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Robots - Man's New Best Friend?

This story was written by CNET's Jonathan Skilling


Sylvia the German shepherd is learning to live with robots.

The 6-year-old, curious canine was recently adopted by the Tambascia family in Brockton, Mass. There was one problem: a trio of house-cleaning robots - two Roombas, and one Scooba - already lived there.

"She didn't know whether to eat the robots or run," Joy Tambascia said. "She still tries to eat them or attack them on occasion - kind of how dogs react to the regular vacuum."

If Sylvia's conundrum sounds like a topic more worthy of Oprah's magazine than Scientific American, you're right: the robot of today and the near future is a lot more mundane (and probably a lot more useful) than the robot of science fiction.

For many people who own them, iRobot's Roomba is a regular vacuum cleaner. Roughly the diameter of a hubcap and about as thick as dictionary, it crisscrosses a floor autonomously, recognizes the difference between carpet and hard surface, senses stairs, and when battery power runs low, it automatically locates and returns to its docking station.

The Roomba is typical of commercial robotics in the early 21st century: There is no white-faced Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who would desperately like to learn to whistle. Don't expect chatty C-3POs, intrepid R2-D2s, or killer Terminators. Instead, robots are humble devices that do menial labor, and they're on the verge of becoming household fixtures.

"People have such great expectations of robots because of what they see in the movies," said Jim Wyatt, director of Kablamm, a company in Reading, England, that helped develop a toy robot called MechRC. "People have this expectation that robots will be able to see you and hear you."

Robots performing relatively simple tasks have been creeping into society for years, of course. They've been a fixture of assembly lines and laboratories, such as stationary mechanical arms piecing together cars and handling pharmaceuticals. Nowadays, industrial robots comprise a roughly $18 billion annual market, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

There are going to be a lot more of them, too, as they move into homes, hospitals, classrooms, and barracks. NextGen Research has estimated that the worldwide market for consumer-oriented service robots will hit $15 billion by 2015. (The market research firm plans to issue a report next month with updated figures.)

Many expect big growth in the number of home and entertainment robots being sold to consumers. From 2000 to now, something like 5 million such robots have been sold, "and we're not done with this decade yet," said Paolo Pirjanian, CEO of software developer Evolution Robotics. "In the next decade, I really think we could see another order of magnitude - 5 million a year."

Keep in mind, though, that the housecleaning won't likely be done by a multitasking Rosie from "The Jetsons."

"You're not going to just have a robot in the home that does everything, but you're going to see many forms of robots, just as you don't have a single appliance in your home that washes your dishes, washes your clothes, and cooks your food," Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft's robotics group, told an audience at the RoboBusiness conference in Boston in April. "I think you're going to see a variety of robots that are designed for very specialty functions."

In a three-day special report, CNET News will take a look at the growing world of commercial and do-it-yourself robotics. We'll check in with the top robotics researchers in academia, as well as with hobbyists showing off their projects at this weekend's Maker Faire conference in Silicon Valley.

We'll describe an industry where the management of simple tasks and goals is just maybe paving the way for the grand visions of science fiction. But first, the floors need to be cleaned.

Robots in the home

Today's consumer robots are most likely to be found in the toolshed or the toy box, and there's no getting away from the dominance of iRobot. The company has staked an early claim in several key markets, including the defense sector, and has taken hold of the public's imagination--several years ago already, "Saturday Night Live" did a mock TV ad for a Roomba-inspired feminine-hygiene product.

In 2008, the Bedford, Mass., company had $307 million in revenues, with a good balance between its consumer division and its government and industrial division. On the consumer side, the Roomba is the chief revenue driver - indeed, over the years, more than 3 million of them have been sold.

Beyond the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the Scooba floor washer, the company also offers the Dirt Dog, a Roomba variant for sweeping up work areas; the Looj, for cleaning gutters; and the Verro, for cleaning pools. (There are even a couple of Roomba Pet Series models designed to clean up pet hair and kitty litter.)

"We can vacuum. We can vacuum well, and scrubbing is coming along, and so forth," iRobot CEO Colin Angle told CNET News in an interview in April. "But there's so much more a robot could do, as far as helping you come home to a house that is exactly the way you want it, with no need for you to go and do these maintenance types of tasks."

The company is cagey about what it might offer next, though Angle sees plenty of opportunities.

