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If you search the web looking for information on robotics you'll probably stumble across the top academic research labs. These include the CMU Robotics Institute which is one of the largest and includes projects that range from developing a vision-guided robot helicopter "which can autonomously carry out functions applicable to search and rescue, surveillance, law enforcement, inspection, mapping, and aerial cinematography, in any weather conditions and using only on-board intelligence and computing power" to computer assisted surgery in which robots actually plan to assist in surgical procedures such as hip replacement. Another CMU project is concerned with "Personal Robotic Assistants for the Elderly" and one the CMU robots, Minerva, daily moves through crowds at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Some of you might be interested in the Social Robots project which has the goal of overcoming the human-robot social barrier. "Towards this end, we are in the process of developing a robot which bears a personality, and which can behave according to social conventions. The idea is that communication and interaction with robots should be easy and enjoyable, both for unfamiliar users and trained professionals. We want robots to behave more like people, so that people do not have to behave like robots when they interact with them." This is closely related to the more widely publicized Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT who brought us the Cog, Coco and Kismet robots.
The Stanford Robotics Laboratory has a good robotics program but there are also excellent programs at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech. In today's lecture I wanted to spend some time talking about robots in the field doing real work. Some of the fielded robots come from places like CMU and Georgia Tech but industrial robotics is thriving and not just in the factory - mobile robots are moving out of the factory and into (and under) the streets, hospitals, homes and to other planets.
Robotics World is a good source for news about late breaking robots. However, a lot of the news is about the most lucrative (and to some of you, least exciting) areas of robots, including self-guided vehicles for just in time manufacturing - robots bring raw material to the factory from inventory and move finished products to shipping on an as needed basis (see a related article in "Modern Materials Handling" magazine). But there are also articles on recent progress in legged motion and software systems designing robots and control systems.
Manufacturers of mobile robots such as ActivMedia Robotics and Real World Interface are still hopeful that startups will use their platforms to design and market robots for (this is the list taken from ActivRobots) Delivery and Collection, Tracking and Following, Inspection and Surveillance, Tour Guides, Waiters and Performers, but my guess is that most of their revenue comes from researches and educators buying robots for research and education. There are exceptions and we saw some hope when Henry Sharpe and Kip Bradford from Design Lab Incorporated visited and talked about the opportunities in the toy industry. Indeed, iRobot, the parent company of RWI, features its most recent collaboration with Hasbro, My Real Baby, on its website. The robot is touted as being "one of the most advanced robots to make it to the consumer market." In addition to having sophisticated sensors and "an extraordinarily expressive face that models human facial muscles with a revolutionary, flexible skin" it has a "sophisticated model of over fifteen human-like emotions and levels of emotional intensity." Some of you might be interested to know that "My Real Baby" uses the "Behavior Language Operating System" developed by Rod Brooks and "honed by iRobot engineers."
As far as AI is concerned toys like "My Real Baby" and the Sony Aibo may represent the state of artificer. However, robots appear in the news on a regular basis. Just last week there was an article in the New York Times about a robotic arm for the space station. It is similar to the shuttle arm (both were developed in Canada) but with a larger payload and a very adaptable mechanism for attaching itself to the space station: either end of the arm can be anchored to the station at selected anchor points and the arm can move about the station like an inchworm by connecting from one anchor point to the next. Another space application is the Autonomous Extra-vehicular Robotic Camera (AERCam) a flying soccer-ball sized spacecraft with a camera allowing remote inspection of the future space station and the Space Shuttle.
The novel anchoring system for the Canadian arm is related to work on self-configuring robots some of which is going on in Daniela Rus' lab at Dartmouth and at Mark Yim's lab at Xerox PARC. Self-configuring robots may seem like pretty far-out science fiction (remember the "transformer" toys that were so popular a few years back) but the new space station arm is real and its abilities to reconfigure itself seem perfectly suited to the space station application.
Another area in which things are moving market wise is the area of telerobotics especially in the entertainment business. How do you think they get those amazing, any angle shots for big sporting events like the Superbowl? The answer is robotic cameras and clever software for combining multiple views and extrapolating between views. The robots used to lay fiber optic cables in active sewer lines are really teleoperated robots with some very limited local intelligence and control but largely guided by humans.
Robotic assistants of various sorts are also springing up. A fully autonomous robotic road follower is still some years off - though you might find it interesting to check out recent work on the ALVINN project at CMU - some of the more recent emphasis is on vision guided lane transitions. However there are interesting devices combining cameras, robots and sophisticated software that track eye movements of drivers and warn them when they [their eyes] stray from the road for too long.
If you don't fancy working for the toy industry, the military (which has an obvious interest in robotic tanks and aircraft), or factory automation companies, the most obvious consumer and public sector robotics will involve such applications as cleaning, mowing lawns, delivering meals in hospitals. You might remember the hospital application that was shown in one of the videos we saw in class. That robot was developed by HelpMate Robotics formerly called Transitions Research Corporation which was started by Joe Engelberger. When I checked on the web I found out that HelpMate was purchased by Pyxis a leader in "automated medication dispensing". You can find out about the latest version of the HelpMate robot on the Pyxis web pages where it is advertised as "a trackless, robotic courier system designed to perform material transport tasks throughout the hospital environment. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a-year, HELPMATE transports pharmaceuticals, lab specimens, equipment and supplies, meals, medical records and radiology films back and forth between support departments and nursing floors." Why do you think that HelpMate allowed itself to be bought up? Why do you think Pyxis decided to purchase it?
If you want to learn more about service robots, check out the service robotics page of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. You can now buy robot lawnmowers from Amazon - the Friendly Robotics RL500 Robomower, there is a robotic wheel chair undergoing FDA testing, a robot golf cart called the intelecady that will follow you around the golf course, a robot vacuum cleaner (several of them actually), and there are numerous robots being marketed for surveillance in the home or day care center or to assist in video conferencing. There are robots down on the farm now as well as in the factory; an early robotic device was used to shear sheep and now there is a robot that milks cows (for about $150,000 per unit, it recognizes the cows (using lasers and universal product codes), milks them only when appropriate (it maintains data on each cow), and it can clean the cow and itself to prevent the spread of disease. Among other interesting links, you can check out the latest on humanoid robots and in particular the robots being developed by Honda, Sony (a new bipedal entertainment robot to complement the Aibo series), Shadow Robotics, and Sarcos. Why do you think Honda and Sony are investing so much money into building humanoid robots when wheeled or tracked robots seem so much more economical in the short run?
This overview wasn't meant to be exhaustive but no account would be complete without some mention of space applications and, in particular, of the robotics lab at JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. At this site you'll learn the latest on NASA's planetary robotic explorations including the Mars Rover flight scheduled for 2003 and about the Nanorover technology being developed for exploring smaller "heavenly" bodies such as asteroids and comets.
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