Living in a robotic world
A look at robotics research suggests we will rely more on machines at home, on the road, even in space, as GILLIAN SHAW explains.
Frederic Boisdron and his wife run their home with the help of 12 robots. The robots do everything from cutting the grass to washing the windows. They even keep the cat’s litter box clean.
What they won’t do is look after the couple’s first child when the baby is born in October. But by the time the Boisdrons are grandparents, their children could be enlisting robots to help look after them.
Boisdron, editor-in-chief of the French magazine Planète Robots, was in the Netherlands recently for a tour of robots and robotics research and to drop in on the global robot competition RoboCup 2013.
I ran into Boisdron on his tour, hosted by the government of the Netherlands. One of the first people we met was Maarten Steinbuch, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, a specialist in robotics and an enthusiastic advocate of a world that will see robots fill many tasks — tasks that, with our aging population, there won’t be enough people to do.
“I think in 10 years there will be some limited applications in the home,” Steinbuch said of the prospects for robots becoming mainstream. “I expect that there will be a market where you will see specialties come up.”
For Boisdron, the future is here: “We have 12 robots in our house. We have a vacuum cleaner robot, we have a floor cleaner robot that washes the floor with vinegar, we have a litter robot for the cat, we have a robot to wash the windows, and we have a robot to cut the grass.
“I have a little programmable robot that’s about 20 centimetres tall that I use for test programming, and I have a little robot that dances to music and it reacts to you — if you are tender with it, it moves slowly.”
But the housecleaning and cat litter robots are already getting to be a bit old-school, so the Boisdron family will soon be welcoming a humanoid robot into their home.
“We are getting a full-sized robot from the French company Cybedroid,” said Boisdron of the 160-cm early model of what Cybedroid plans to release in a commercial version. “The company hopes to sell it in five years at a price that will be something like 20,000 euros ($27,000).”
The robot will be able to respond to simple commands, and the aim is to help people with disabilities manage in their home.
Boisdron expects his robot will arrive already programmed with some applications, but he’ll be able to program it to do more.
“I’m not ready to let the robot take care of my baby,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think my wife would accept that.”
And just like tablets and smartphones, robots will have their store.
“There will be an app store like Apple’s App Store,” said Boisdron. Right now there’s an app store for NAO, a 58-cm-tall humanoid robot that is showing up everywhere, from children’s hospitals where it helps kids cope with chronic diseases, to helping the elderly with home care.
Like computers, which were at one time hugely expensive, unwieldy and certainly not found in every home, Boisdron expects robots will follow a similar path.
“For robots like the vacuum iRobot Roomba, the market is already here,” he said. “But for humanoid robots, the life-size robots, I think the market will be ready in 15 or 20 years.
“The kind of robot you can buy now or in six months is very expensive, slow, and with a very poor lists of applications. But like the computer industry, there will be a boom.”
But house robots represent only the tip of a trend in technology that is seeing robots running everything from factory operations, to rescue missions and space exploration.
It’s a development that’s being mirrored in many countries around the globe, including Canada.
At RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven, teams from Canadian universities competed with others from around the globe and the University of B.C.’s Thunderbots placed in the top 10 in their competition. At the European Space Agency’s largest site, its Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk in the Netherlands, researchers talk not only about Canada’s famed Canadarm, designed and built by Richmond’s MDA, but of the company’s participation through Canada’s role as a member of the European Space council.
Earlier this year, the MDA-created Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency’s robotic “handyman” on the International Space Station, successfully topped off a mock satellite’s fuel tank in a demonstration of how robots could service satellites in space.
Japan is getting ready set to send a talking robot to space, the diminutive Kirobo, who is intended to keep astronaut Koichi Wakata company with conversation.
In a recent robotics tour of the Netherlands, we saw robots that could care for crops, care for people and perhaps some day — like the Jetsons’ Rosie — care for your kids.
But human interaction is a stumbling block. Would you trust a robot to look after your aging mother? Advances in robot technology is giving rise to debates over ethics and legislation — should robots be governed by their own laws? What if your selfdrive car runs over the neighbour’s cat, or worse, the neighbour. Who goes to court? You or your robot?
“In Korea, they are already making laws for robots,” said Steinbuch, who is also director of the automotive systems graduate program at Eindhoven TU, which focuses on autonomous cars.
“A car is becoming a robot,” said Steinbuch. “Sometimes, I call a car an iPad on wheels. There will be a time when you will be able to get out of your car, say ‘ Go find a parking spot,’ and your car will go and park itself.
“There will be an app so you can call it back on your smartphone when you’re ready to go. The technology is almost ready ... that will be in the next 10 years.”