"There's the lawn mower, there's cooking, there's windows, there's more stuff going on in the bathroom with your tub, and doing laundry, folding laundry, putting stuff away ... shoveling the driveway," Angle said. "Once we get manipulation on the robots at consumer price points, those are all very real, very doable sorts of things."

The robotic lawn mower is already being done by a variety of companies, including Husqvarna and Kyodo America. At this year's Golf Industry Show, a company called Precise Path unveiled the nearly $30,000 RG3 robomower, designed for keeping the greens well-trimmed - a job that requires meticulous attention to detail.

That's obviously out of the reach of consumers, if not necessarily the local country club, but even the more modest machines aren't cheap. For instance, Kyodo's LawnBott - which can be programmed to work autonomously and can return on its own to its docking station--starts at about $2,000.

Finding the right price point

Price could be a bugaboo for the consumer robotics market. That $2,000 or so for a LawnBott would also get a high-end rider mower (an inexpensive push mower would cost $200 or less). By comparison, iRobot's Verro 500 pool cleaner lists at $999, the various Roombas range from $129 to $549, and WowWee's Rovio mobile Webcam is $299 - just a little pricier than a Nintendo Wii.

If people are unwilling to spend big on home and garden robots, they're likely to be even stingier for toy robots.

"In toys," said Kablaam's Wyatt, whose MechRC sells for $599, "price is king."

Some high-profile robotic toys, in fact, have already succumbed to penny pinching. In April, Ugobe, the maker of the robotic dinosaur Pleo, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company appeared to have problems even before the recession hit, despite the positive media coverage for an animatronic dinosaur toy packed with sensors that was intended to be as charming as a real pet. The launch in late 2007 came a year behind schedule and with a price tag - $349 - that had ballooned by 40 percent.

Ugobe CEO Caleb Chung blamed a global credit crunch that hit Pleo buyers hard. "We were selling them," Chung told the Idaho Statesman, which covers the Eagle, Idaho, area where Ugobe was located. "But they were sitting in crates in Europe, Australia, Asia, Russia, and the Middle East."

There were construction challenges as well. Ugobe's design team, for example, struggled for months to fit a battery into the middle of the body - the very same part of Pleo that had to be able to pivot for a realistic gait. And some consumers complained that the battery the company settled on was difficult to install and had a surprisingly short charge.

Perhaps the most iconic toybot of the last decade was Sony's Aibo, a robodog that had an enthusiastic following.

Aibo was no one-trick product - it took pictures, played music, reacted to its owner's commands, and even spoke. But in early 2006, as Sony went through a bout of belt-tightening, it eliminated its robotics division. That spelled the end for the $2,000 Aibo, more than 150,000 of which had been sold since 1999.How to build a robotics start-up

Robot makers face a number of challenges with customers and development alike: the tools and technologies for building robots are still limited; some robot skills, such as manipulation of objects, are a vexing problem; operating systems are customized for specific robots; engineers who work on one project at one university or company may not be able to easily transfer their skills to a different project.

"Every platform is a kind of an ecosystem unto itself," Microsoft's Trower said in his RoboBusiness address. Microsoft, with its Robotics Developer Studio, is among those pushing for more standardization. The Windows-based platform for programming commercial robotic applications - most notably, Lego Mindstorms - debuted in December 2006. A refresh of the software is scheduled for this summer.

There's widespread acknowledgement of a need for greater standardization and lower-cost parts. Companies showing their wares at RoboBusiness weren't shy about touting their use of commercial off-the-shelf components. On the software side, in addition to Microsoft, there are start-ups like Menlo Park, Calif.-based Willow Garage, which is developing an open-source platform for use in personal robots.

The money people are slowly coming to grips with robotics too. At the end of April, for example, Charles River Ventures of Waltham, Mass., announced that it had brought on as a senior adviser Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University professor and expert in robotics and artificial intelligence.

In 2005, Thrun led the Stanford team that won the DARPA Grand Challenge, a government-sponsored contest intended to spur robotics innovation. Stanford's driverless car, "Stanley," performed a feat never before done by an artificially intelligent machine when it autonomously drove more than 130 miles across the Mojave Desert in about 8 hours, edging out an entry from Carnegie Mellon University.

"The venture capital community is now starting to spend a lot of time getting to know this area," said Pirjanian of Evolution Robotics, whose North Star localization software is used in WowWee's Rovio.

