I agree its a pretty weak article but its a blog, not a paper, so I would not expect it to rise to the level of rigor for something intended for one of the IEEE journals.
That being said, if you've ever heard of 'charity burnout' there is something similar called 'robotics burnout.' You discover it, you engage in excitement, but nothing happens, you can only be excited (or charitable it seems) so long before you need to take a break. But lets start at the beginning shall we?
So in 1985 the Homebrew Computer Club was waning, it had been the center of attention between 75 and 85 but with people like IBM in the game and Apple going much more 'corporate' it was more of a users group than the folks who were changing the world.
One of the special interest groups from that meeting was the Robotics SIG. A guy named Dick Prather who was active in that SIG decided that even if the computer group was dying, robotics was just getting started and so he did the SIG equivalent of a setsid(2) call and made the Homebrew Robotics Club an independent organization. It has met continuously since then (yes 26 years).
One of the things about 'robots' that most people don't get, is that fundamentally a robot is any machine that has some level of program-ability that does one or more tasks while adapting to its environment. Your dishwasher is a good robot, it washes the dishes for you, or the pots and pans, or the stem ware, it uses a variety of sensors to decide if the dishes are clean yet and it dries them afterwards. If you didn't have it you would be getting a sore back moving dishes from the counter-top to the sink, to the drying rack.
Folks have argued that to be a robot it would have to do it like humans do, but that is an angels-on-pins sort of argument. Generally robots are the expression of automation, and they have (as a market) been growing where ever it makes economic sense. As processors get cheaper and more powerful more and more things make economic sense.
Of course for things that are really expensive or really dangerous its really easy to justify the cost. So for things like disarming bombs, or hunting people down in a country you are not technically at war with and killing them are both easily justified costs if you can automate them.
ISRobotics, the guys who make the Roomba, make most of their money selling robots for things like mine clearing and recon, and yes shooting people. Founded in 1990 they were making $1M/yr in 1996 with 16 employees[1], that wasn't particularly sustainable but in 2001, with 9/11 they demonstrated the value of their packbots. And now at $401M/yr they are doing quite well except that over 60% of their revenue is "G&I" which is code for "Government and Industrial".
Now that isn't all bad, its just that instead of comparing the robotics revolution to the 'PC' revolution you have to compare it to the 'computer' revolution, which is to say that a whole lot of investment and development is focused on corporate and government use until the the industry can supply enough automation to slake their thirst and to give some time to 'regular' folks.
So in the 80's we had companies like Androbot and Heathkit approaching mobile robotics as gimmicks/educational, in the 90's we had a lot of toys and the start of robot (really armored R/C vehicles with minimal automation) combat. And now in the second decade of the 21st century we're seeing prototype self driving cars, a number of walking designs, and energy systems that can sustain things for more than a couple of minutes.
Bottom line, things are going along, and getting better, and in many ways getting better faster now than they have in the past, but there is so much eco-system that has to develop around building mobile robotics that can do useful work that the rate of change feels much more evolutionary than revolutionary.
When we look at robotics startups today, places like Willow Garage and Anybot you can get a good feel for how cool things could be and how far we are from seeing the kind of uptake like we did with personal computers.
Generally robots are the expression of automation, and they have (as a market) been growing where ever it makes economic sense. As processors get cheaper and more powerful more and more things make economic sense.
Yeah that's kind of it in a nutshell. The PC revolution was easy to see because computer hardware has been performing the same fundamental task for decades: computation. Memory, storage, processing, and I/O; that's it. All computers are basically the same in that sense. But that one fundamental task is so useful that virtually everyone benefits.
Because of this, an entire industry has focused on improving those 4 basic components of computing, making them ever cheaper and more capable. And as the capability increases, the utility increases as well.
It's not the same with robots. Robots are more likely to evolve gradually over time. There won't ever be one single thing you can point to and claim "that was the robot revolution" and it's going to be a lot slower because there won't be a Moore's Law for robotics.
