Robots that will change your life

New generation of 'bots are here to help, protect — and amuse
By Elizabeth Corcoran
Forbes
Aug. 31, 2006

The robots are on the move — leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us — and some even do floors.

Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland. The majority of the world's robots are bolted to a spot on a factory floor, sentenced to a repetitive choreography of welding, stamping and cutting.

No more. In our eighth annual E-Gang (our group of tech innovators to watch), we present the masters of robotic innovation — entrepreneurs and researchers who are fusing advances in biomechanics, software, sensor technology, materials science and computing to create new generations of robotic assistants.

Learning has been key, both for robots and for their designers. Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute has been an incubator for much of the current work on robots. Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nudged the whole field forward in early 1990s when he showed how robots could make faster decisions by responding to sensory data from their immediate environment rather than relying on complex sets of rules.

The pioneers we've highlighted in this report work in diverse corners of the robotics arena. Some people have devoted their lives to developing robots, such as Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, who founded iRobot with their academic adviser, Rodney Brooks. In the medical world, Russell Taylor has contributed to innovations in surgical robots for decades.

Others are relative newcomers. Sebastian Thrun, from Stanford University, burst into the headlines last year by winning a U.S. Defense Department race of autonomous vehicles through the desert. But he brings with him the legacy of Carnegie Mellon. So, too, does Mark Cutkoski (also of Stanford), who collaborated with an insightful biologist, Robert Full of the University of California, Berkeley. Although Full did not set out to become a robotics expert, his basic research discoveries about how creatures — from cockroaches to people — move has become a cornerstone of much work.

Soren Lund at Lego is helping bring what was once considered esoteric engineering into the hands of enthusiasts everywhere in the world. Yoshiyuki Sankai, at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, proudly continues Japan's long tradition of innovative — and surprising — humanoid robots. And Caleb Chung and his colleagues at the startup UGobe remind us to celebrate the playfulness and creativity that has also been a hallmark of robotics over the years.

The market is still small: $6 billion a year for industrial robots, according to the International Federation of Robots.(That doesn't include the software, peripherals and systems needed to support robots. Add those elements in, and the value of the market jumps to $18 billion.) Data on the size of the nascent business of service robots — robots that clean or protect or entertain — are sketchier, but the growth predictions are dizzying: the IFR, in cooperation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, expects to see 7 million service robots sold by 2008.

In the U.S., the Defense Department has been the big spender for robots, seeking machines that can protect soldiers' lives. But interest is simmering in the venture community — a signal that profits lie ahead. Big players are muscling in, too. In May, Microsoft announced that it had a new research program under way, aimed at developing an operating system and software development tools for robots.

Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft's robotics group, says robotics today reminds him of the early days of the PC — chock-full of ideas, opportunities and too many different operating systems.

Unlike PCs, however, robots are calling on the ingenuity of people from wildly diverse backgrounds: biologists are teaching robots to move, entertainers are teaching them how to amuse us, statisticians are teaching them when to ignore data, computer scientists are teaching them how to think, and materials scientists are inventing new composites that make them light on their feet.

Robots are about to be unshackled from forced labor. Expect them everywhere.












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