Robots Rising: 7 Real-Life Roles
Today's robots feature improved components and capabilities that take them out of labs and into oceans, hospitals -- perhaps even your workplace. Take a closer look.
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The robots are coming -- in fact, in some places they've already arrived. Last October, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said his company had about 1,300 robots -- the fruit of Amazon's $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems two years ago -- fetching products in its warehouses for shipment. Bezos recently said that Amazon should have about 10,000 of them by the end of the year.
Since December 2013, Google, one of Amazon's major rivals, has acquired no fewer than eight companies developing robotics technology, including Boston Dynamics, maker of formidable DARPA-funded robots like BigDog and Atlas. And that's to say nothing of its investment in artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies or its self-driving car research.
Even Facebook has gotten into the business, with its acquisition of Ascenta, a UK maker of autonomous drones.
Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and coauthor of The Second Machine Age (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014), attributes the rising interest in robots to the halo effect of Moore's Law. "It's not that robots are getting better," he said. "It's that their components are getting better. And the sum of all those components is adding up to something different."
Thanks to increased computational capabilities and plummeting component prices, the hardware and software required to handle real-world navigation and interaction is now available beyond well-funded research labs.
The appeal of robots isn't simply as a way to cut labor costs. McAfee says, for example, that farmers find automation appealing because it insulates them from the legal complexity of immigration labor issues. "A lot of farms and farmers don't want the hassle," he said. Other reasons for automating include product quality, production speed, and worker safety.
Unfortunately, robots may put some of us out of work. McAfee says the trend here is clear. "We've been shedding manufacturing jobs for about 35 years in America, while manufacturing output and value added have been going up," he said. "I don't know how you can make the case that these kinds of technologies are creating as many jobs as they're destroying."
As a consequence of the robot proliferation and improved capabilities, standards organizations and industry groups have been updating safety standards for situations where humans and robots work together in environments less controlled than factory assembly lines. Like it or not, more and more of us will have robotic coworkers.
"It used to be that we put fences around industrial robots, not to protect the robots but to protect the people," said McAfee. "When you look around leading factories now, you don't see as much of that, and I think we'll see that even less in the future."
The robots are coming, but we haven't yet reached consensus about where they belong. Social acceptance will take longer than overcoming technological challenges. For now, take a look at these seven robot developments happening now across a variety of industries. What do you think of these robots? Tell us in the comments section.
In a BBC article last year, Missy Cummings, a former military pilot and current associate professor at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, observed that by 2012, UAVs had become safer than planes flown by military personnel.
We have the technology for planes that can fly themselves, but not the will to fly on them. Cummings observed that we like pilots because they share our fate in the air. Human pilots may find automated systems taking over more responsibilities, but airlines will have to keep human pilots on to reassure passengers and just in case human judgment is required. Automation will come sooner for autonomous UAVs like those made by Google's Titan Aerospace. These drones will follow set-and-forget flight routines as they circle the globe to relay Internet data between ground stations.
Drones aren't just for flying. They float too, on missions for science, security, industrial exploration, and entertainment. An autonomous boat called Saildrone has sailed about 6,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean since departing San Francisco, Calif., on October 1, 2013.
If you were paddling along Kenya's Mara River earlier this year, you might have met some robot boats. Developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and operated by a CMU spinoff, Platypus LLC, several autonomous airboats were deployed there to measure water quality. The boats are made of vacuum-formed plastic and the sort of airbags used to pack parcels. They use Android smartphones for brains.
Google's self-driving cars are among the best-known autonomous automobiles, but many companies are pursuing computer-guided vehicles. Remote control cars have been around since the mid-1920s, but only recently have advances in software, hardware, and sensors made true autonomy possible. Audi, BMW, General Motors, Ford, Mercedes Benz, Nissan, Toyota, and Volvo have all been testing driverless systems. Various states in the US have passed laws allowing the testing of autonomous cars, as has the UK.
Though there may be valid reasons to sideline human drivers -- we make a lot of mistakes and kill a lot of people -- we have a long way to go before our laws and social expectations make computer-controlled cars the norm.
As of October last year, Panasonic Corp. began selling HOSPI, an autonomous robot designed to transport medical specimens and drugs around hospitals in Japan. It's designed to operate using preinstalled map data of the facility and will move to avoid obstacles like a person in a wheelchair or hospital workers. It includes security features to protect onboard medical supplies.
HOSPI is similar in concept to the Kiva Systems robots used in Amazon's warehouses -- it moves materials around without the need for human intervention. This is where robots in the near term will shine: in controlled environments, doing narrowly defined tasks.
Artificial Intelligence is best suited to handling well-defined tasks in a predictable environment. But when human intelligence directs mechanical strength and speed, you have a winning combination, at least up to the limits of human reaction time and alertness.
The iRobot 710 Kobra offers a good example of what's possible. It's designed for bomb disposal, explosives detection, and dealing with hazardous material. It's operated remotely by a person. And while it may lack the fine motor coordination and flexibility that a person brings to these tasks, it has advantages in terms of speed, strength, and safety.
The Double telepresence robot offers a more modest example of the genre: It's more or less an iPad on a remote controlled Segway. Sometimes it's enough just to show your face in the office.
The computing revolution has allowed us to endow machines with an approximation of intelligence. But emotion could prove to be more valuable still, at least in the consumer market.
A company called Aldebaran, backed by Japan's SoftBank Group, is betting that a highly appealing robot will find more buyers than a semi-useful robot. It has created a mechanical humanoid called Pepper, which will sell for about $1,900 (198,000 yen) in Japan next year. Pepper will have downloadable behaviors. "This robot has been created to make people happy to interact with," the company explains. "He's an emotional robot, not a functional robot for domestic use with dishwasher or vacuum cleaner functionalities."
The computing revolution has allowed us to endow machines with an approximation of intelligence. But emotion could prove to be more valuable still, at least in the consumer market.
A company called Aldebaran, backed by Japan's SoftBank Group, is betting that a highly appealing robot will find more buyers than a semi-useful robot. It has created a mechanical humanoid called Pepper, which will sell for about $1,900 (198,000 yen) in Japan next year. Pepper will have downloadable behaviors. "This robot has been created to make people happy to interact with," the company explains. "He's an emotional robot, not a functional robot for domestic use with dishwasher or vacuum cleaner functionalities."
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