This is a weak article. First, it ignores the existence of commodity robots. Something like 4 million Roombas have been sold. They are easy to use commodity robots that sell in volume from Best Buy.
Second, many people, going back to the early 20th century, have imagined buying cheap general purpose robots, just as they have imagined buying jet packs and holidaying on space stations. Just because I imagine it doesn't make it feasible. The reason there aren't many autonomous-robot startups is that no one knows how to do the AI. It may make sense to you that you ought to be able to put together robots like you put together a spreadsheet, but that's not how it turned out to be. The article admits this, describing day to day tasks as "incredibly complex". Yet then asks us to imagine the cheap, capable robot.
Fourth, Microsoft has Robotics Studio, a package that competes with ROS in many respects. It is exactly a "robot operating system" on top of Windows. Researchers pretty much ignore Robot Studio, but why does this journalist do so when he says that "what we need Microsoft [...] to do is build an operating system....". It has been trying for years. Thanks for the advice, though.
A low-quality piece for Spectrum, picked up from a blog.
I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that they have been the next revolution since Karel Čapek gave us the term in 1920. If you haven't read R.U.R. you should. It feels like it belongs in last weeks Wired.
After reading R.U.R., it's amazing how many themes of the subsequent 90 years' worth of dystopic literature it predicts! Robot rebellion, androids, human fertility crisis - it's all there, and more.
It's also kind of ironic that the same piece of literature that introduced the concept of the robot also introduced the perennial concept of the coming robot rebellion.
If you were thinking multipurpose C3P0 style robots, then the revolution has been 5 years in the future for the last 30 years.
However single-purpose robots have become part of the fabric of most industries. Heck, most people don't even think of them as robots. So the revolution happened, it is now the new normal.
I had a similar thought the other day while using an automated paper towel dispenser. "Isn't this primitive robot?" Yet, I'd never really thought to apply the term "robot." It'll be interesting to watch the evolution from dumb/single-purpose robots to smarter/multi-purpose ones.
It's too bad there apparently aren't any robots ready to put into service in Fukushima. They might have robotic arms or cranes for doing things like shuffling fuel rods, but what can help with doing improvised welding or wiring in a hostile environment?
In recent months NHK reported on experiments in using simple robots that could help the elderly in Japan with a few chores, but they were a flop mainly because the people involved rejected them instead insisting on human companionship. There's a shortage of working-age people, and a growing percentage of retirement age people there. Many of the younger people stay in the larger cities making the shift even more dramatic in some areas. In the 60's many predicted flat-panel on the wall television sets to be in use by the 80's. It looks like general purpose robots will take longer than many would have hoped too.
Perhaps something remotely controlled by a human with VR gloves etc is viable for the emergency repairs? Things would have to be well shielded to avoid having stray neutrons altering data bits.
Believe it or not... It is fairly trivial to consume _all_ computational resources on the robot. A few examples of concurrently running tasks: AMCL SLAM (mapping); assembling incoming laser scans and transforming them to various frames; multiple occupancy grids (obstacle detection / planning) at various resolutions; 3D point-cloud perception for object recognition, person tracking, or 3D mapping; motion-planning controllers for mobility (base) or manipulation (arms) running at 100+ Hz; computer vision algorithms; the list goes on...
It is possible to offload some of these tasks (especially high-level planning or recognition tasks) to people via MechTurk or the cloud (see "Cloud Robotics"). However, there will always be some computation that needs to occur with real-time constraints -- which likely means on-robot.
The _big deal_ in the last 2 years is ROS. ROS has changed everything, and is causing robotics to accelerate! Now, if you need one of those previously mentioned tools... they're open source, well documented, and ready to use.
Very astute. I think you hit it dead on. The robot revolution will be about outsourcing menial tasks to cheaper humans, not super-duper AI. It's really more of the network revolution continued into servos, not a "robot revolution".
