investments in STEM education and vocational retraining can help the economy rather than enlarge the disparity described by Autor.

British pottery manufacturer Wade Ceramics is one such proponent of stay-at-home automation, and says Wade can now make some of its products for the same costs as firms in China – thanks to a £3 million investment in robotic equipment. Managing Director Paul Farmer, in a recent article in The Sentinel, said:

We haven't lost permanent staff because we have been busy in other parts of the business... We have lost some agency workers, but we have kept the permanent workforce stable. We are growing and in fact we are starting to recruit again... At the moment we're looking for engineers and machine operators.

Wage levels in China are going up and I believe the minimum-order quantities there are huge. This [robotic] technology and our flexibility means we can really exploit that.

Mr Farmer believes automation is becoming more important as traditional skills become harder to find.

There isn't any young blood coming through and we are all having to fight each other for the skills out there.

Wade Ceramics is representative of a very real situation: a shifting, reduced or diminishing workforce due to a variety of causes. The effect is that Wade is having difficulty finding skilled labor to man its factories. The same situation is appearing in certain areas around the world, Japan in particular. And robotics is playing a role in remedying the situation. It seems to me that robotics and automation are inevitable and it's incumbent on governments to upwardly retrain and educate the workforce accordingly.

Autism, Robotics and Apple's iPad

2010-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

Regular use of iPad on left -- unintended use for autistic kids on right

Here's an unintended consequence of the iPad that is having wonderful results with disabled kids, particularly those with spectrum disorders and communication problems.

There was a poignant story in the SF Chronicle that appears to be the most informative thus far on the subject.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-08-11/news/ihelp-for-autism/

Even the WSJ had an online story that included a quote from Steve Jobs on the subject:

"We take no credit for this, and that's not our intention," Mr. Jobs said, adding that the emails he gets from parents resonate with him. "Our intention is to say something is going on here," and researchers should "take a look at this."

I think the groundswell of uses and apps is touching and important. Many of those apps are referenced in the SF Chronicle article. Perhaps it will speed up the robotic projects for the low end (hard cases) of the spectrum - projects which are wanting for funding to execute meaningful testing.

Here's a quote from a Los Angeles psychologist that works daily with autistic kids within the school system:

Lots of my kids are using iPads -- especially my kids with limited expressive language or who struggle with retrieval challenges. Because the iPad is not static -- it can be accessed from every angle -- it facilitates greater usage.

The ease of use and low cost of the iPad make it suitable for all these apps. Before the iPad, parents and school systems had to beg MediCare and other providers for $8,000 or so for a product and software that was similar but with less flexibility, speed, intuitive use and range of software apps as that provided by the iPad.

Some very poignant and informative videos are available on youTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulf11Kg8-lI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRSENIQaFc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3VNwDqKhCM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vomkNSluWW4

A few good resources describing these new iPad apps can be found here:

http://www.autismhangout.com/
http://www.gadgetsdna.com/10-revolutionary-ipad-apps-to-help-autistic-children/5522/
http://www.interbots.com/blog/autism-therapy/

Have these iPad apps provided the lift therapists and educators need to help them help their disabled kids or is there still a need for robots? A very strong "YES" say the psychologists, educators and therapists that I've discussed this with. The number of cases is so large and the range of disabilities so extensive that many different treatment methodologies are needed. Robots have the patience and discipline that difficult cases require. One notable robotic project that works in this arena is Kaspar.

Kaspar is a small likable robot developed at the University of Hertfordshire where Drs. Kerstin Dautenhahn and Ben Olsen have demonstrated this relatively inexpensive and very portable robot designed specifically to interact with low-spectrum level autistic children.

Dautenhahn and Olsen have had some successes with their robot and they showed me videos of children interacting with the robot and then sharing their excitement with their teacher or parent - a social response not typical of children with this disorder. They had many similar successful anecdotal stories and recently lent one of their Kaspar robots to another University for a more extensive study of 29 autistic children. The results will be available soon and their hope is that the results will confirm what they have observed: that there is long-lasting social improvement by utilizing the robot as part of the overall therapy with the child.

Dautenhahn and Olsen, when I visited last month, were frustrated that they were unable to raise enough money to run a larger study of their own to prove the benefits of Kaspar's type of robotic interaction. I was moved by their plight and have suggested the story to some of my reporter friends hoping that a favorable article would give them some attention and perhaps interest a donor or two to help them achieve their goals. Got bucks?

Bionic Prosthetics Finally Reaching The Market

2010-10-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

Exo-assisted soldier lifts and loads heavy munitions

Exoskeletons to meet the needs of the military have narrowed to two major vendors: Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Ratheon's new XOS2 robotic suit is lighter, faster and stronger than its predecessor and uses 50% less power. Nevertheless it is extremely bulky and cumbersome.