Picking the right fight

Investors and entrepreneurs can also now look to the success of companies as diverse as iRobot and WowWee in the consumer sector, as well as Intuitive Surgical and Kiva Systems outside it. (Kiva's bumper car-size robots work in warehouses, scurrying around - without bumping - to pick up and move stacks of inventory for businesses such as Staples, Walgreens, and Zappos, using Wi-Fi to communicate with servers and using digital cameras to navigate.)

A key for start-ups is to try to meet a need, rather than concoct a clever machine and then try to figure out what to do with it. Don't try to solve too many engineering problems at once.

Can robots make it in hospitals too? Many hope so. Robotic systems such as Intuitive Surgical's Da Vinci apparatus are already being used to assist in minimally invasive surgery. The RP-7 robot from InTouch Health provides telepresence for doctors located far away. Work is also progressing on gear such as robotic wheelchairs and prostheses, as well as on so-called companion robots.

But assisting the elderly may be a real sweet spot for robotics. The population is aging in the United States, Europe, and Japan, on top of which there's a "caregiver gap," said Microsoft's Trower, referring both to smaller family networks and understaffed health care facilities.

Robots, along with other electronic gear, will be pressed into service to help out with communication, entertainment, therapy, and transportation for the elder population. The question is, how soon?

"I'm thinking a decade, a 5- to 10-year timeline," said Holly Yanco, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, who founded that school's robotics lab. "What you don't want from assistive technology is to be more onerous than what we do in everyday life."

It's an area with some of the greatest challenges for roboticists.

"It's not like selling a Roomba," said Yanco. "Everyone who needs this technology has different needs, different abilities."

The kind of customization that can be required for these products adds to the cost of what can already be very expensive gear. Among the technologies that Yanco has focused on is the Manus ARM (or "assistive robotic manipulator"), a wheelchair-mounted arm from Exact Dynamics of the Netherlands that retails for about $30,000. The UMass Lowell robotics lab has adapted the device, which picks up objects using a pincerlike two-finger gripper, to use cameras intended to give the user a more natural interaction than having to navigate software menus.

Manipulation will likely be the hardest robotic nut to crack in the near future - the ability to reach out and grab something, to know whether it's fragile or sturdy, and to move it to the right spot without spilling, crushing, or otherwise mucking things up. The things that people do instinctively - holding a baby, pouring a soda, putting on a jacket - are incredibly hard for robots.

"To be able to change your environment - folding clothes, handling inventory - you need low-cost, highly reliable manipulation, and that's not readily available. It costs thousands of dollars; it's not easy to program," said Tom Ryden, co-founder and chief technology officer of North End Technologies, a start-up in Nashua, N.H., still in stealth mode, with executives drawn from the videoconferencing and robotics sectors.

Then, too, for medical and assistive technologies, there are bureaucratic complications to contend with - getting approval from the Food and Drug Administration, for example, or getting insurance providers to be willing to pay. Liability issues could be significant. If a Roomba goes on the fritz - well, get out the broom. But if a brainy wheelchair or medicine minder has a bad moment, the consequences could be dire.

Nonetheless, these are gadgets with a higher purpose. Among today's therapeutic robots, it would be hard to find one that's cuddlier than the Paro, a disarming mechanical re-creation of a furry, white baby harp seal.

The Paro has a small array of sensors (for light, touch, temperature, sound, and posture) that help it adapt its behavior to its surroundings and to the people handling it. Devised by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology to help reduce stress among patients in nursing homes and hospitals, it went on sale in the United States earlier this year with a $6,000 price tag.

Cleaning up

Central to consumer adoption of robotics will be ease of use: cars that share in the driving without being an overbearing high-tech backseat driver, cleaning bots that go off and do their own thing.

So keep an eye on the Roombas of the world, as they become ever smarter and less random about their chores. "We want floor care to be the same as the sprinkler system for the lawn - set it up once, move on, forget about it," Evolution Robotics' Pirjanian said. Of robovacuums and their ilk, he said, "they'll be running all the time in the background."

This brings us back to Joy Tambascia, owner of Sylvia the German shepherd and of two Roombas, a Scooba, and a smattering of WowWee toybots.

Of the Roombas, Tambascia says, "they're not that much more difficult than using an (old-style) vacuum cleaner."

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