Extracting information and optimizing actions based on it via purchasing/timing decisions. Requires much less capital commitment and potentially much higher ROI.
FTA: "Buzzing you in when you get locked out, signing for a package, taking that frozen chicken out of the freezer while you’re at work, feeding your pet, and of course the veritable classic of robo-problems: getting you a beer." - imho these are terrible examples of what a robot could do... there are much simpler solutions for most of these problems than buying this: http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
Looking for general purpose robots misses the evolution in home robotics already in progress. I've used a iRobot Roomba for vacuuming our home for about two years now, it works great. I expect future versions will be able to do more tasks.
Consider the progression of the iPod as a music player to a general purpose touch computer (running iOS apps of all kinds) that is is today -- this is perhaps a good picture of how home robotics may progress from single purpose to multi-purpose household machines.
It's the term robot. For most people that means human like machines. Making human like machines is a terrible waste of energy compared to just making the form of a machine match it's tasks.
If you instead say machine automation rather than robot, well then you see that we probably are in that revolution.
I've been working on a theory on this one.
In the most abstract sense, computers are an extension of the human self. Cave Paintings, Papyrus scrolls, Guitars, Printing Presses, Pens, Televisions, Computers are all an evolution of this. You can think of a mobile phone as a inanimate (non-sentient) robot that lacks the ability to self-ambulate. There is a distinction between sentience which has not yet been achieved, and partial autonomy. There simply is not a mass market use case that makes small scale robots like the finch popular enough. Instead, I believe that mobile devices will continue adding new and interesting features. NFC will be the big thing next. After that, some new pathways will be: printing from mobiles, and possibly some of them will have movable parts that developers can program.
Eventually, the mass market appeal of mobile devices will combine with the usefulness of a physical manifestion of our ideas into reality. You need to make a cheap robot USEFUL.
Ultimately, it is the person that controls the robot that will get the most use out of it. Just like a master craftsperson can use his or her tools far more effectively than any random person.
So...in one idea, the reason robots are not really here is that there is no mass market appeal to justify the hundreds or thousands of dollars that they cost.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. All the parts are laying around, and I just need to start putting them together..literally, I have steppers and servos, and some DSP test boards. I am getting de ja vu all over again. When I was finishing up school, i commented that if I had a little more sense i would just quit, and make web pages. Here it is 15 years later, and about time to close up the pottery shop. Zafka Robotics does have a nice ring to it.
iRobot is amazingly successful not just in home robots but also in the military and public sectors. I love my Roomba and I'll be purchasing the Scooba 230 too.
There are very real technical limitations that make the kinds of robots available limited. Tele-operation is ok for the military, but interfaces aren't good enough yet to, say, enable a human size robot to open a door quickly. Automated driving is up and coming, but still a few years away from being a real product.
This is a combination of perception and manipulation problems. There is only so much that can be done by a robot moving from point a to point b, and we're seeing products that leverage that. Roomba, toys, packbot, grand challenge bots - none of them really see, touch, and grab things. This isn't a matter of some discoveries in a university that are waiting to be productized. No one has found the right answer.
I left a job in robotics to work on more interesting products, but I hope to return when the tech is real.
I almost got a Roomba but I went with a Dyson instead because all reviews said you still need to vacuum. I'll probably get the next generation, which should be out in a year or so.
Moore's Law is a bit flat at the beginning. For example, only 1% of the human DNA was sequenced at the first half of the project and the other 99% during the second half, if I remember the story correctly. We need a few more 18 month periods before robots start to become more useful in a non-controlled environment. My money is on 2015-2018.
It's all about price points. The crux of the problem is glanced in the last paragraph of the article "Imagine a robot that you could buy at Best Buy for somewhere between $2k and $4k." Right now, that just isn't feasible. For autonomous mobility you need components that qualify the following criteria: fast, quiet, safe, and precise. Unfortunately, such components just aren't affordable yet.
The revolution frenzy won't hit until your upper middle class income family can afford it.