Legs-only version of HULC

Lockheed Martin's HULC, licensed from Berkeley Bionics, is a completely untethered, hydraulic-powered exoskeleton that enables users to carry loads of up to 200 pounds for extended periods of time and over all terrains. HULC is presently undergoing testing at the Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Florida.

Cyberdyne's HAL

Meanwhile, Japan's Cyberdyne non-military HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) looks better, weighs less, operates longer on battery power. It was recently chosen for an ABT-funded EU project in Denmark for a rehabilitation center at Odense University Hospital for clinical trials regarding worker augmentation, a use of interest to many.

Just last February, at an FDA Workshop in Washington, DC, I was demoralized to learn that wounded soldiers were still being fitted with old-fashioned hook appliances (CBS News) instead of the ones that I had been reading about in the science and tech journals.

Dean Kamen shows off "Luke"
prosthetic under development at DEKA Labs

Shortly thereafter, Dean Kamen plugged DEKA's not-yet-ready arm and hand prosthetic (named "Luke") on The Colbert Report. I asked an acquaintance from the VA about the situation and he commented that the DARPA/DEKA product was too heavy and not-yet ready for prime time.

When I asked him about TouchBionics, a British firm that had already done all the trials and had received the appropriate EU approvals for their bionic limbs, hands and fingers, he said that they had good products and that the VA would pay for them if they were asked to do so by the patient and his or her doctors. Was that happening, I asked? Were wounded Americans getting British products? No, was his answer... because nobody told them they could.

Today, one of the trickle-down products from all this government-sponsored activity has arrived and it is impressive: eLEGS from Berkeley Bionics, Lockheed Martin's partner with the military's HULC product. eLEGS provides a complete replacement of a natural human gait using the exoskeleton developed for the military. And the exoskeleton suit has been scaled down to reasonable proportions.

Check out this eLEGs video:

eLEGS was unveiled at a press conference yesterday in San Francisco by Berkeley Bionics’ CEO, Eythor Bender, who explained that the company’s mission is to provide people with unprecedented mobility options.

Many of the 6 million Americans who live with some form of paralysis today were highly active and at the top of their game when they sustained their injury. As they research their options for increased mobility, they discover that wheelchairs are pretty much it. This has been the only alternative – their only hope – for nearly 500 years,” he said. “We want to enhance their independence and freedom of movement,” he added, “and with eLEGS, they can stand up and walk for the first time since their injury.

eLEGS is not yet available to the general public. Clinical trials will commence early next year at select rehabilitation clinics in the United States. A limited release of eLEGS is scheduled during the second half of 2011 at several of the most respected rehabilitation facilities around the country. At that time, eligible patients will have the opportunity to enroll in a medically-supervised eLEGS gait training program, working with their physical therapist. Therapists will undergo training in order to become eLEGS-certified prior to assisting patients.

Many technological breakthroughs are creating a roadmap that is sure to offer disabled people new prosthetic devices to help them help themselves to a more normal existence in the very near future. Hands, arms, feet, legs, ankles, fingers... many are reaching the FDA in the form of clinical trials such as those described above for eLEGS. And there are advances that include wiring existing nerve endings in such a way as to give the wearer true sensation of feeling and touch.

The following projects are worthwhile and offer near-term possibilities for the disabled:

SmartHand, an EU-funded bio-adaptive hand prothesis
Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL), a DARPA funded project at Johns Hopkins University, is designed to respond to user's thoughts
PowerFoot One from iWalk, funded by MIT, the VA and the US Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center
REX Bionics' exoskeleton is a product similar to eLEGS in that it helps wheelchair users attain vertical mobility
Finally, an exoskeleton power assist suit (PAS) from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology is oriented to elder Japanese to help them lift and squat while farming their gardens and vegetable plots

All of the projects mentioned are focused on healthcare. There are many other robotic hand, arm and gripper projects of equal merit which aren't oriented to the healthcare marketplace but will be reviewed in a future article.

EmTech@MIT 2010: More than just 35 young innovators giving their "elevator pitch"

2010-09-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Afternoon sail on the Charles River; downtown Boston background.

Boston, the Charles River, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided a beautiful setting for the iPad-toting crowd of VCs, inventors, technology gurus, students, business execs, and curious individuals and investors searching for inroads to our technological future. This year’s Emerging Technologies Conference, which took place September 21-23 on the MIT Campus in Cambridge, focused on important innovations (identified by MIT's Technology Review magazine) in the key sectors of communications, energy, biotech, IT and materials.

