A spinoff of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is rapid development of coordinated robot teams for
surveillance and ordnance disposal in rough terrain. Funding for military robotics research in the US
continues to balloon. Compared to military robotics, funding for healthcare robotics seems
somewhat anemic, however, considering what little is being achieved in the US on
that front.

AstraZeneca has built a factory-sized robot able to mix
and test 100,000 compounds a day. A result of such technological foresight is
that the company has some 70 new drugs in the pipeline.

Spain has built a robotic
librarian.

When the media start talking about the “fast-growing consumer robotics
market,” you can be reasonably sure the market exists. Yet it was barely on the
public radar a year ago. Most current talk is about robotic vacuums and
lawnmowers.

Future Horizons, Europe’s leading semiconductor analyst, predicts that total
revenue for the global robotics market will rise from US$4.4 billion in 2003 to
$59.3 billion in 2010, and that the current volume preponderance in favor of
heavy industrial and professional, intelligent, service robots will reverse by
2005 as domestic robotics start to dominate the market. By 2010, Future Horizons
says, there will be 55.5 million robots worldwide, 39 million of them domestic,
10.5 million of them domestic and intelligent (for service as opposed to
entertainment), 5.8 million of them professional, and 200,000 of them heavy
industrial.

Japanese industrial robot maker Fanuc’s profits jumped 37 percent last year
just ended on brisk demand from automakers. Fanuc is the world’s biggest
manufacturer of industrial robots.

Reference: Baard, Mark (2004). “Lawn Mowing for
Lazybones.” Wired News, April 2.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Future
Horizons Predicts Consumer Robotics Will Fuel Electronics Growth.” Hidden
Wires, April 5.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Consumer robotics to
fuel electronics growth.” Electronics Talk, April 2.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Fanuc
03/04 net profit up 37 pct on robots – paper.” Reuters via Forbes, April 8.

PackBots

One of an estimated 50-100 PackBots being used by the US military in
Iraq and Afghanistan for battlefield reconnaissance and bomb disposal was
“destroyed in action” recently — victim of its own success in saving the life
of the soldier who might have been blown up if the robot had not gotten there
first. “The 42-pound (19-kg) base unit, known as the PackBot Scout, costs
around $50,000 and operates in adverse conditions such as navigating steep
terrain, exploring mountain caves, falling off cliffs and fording streams,”
writes Greg Frost for Reuters. PackBot‘s maker, iRobot (which also makes
domestic robot vacuums) has signed a contract worth an estimated $32 million to
develop a smaller, more advanced form of the PackBot as part of the U.S.
Army’s Future Combat Systems program.

PackBot Scouts are similar in concept and name to Scout robots
being developed with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding at the University
of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, and Caltech. Like the PackBot
Scouts, the team’s Scouts can also survive “a six-story drop into a
collapsed building or a 100-foot throw into unfamiliar territory,” as an NSF
press release describes it. The latest Scouts incorporate a video camera,
three infrared range finders, two light sensors, and a pyroelectric sensor for
sensing body heat. Where this Scout differs from the PackBot Scout
is, first, in size: It is a cylinder about the size of the cardboard tube inside
a roll of toilet paper. Second, it can work as a member of a team of a dozen
Scouts for wide area tasks such as collecting air samples, testing for
toxic fumes, or keeping surveillance.

Each Scout team will be coordinated by “MegaScout, a 15-inch-long
sibling of the Scout which can carry larger sensors, a manipulator arm
(for opening doors, lifting Scouts and similar tasks) and the processing power
to control the Scout team in the field.” A human operator need only worry
about controlling a handful of MegaScouts to be able to effectively
control potentially a hundred or so robots.

Reference: Frost, Greg (2004). “U.S.
Company Cheers Loss of Its Robot in Iraq.” Reuters via Boston Globe, April
12.

Reference: National Science Foundation (2004). “Turning Robots into a
Well-Oiled Machine: Robot teams to help emergency responders in the
trenches.” Press Release NSF PR 04-046 – April 12.

Robotics Research On a Drum Roll

A “perfect (but benign) storm” is beginning to rock the field of robotics as
component prices fall and the US military-industrial complex pours more funding
into robotics research at universities. Big beneficiaries include the Robotics
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (federal and corporate funding up 48 and
40 percent respectively since 2000) and the California, Virginia, and Georgia
Institutes of Technology (up at least 50 percent or more in recent years.)

The US military is the main customer, which is seeking nothing less than to
replace soldiers on the battlefield with robots controlled by humans implanted
with neuroprosthetics to control the robots at a distance (under development at
Caltech). Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Intel are among companies that have
sponsored university research or maintain their own robotics projects, as does
farm machinery manufacturer John Deere, which wants to do to the farmer what the
US military is doing to the soldier — replace him on the ground with robots.

Reference: Sheehan, Charles (2004). “Robotics’
Research Gaining in Prestige.” AP via SiliconValley.com, April 8.

Robot Caregivers

“If the future isn’t now, it is getting closer all the time,” writes Gary
Rotstein in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He is referring to three
prototype robotic devices to help the elderly: a walker called IMP that
knows where to go even if its user forgets where s/he was going, a handheld
memory device that reminds its user of things they should be doing; and the
wheeled robot Pearl, who has been a regular visitor at a US nursing home
of late. Pearl can also speak reminders to people, after finding them,
but she is still a relatively rough prototype and cannot yet perform many of the
ambitious care-giving roles planned for her.

Reference: Rotstein, Gary (2004). ” Pearl for the elderly:
Robotic walker is in the works.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 4.

Robot Drug Factories

AstraZeneca has opened a US$13 million robotic compound-management plant in
Delaware. It currently houses a million compound samples, “tens of thousands” of
which can be mixed at a time — up to 100,000 compounds in a day — to develop
new drugs. Previously, the Delaware scientists had to send by mail for compounds
from an AstraZeneca facility in the UK and wait for them to clear Customs.

AstraZeneca has been recognized as having the best product research and
development pipeline in the pharmaceutical industry, according to the trade
publication R&D Directions, and has a pipeline “deep and broad, with
about 70 drugs in development to treat many disorders,” including cancer,
asthma, pain, schizophrenia, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular, Alzheimer’s
and gastrointestinal diseases.”

Reference: Loyd, Linda (2004). “AstraZeneca
counts on robots to speed search.” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 21.

Robot Librarian

A robotic librarian built by scientists in Spain is equipped with automatic
speech recognition to recognize the title of a book a patron asks for, and text
recognition to find it on the shelves, no matter how the title is displayed on
the book’s spine. It has infrared sensors and lasers to avoid bumping into
people or things as it moves around the stacks in search of books.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “First
robot librarian invented.” EFE/Expatica, April 2.