It seems to me the problem is that there is so much variation in the underlying robotics hardware that it will be difficult to come up with a 'one-size-fits-all' OS.
the hardware, as usually, is abstractable into drivers.
Take for example hand movement - you may have the model of the robot's hand including actuators' input/output abstractions, length/weight of the arms, etc... It is common for all the robots with arms and very mathematically-mechanically complicated task to calculate the dynamic of the hand from current position, at current speed to another position with another speed, including recoil on the rest of the body, ... Mathematically it is a complicated smooth manifold in the high dimension space and various analyses and optimizations on such objects have been a very fruitful source of many Ph.D.s and articles :) Though on practice any "good" suboptimal solution would do. The 3D orientation and environment sensing is also abstractable - here again the calculation and effective algorithms (which are really hardware independent - for example stereo analysis is dependent basically on the resolution and the speed of the input sensors and teh CPU power and effective algorithm - sounds familiar?) is the heavy part. The [speech] command processing - has been also abstracted into input devices and processing core algorithms.
<fanciful-speculation>
That's why I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple, with its superior hardware/software integration, on the forefront of the consumer robotics revolution.
</fanciful-speculation>
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
That being said, if you've ever heard of 'charity burnout' there is something similar called 'robotics burnout.' You discover it, you engage in excitement, but nothing happens, you can only be excited (or charitable it seems) so long before you need to take a break. But lets start at the beginning shall we?
So in 1985 the Homebrew Computer Club was waning, it had been the center of attention between 75 and 85 but with people like IBM in the game and Apple going much more 'corporate' it was more of a users group than the folks who were changing the world.
One of the special interest groups from that meeting was the Robotics SIG. A guy named Dick Prather who was active in that SIG decided that even if the computer group was dying, robotics was just getting started and so he did the SIG equivalent of a setsid(2) call and made the Homebrew Robotics Club an independent organization. It has met continuously since then (yes 26 years).
One of the things about 'robots' that most people don't get, is that fundamentally a robot is any machine that has some level of program-ability that does one or more tasks while adapting to its environment. Your dishwasher is a good robot, it washes the dishes for you, or the pots and pans, or the stem ware, it uses a variety of sensors to decide if the dishes are clean yet and it dries them afterwards. If you didn't have it you would be getting a sore back moving dishes from the counter-top to the sink, to the drying rack.
Folks have argued that to be a robot it would have to do it like humans do, but that is an angels-on-pins sort of argument. Generally robots are the expression of automation, and they have (as a market) been growing where ever it makes economic sense. As processors get cheaper and more powerful more and more things make economic sense.
Of course for things that are really expensive or really dangerous its really easy to justify the cost. So for things like disarming bombs, or hunting people down in a country you are not technically at war with and killing them are both easily justified costs if you can automate them.
ISRobotics, the guys who make the Roomba, make most of their money selling robots for things like mine clearing and recon, and yes shooting people. Founded in 1990 they were making $1M/yr in 1996 with 16 employees[1], that wasn't particularly sustainable but in 2001, with 9/11 they demonstrated the value of their packbots. And now at $401M/yr they are doing quite well except that over 60% of their revenue is "G&I" which is code for "Government and Industrial".
Now that isn't all bad, its just that instead of comparing the robotics revolution to the 'PC' revolution you have to compare it to the 'computer' revolution, which is to say that a whole lot of investment and development is focused on corporate and government use until the the industry can supply enough automation to slake their thirst and to give some time to 'regular' folks.
So in the 80's we had companies like Androbot and Heathkit approaching mobile robotics as gimmicks/educational, in the 90's we had a lot of toys and the start of robot (really armored R/C vehicles with minimal automation) combat. And now in the second decade of the 21st century we're seeing prototype self driving cars, a number of walking designs, and energy systems that can sustain things for more than a couple of minutes.
