As the sun set on a warm November afternoon, a quartet of five-foot-tall, 300-pound shiny white robots patrolled in front of Building 1 on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. Looking like a crew of slick Daleks imbued with the grace of Fred Astaire, they whirred quietly across the concrete in different directions, stopping and turning in place so as to avoid running into trash cans, walls, and other obstacles.
The robots managed to appear both cute and intimidating. This friendly-but-not-too-friendly presence is meant to serve them well in jobs like monitoring corporate and college campuses, shopping malls, and schools.
If you visit Manuela Veloso, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, you can expect to be met at reception, and led to her office, by an unfailingly polite and helpful assistant.
You might notice something a little odd about your chaperone, though, as it stops at the elevator and asks, in an electronic tone: “Can you press 7, and then press my ‘done’ button when we get to that floor?”
Youngsters aren’t the only ones who get the latest high-tech gadgets. Sometime in the next decade or two, homebound retirees could be early adopters of an important new technology: the home-help robot.
As robots become safer, smarter, and more capable, robotics companies are eyeing elder care as a huge potential market. A rapidly expanding elderly population could also necessitate other new forms of home-assistance technology.
The sticky effect seen when you rub a balloon on your hair could be used to help robots pick things up, greatly expanding what machines can do in factories.
Grabit, a spinoff of SRI International, has developed a simple and cheap robotic hand that makes use of electrostatic attraction. Grabit’s robot hand, which was demonstrated at the RoboBusiness conference in Boston last week, is a little more complex than the balloon trick: for example, it uses powered electrodes to sustain the electrostatic attraction, and alternating polarities to avoid charge buildup and keep the device from collecting dust.
Following the death of a man in Texas who was infected with Ebola, hospitals across the country are bracing themselves for the possibility of having to manage the deadly disease.
This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.
The robot applies fertilizer while the plant is rapidly growing and needs it most. This eliminates the need for using tractors, which can damage the high stalks, and reduces the amount of fertilizer needed earlier in the season, says Kent Cavender-Bares, CEO of the company, Rowbot. Further, by reducing the fertilizer, the robot reduces the amount of nitrogen that can end up polluting waterways after rainstorms.
The rise of robotics is gaining traction much faster than most executives realize and will have a major impact on the competitiveness of companies and countries alike, according to new research by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Spending on robots worldwide is expected to more than quadruple from just over $15 billion four years ago to about $67 billion by 2025—a 10.4 percent compound annual growth rate since 2010—according to BCG’s study. The findings appear in a new article, “The Rise of Robotics,” published on bcgperspectives.com.
Cynthia Breazeal has been a media darling since her grad-student days at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. She has worked on “social robots” with expressive faces and names like Kismet and Leonardo. So it’s no surprise that her current startup—and robot, called Jibo—is getting lots of attention.