Len Polizzoto

There was discussion about the innovation process including defining the difference between a business plan and model (eg: the iPod started as a music business model; not just technology) and a presentation by Len Polizzoto of Draper Labs that included his 10 guiding principles of innovation: (1) A patent does not an innovation make; (2) 90% of new products fail each year; (3) Innovation does not have to be based on new technology; (4) It takes a diverse team; (5) It requires the generation of real value; (6) Value is determined by the end user; (7) The competition is always better than you think; (8) Organizations become less innovative as they grow; (9) VCs don't take risks; and (10) Innovation takes discipline, commitment and dedication.

EmTech@MIT 2010: 35 Innovators Under 35

An awards ceremony honored the 35 outstanding men and women under the age of 35 chosen for 2010 by Technology Review who exemplify the spirit of innovation in business and technology. This year’s winners included Philip Low, Founder and CEO of NeuroVigil, for advances in patient self monitoring of neurological disorders, Wesley Chan, Investment Partner for Google Ventures for developing the Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and Google Voice, and David Kobia from Ushahidi, who received the Humanitarian of the Year Award for his work creating web programs for communities around the world faced with natural disasters or social upheaval.

Each of the 35 gave their "elevator pitch" about their product or service and, more importantly, were available for in-depth conversations during the receptions and networking sessions. Nevertheless, their presence was somewhat anti-climatic because the magazine had already come out fully detailing each innovator and innovation.

Communications and Information Technology:
Although the actual number of cellphone subscriptions worldwide is an estimate ranging upward from 3.3 billion (Informa), the bottom line is the same: it's a mammoth marketplace, larger than the combined worldwide total of PCs, autos and TVs!

Fewer and fewer people have land-lines. Cellphones are more convenient and are providing the necessities plus fun and games and, in some cases, personal identity, eg: in rural or storm damaged places where there are no home addressing systems (or no homes).

Taking advantage of the movement from simple to smart phones and pads was at the core of many of the Tech 35 Innovations. Some of the more altruistic pursuits include using cell and smart phones to place grocery orders for small stores in India, or to report incidents, requests for help and provide tracking in places faced with natural disasters or social unrest, or providing low-cost self-contained solar-powered satellite communicating VoIP base stations (Vanu) for extreme rural areas.

Matt Grob, Qualcom's head of Corporate R&D and other R&D presenters from Bell Labs and Alcatel/Lucent showed some of the anticipated capabilities including augmented reality projects like road sign translation (imagine how that would help you navigate in Japan, China and Egypt where few signs use English characters), product identification, and gaming, and also short-distance communication, so that appliances can communicate with base stations and become part of a smart grid or network.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse

Progress in providing faster networks is complex and includes the necessity by the provider companies to recoup their investment (a 3-year process at the least) before they expend the billions it takes for next generation speeds.

Sprint's 4G network release in the Boston area was displayed in many forms at the conference (outside, multiple booths, etc.) - including in a talk from Sprint CEO Dan Hesse where he said that, although Sprint's 4G data plans offered unlimited service, it is reserving the right to rescind that for very heavy users.

With faster networks, many healthcare apps become more realizable as therapeutic need mixes with technology to quickly move color medical images and files around the community, campus and world. Educators look forward to being able to similarly push content and interactive tutoring in ever faster ways to improve the online learning experience. And gamers and consumers, with their streaming and shopping needs, drive system use and create demand for ever more speedy networks.

Energy and Batteries:
Processing power versus battery life and cost; net-based processing versus local; games and high-bandwidth streaming entertainment versus a limited or differently-priced plan; the costs of scaling up to demand - these were some of the complexities discussed in the IT and communications sphere.

A very similar discussion was hashed about by senior technology scientists and planning advisors from Shell, Exxon and MIT regarding changing how we get and use power. In the energy/power sphere, intermittent power sources such as wind and solar add to the complex decision making process by their desirability versus their inability to store power thus requiring the grid to be smart enough to reduce other sources flexibly... a not-in-the-immediate-future situation.

Energy complexity, with no real solution (or even a national strategy and policy) in sight, is causing uncertainty, speculation and even fear, with a result that hesitation and indecision is slowing down incremental progress. By this inaction we end up waiting for a miracle solution to come from the labs. This will surely happen, but the questions are when and whether we can we afford to wait.

Consumers choose Kindles over iPads because of battery life. Payment plans, another element of the business model, also plays a role. Amazon eliminates the need to choose a data plan and is a consumer favorite as a result. Eliminating irrelevant or bothersome choices (eg: which data plan) is going to be important in forthcoming products and their business models.

Much of the energy discussion was removed from technology - except for a nifty display of MIT's urban car project and the EmTech 35 innovations involved in new battery materials and methodology - and bordering on the political - very confusing from the point of view of expectations about the conference.

Robotics, Biomedical and Materials:

Polymer-based SDM Hand

Aaron Dollar, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Yale, has developed a plastic hand able to grasp a wide variety of objects without damaging them, which replicates the flexibility and gentleness of a human hand. As a result he is exploring whether it can be used as a prosthetic.