Bottom line, things are going along, and getting better, and in many ways getting better faster now than they have in the past, but there is so much eco-system that has to develop around building mobile robotics that can do useful work that the rate of change feels much more evolutionary than revolutionary.
When we look at robotics startups today, places like Willow Garage and Anybot you can get a good feel for how cool things could be and how far we are from seeing the kind of uptake like we did with personal computers.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/...
[2] http://investor.irobot.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=193096&p=irol...
[+] [-] Goladus|15 years ago|reply
Yeah that's kind of it in a nutshell. The PC revolution was easy to see because computer hardware has been performing the same fundamental task for decades: computation. Memory, storage, processing, and I/O; that's it. All computers are basically the same in that sense. But that one fundamental task is so useful that virtually everyone benefits.
Because of this, an entire industry has focused on improving those 4 basic components of computing, making them ever cheaper and more capable. And as the capability increases, the utility increases as well.
It's not the same with robots. Robots are more likely to evolve gradually over time. There won't ever be one single thing you can point to and claim "that was the robot revolution" and it's going to be a lot slower because there won't be a Moore's Law for robotics.
[+] [-] MaysonL|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotresearcher|15 years ago|reply
Second, many people, going back to the early 20th century, have imagined buying cheap general purpose robots, just as they have imagined buying jet packs and holidaying on space stations. Just because I imagine it doesn't make it feasible. The reason there aren't many autonomous-robot startups is that no one knows how to do the AI. It may make sense to you that you ought to be able to put together robots like you put together a spreadsheet, but that's not how it turned out to be. The article admits this, describing day to day tasks as "incredibly complex". Yet then asks us to imagine the cheap, capable robot.
Third, the "mysterious" capital behind Willow Garage is Scott Hassan, an early and thus very rich Googler. It says so on the WG web page [http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/about-us/history].
Fourth, Microsoft has Robotics Studio, a package that competes with ROS in many respects. It is exactly a "robot operating system" on top of Windows. Researchers pretty much ignore Robot Studio, but why does this journalist do so when he says that "what we need Microsoft [...] to do is build an operating system....". It has been trying for years. Thanks for the advice, though.
A low-quality piece for Spectrum, picked up from a blog.
[+] [-] noonespecial|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Čapek
[+] [-] zeteo|15 years ago|reply
It's also kind of ironic that the same piece of literature that introduced the concept of the robot also introduced the perennial concept of the coming robot rebellion.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] huxley|15 years ago|reply
However single-purpose robots have become part of the fabric of most industries. Heck, most people don't even think of them as robots. So the revolution happened, it is now the new normal.
[+] [-] msluyter|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flatulent1|15 years ago|reply
In recent months NHK reported on experiments in using simple robots that could help the elderly in Japan with a few chores, but they were a flop mainly because the people involved rejected them instead insisting on human companionship. There's a shortage of working-age people, and a growing percentage of retirement age people there. Many of the younger people stay in the larger cities making the shift even more dramatic in some areas. In the 60's many predicted flat-panel on the wall television sets to be in use by the 80's. It looks like general purpose robots will take longer than many would have hoped too.
Perhaps something remotely controlled by a human with VR gloves etc is viable for the emergency repairs? Things would have to be well shielded to avoid having stray neutrons altering data bits.
[+] [-] johngalt|15 years ago|reply
Amazon Robot Brain anyone? $0.25 per robot hour.
Or cheat the system with Mechturk?
[+] [-] beambot|15 years ago|reply
Believe it or not... It is fairly trivial to consume _all_ computational resources on the robot. A few examples of concurrently running tasks: AMCL SLAM (mapping); assembling incoming laser scans and transforming them to various frames; multiple occupancy grids (obstacle detection / planning) at various resolutions; 3D point-cloud perception for object recognition, person tracking, or 3D mapping; motion-planning controllers for mobility (base) or manipulation (arms) running at 100+ Hz; computer vision algorithms; the list goes on...
