The lullaby of robots
They’re not just for assembly lines anymore
Industrial robots have assembled cars and other machinery for decades, but a conference in San Jose this week showcased robots that are creeping into other segments of business and society.
At the two-day RoboBusiness Conference, about 2,000 people were serenaded with lullabies and Disney tunes, including “Let It Go” from the hit film “Frozen,” by a human-like robot designed to comfort senior citizens and autistic children.
And next to a man-size robot that can drive a motorcycle 190 mph around a race track, a half-dozen ant-size robots quickly scurried about a miniature factory floor.
“In five years, could you imagine what this conference is going to look like?” Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan asked the crowd. “There are going to be 8-foot robots walking all around us, talking to us, some of them maybe being smarter than us.”
The 12th annual conference, which wrapped up Thursday, illustrated how the focus of robotics is shifting from industrial uses to consumer products. That’s especially true at a time when drones, self-driving cars and police robots that carry bombs
are making news.
The global market for robotics should be worth about $83 billion by 2025, said Meldon Wolfgang, partner and managing director of the Boston Consulting Group.
Two years ago, the company estimated that the market would be worth $67 billion “and we were too conservative,” Wolfgang said. “What we were struck by was the relative increase in funding of robotics companies. It’s basically been triple the investment from what we saw in the prior three years.”
Those attending the conference included venture capitalists looking for investment opportunities, and representatives from companies like Johnson & Johnson, Target and Walmart scouting for the latest technology that they might employ, said Brent Watters, product director for the robotics division of conference sponsor EH Publishing.
“Their challenge is to not only understand the machines, but the software and solutions behind them,” Watters said.
The show floor included robots from San Jose’s Fellow Robots, which are designed to escort Lowe’s home improvement store customers to the items they want to buy. And startup Fetch Robotics, also of San Jose, showed off its robots that can be used by stores to monitor or move inventory.
“We’re branching into this space where robots are not in cages anymore and they’re interacting more with the workers in the environment, and even moving into some front-of-the-house applications like the grocery store or a department store,” said Fetch CEO Melonee Wise.
The conference still included companies exhibiting huge robotic arms and hands designed to rapidly repeat assembly-line tasks considered mind-numbing for humans.
But there was also the iPal, the singing 3-foottall robot with infrared and ultrasound sensors, a high-resolution video camera and a smile created by LED lights.
The robot, from startup AvatarMind Robot Technology of Nanjing, China, is designed to serve as a teacher’s aide for kindergarten classes, to help parents with autistic children and as a companion for senior citizens.
The company plans to sell the robot in the United States in the first quarter of 2017 for less than $2,000. “We wanted to make an affordable robot that even families could buy,” said CEO John Ostrem, who works in Palo Alto.
In another booth, the Motobot sat atop Yamaha’s top racing bike. Menlo Park’s SRI International is working with Yamaha to develop the robot, which can be used to test motorcycles without endangering a human rider.
The robot “has all the control inputs that a human would have,” said Alexander Kernbaum, senior robotics research engineer. “It has to be able to steer, manage the throttle, shift, sense its environment.”
And most importantly, “not crash,” Kernbaum said. “What we basically have here is the world’s most expensive test dummy.”
SRI plans to have the Motobot ready to challenge professional motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi in August. To beat Rossi, the company has to create robot sensing technology that reacts faster than what’s now available.
“If you can solve this problem of super-fast sensing, there are all kinds of other robotic applications that we can do,” Kernbaum said.
SRI also showed off micro robots that it is developing for use in manufacturing electronic circuits, in biology labs or other industries that might need precise work with parts as small as a cord one-fifth the size of a strand of human hair.
And because these robots are the size of bugs, they can be transported into space. “You can have a micro factory building satellites in space,” Kernbaum said.
Istvan, who is running for president representing a pro-technology and science party, said he had a microchip implanted in his arm that can unlock his front door. But in a presentation at the conference, he talked about a day when human thoughts could be converted into computer algorithms and then downloaded into a robot.
That scenario, he said, “brings up an entirely new dynamic of ethics and who we are as a person. If somebody dies and their avatar continues, is it something that is still alive? It’s absolutely a brave new world out there.”