New battery technology and materials was a hot topic - in fact, batteries were at the core of many topics - and included Hany Eitouni and his solid polymers SEEO company, acoustic printing of solar cells from SunPrint/Alion, cost-reducing methods for OLED displays, the previously mentioned neural monitoring device for sleep apnea, and a novel armband interface from Microsoft Research to detect gestures.

Conspicuously missing from the conference were representatives from major hubs of emerging technologies, eg: Apple, Amazon and Google.

Optimism: A conversation with Heartland Robotics' Rodney Brooks

2010-09-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

He is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, a stealthy start-up of robotic solutions for small and medium-sized factories. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp. He was the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). A leader in the industry and a man I've long wanted to meet.

Yesterday morning Rodney Brooks and I had a conversation that covered many of the current issues in robotics. Throughout the conversation, he remained positive and upbeat, maintaining a viewpoint that the next few years will be the tipping point for this emerging industry, particularly here in America. Of course, that's part of his current job as entrepreneur/owner of Heartland Robotics. As he said, "Entrepreneurs need to be optimistic." Nevertheless, it was a refreshing and informative conversation which I very much appreciated.

Manufacturing:
On the subject of manufacturing, Brooks cited the breadth of the American marketplace: that there are 300,000 small to medium-sized (less than 500 employees) non-auto-industry factories in America... almost none of which use robots, thus a very large marketplace. He also said that the US is still the biggest manufacturing country in the world even though the trend is to move factories to where labor is plentiful and cheap (a moving offshore target). Also, that the US has the highest productivity rates -- mostly without robotic assistance. Thus, to stay competitive and beat the trend to offshore sites those productivity rates will need to increase. How better to do that than with robots?

We talked about the European SME Robotics project - an 8-year public-private effort to provide robotic solutions to keep EU manufacturing from going offshore. Certainly the project yielded needed constructs for safety, ease of use and trainability but no tangible disruptive product(s). Naturally Brooks hopes that his new company will be providing that disruptive product in the immediate future.

Agribusiness:
We talked about the efforts of many parties all over the world in the field of agriculture. Companies, universities, P-PIP's and consortium's -- all searching to automate farming. In the US, a good percentage of farmers are beginning to do what they call "precision farming," ie, using satellite, soil samples, production data, GPS, and other digitized data, to precisely know where and when to place seeds, fertilizers and chemicals to maximize crop production. Wikipedia's definition of the process is:

Predicated on the concept of in-field variability, precision agriculture requires the use of new technologies, such as global positioning, sensors, satellites or aerial images, and information management tools (eg: GIS) to assess and understand in-field variations. Collected information may be used to more precisely evaluate optimum sowing density, estimate fertilizers and other inputs needs, and to more accurately predict crop yields. It seeks to avoid applying inflexible practices to a crop, regardless of local soil/climate conditions, and may help to better assess local situations of disease and low yields.

John Deere and Caterpillar already enable precision farming and also driverless operation of their tractors. John Deere offers a whole range of GreenStar™precision products including an auto-steering setup.

Looking into the future, with an eye toward increasing productivity while reducing cost, one can imagine a present-day multi-purpose farm tractor -- big engine, bigger tires, an air conditioned, cushioned operator cabin, lots of gadgets and controls in the cabin, radically changing. What would it look like if it were driverless? The operator cabin is expensive and has a lot of devices that would no longer be necessary if the tractor were unmanned. [Why keep it?] What would an unmanned farm vehicle (UFV) look like? How would it be redesigned? And how much less would it cost?

Slowly but surely John Deere and Caterpillar will be providing farmers with more extensive precision farming products and solutions including driverless tractors. Autonomous vehicles for precision farming by any other name is robotics.

Research and Funding:
Since the beginning of the Obama Administration, there's been nary a word about robotics. All of a sudden things are beginning to happen. The Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology stated that “robotics is at a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility” and is backing their belief with a fund to spur small business research. The recent Joint Agency SBIR funding announcement for robotics technology development and deployment is just one of many funding sources giving momentum to America's robotics industry. Venture firms are returning and providing money. So are DARPA, NASA, ARPA-E and the DoD. A robotic solution to an existing, definable problem which reduces cost and hazards and increases productivity is very likely to get funded from multiple sources.

Also, Brooks sees movement toward a National Robotics Initiative working its way through Congress and getting into the budget and thereby providing additional funding for robotics research and development.

Looking at all this activity, all in the US, with solid US manufacturers like John Deere and Caterpillar, knowing more about his own companies and other ventures than he was willing to divulge to me, all this provides Brooks with a solid foundation for his optimism for continued robotics growth in America. Definitely an uplifting conversation.