It is possible to offload some of these tasks (especially high-level planning or recognition tasks) to people via MechTurk or the cloud (see "Cloud Robotics"). However, there will always be some computation that needs to occur with real-time constraints -- which likely means on-robot.
The _big deal_ in the last 2 years is ROS. ROS has changed everything, and is causing robotics to accelerate! Now, if you need one of those previously mentioned tools... they're open source, well documented, and ready to use.
[+] [-] tkahnoski|15 years ago|reply
The tricky bit would be designing an interface for turkers to manipulate the robot.
The other complicated bit is making sure the turkers can't cause serious harm. (We don't want turkers controlling UAVs...)
[+] [-] noonespecial|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secretasiandan|15 years ago|reply
Extracting information and optimizing actions based on it via purchasing/timing decisions. Requires much less capital commitment and potentially much higher ROI.
[+] [-] andrewtbham|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spitfire|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danboarder|15 years ago|reply
Consider the progression of the iPod as a music player to a general purpose touch computer (running iOS apps of all kinds) that is is today -- this is perhaps a good picture of how home robotics may progress from single purpose to multi-purpose household machines.
[+] [-] b_emery|15 years ago|reply
http://www.bilibot.com/about
I guess this still goes into the 'Homebrew Computer Club' category, but now all we need is a Wozniak-Jobs-like pair to take it to the next level.
[+] [-] endergen|15 years ago|reply
If you instead say machine automation rather than robot, well then you see that we probably are in that revolution.
[+] [-] hunterp|15 years ago|reply
Eventually, the mass market appeal of mobile devices will combine with the usefulness of a physical manifestion of our ideas into reality. You need to make a cheap robot USEFUL.
Ultimately, it is the person that controls the robot that will get the most use out of it. Just like a master craftsperson can use his or her tools far more effectively than any random person.
So...in one idea, the reason robots are not really here is that there is no mass market appeal to justify the hundreds or thousands of dollars that they cost.
[+] [-] zafka|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cellshade|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziadbc|15 years ago|reply
The tech world got into media, and since then media related technologies get a sizable chunk of the attention.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ivankirigin|15 years ago|reply
This is a combination of perception and manipulation problems. There is only so much that can be done by a robot moving from point a to point b, and we're seeing products that leverage that. Roomba, toys, packbot, grand challenge bots - none of them really see, touch, and grab things. This isn't a matter of some discoveries in a university that are waiting to be productized. No one has found the right answer.
I left a job in robotics to work on more interesting products, but I hope to return when the tech is real.
[+] [-] ccarpenterg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tezmc|15 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/
[+] [-] ecuzzillo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|15 years ago|reply
Moore's Law is a bit flat at the beginning. For example, only 1% of the human DNA was sequenced at the first half of the project and the other 99% during the second half, if I remember the story correctly. We need a few more 18 month periods before robots start to become more useful in a non-controlled environment. My money is on 2015-2018.
[+] [-] giberson|15 years ago|reply
The revolution frenzy won't hit until your upper middle class income family can afford it.
[+] [-] anonymousDan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VladRussian|15 years ago|reply
Take for example hand movement - you may have the model of the robot's hand including actuators' input/output abstractions, length/weight of the arms, etc... It is common for all the robots with arms and very mathematically-mechanically complicated task to calculate the dynamic of the hand from current position, at current speed to another position with another speed, including recoil on the rest of the body, ... Mathematically it is a complicated smooth manifold in the high dimension space and various analyses and optimizations on such objects have been a very fruitful source of many Ph.D.s and articles :) Though on practice any "good" suboptimal solution would do. The 3D orientation and environment sensing is also abstractable - here again the calculation and effective algorithms (which are really hardware independent - for example stereo analysis is dependent basically on the resolution and the speed of the input sensors and teh CPU power and effective algorithm - sounds familiar?) is the heavy part. The [speech] command processing - has been also abstracted into input devices and processing core algorithms.
[+] [-] msluyter|15 years ago|reply