Robotic Nation Evidence

Robotic Investment

Fledgling robot industry aims to fly high

From the article:

The Korean government has set its sights on robotics as a next-generation technology that it will attempt to nurture into a new engine for the country's economic growth. Last month, the Korean government designated the intelligent robot industry as one of the 10 high-technology industries that it hopes will become major economic growth drivers.

Under the project, the government plans to invest a total of 260 billion won ($226 million) by 2007 in fostering the country's fledgling robotics industry to help it grab a 10 percent share of the global intelligent-robot market by 2012.

In particular, the Commerce Ministry announced that it would spend 110 billion won in projects for five years from 2004 to develop 10 types of intelligent robots for household purposes, medical assistance and extreme work conditions.

This article discusses similar investments in Japan, which is gearing up to invest as much as $500 million per year in a long-range national intelligent robot research project:

That is one goal of the Japanese government's five billion yen ($37.7 million) Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP), which aims to market within a few years robots that can operate power shovels, assist construction workers and care for the elderly.

In the process, a new multi-billion-dollar Japanese industry could be born.

"Just as automobiles were the biggest product of the 20th century, people might eventually look back and say that robots were the big product of the 21st century," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, a researcher for the government-affiliated National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology... It predicts the expansion will be led by robots that perform everyday tasks and believes that, while there are no such robots on the market now, they could be ringing up annual sales of 1.5 trillion yen by 2010.

In a 2010 time frame, we can expect to see robots start to begin moving into the workplace in a significant way. It is likely that these robots will come from Japan and Korea rather than the United States. See Robotic Nation for details.

Manna at UPS

UPS unveils new package-flow technology for deliveries

From the Article:

With the new software, each package arrives for loading with instructions on where it should be placed in which truck. It replaces a system that requires loaders to learn hundreds of addresses or ZIP codes. Meanwhile, drivers will learn their delivery orders and where each package is loaded in the truck by tapping into hand-held computers... Based on testing and initial use, the system could shave more than 100 million miles each year from the miles logged by its drivers.

It is only one short step from this system to the Manna system. Simply replace the hand-held computer with a headset telling the driver exactly where to go and what to do, and you have Manna.

Never mentioned in the article is the fact that, by saving 100 million miles per year, UPS can drop approximately 2,000 drivers (assuming a driver covers 50,000 miles per year).

It will not be that long before UPS, FedEx, Airborne, DHL, the post office, etc. can replace all of the drivers with self-driving trucks and robots. See Manna, Chapter 3 for details. That will send more than a million employees to the unemployment lines.

Sony's QRIO Robots

Sony's Dream Robot: QRIO

From the site:

Even among robots, QRIO's capabilities are unique. As well as walking on two legs, if QRIO does lose its balance, it reacts to protect itself against the impact. And after it falls, QRIO checks front, back, left and right, and gets back up, by itself. Its intellectual capabilities allow QRIO to distinguish people's faces and voices.

QRIO knows your face. It's equipped with a camera and the ability to analyze the images it sees. It detects faces and identifies who they are. It can even learn the faces of people it just met. And it responds to specific people individually, adding to the fun.

QRIO knows your voice. It can determine who is speaking by analyzing the sounds it hears with its built-in microphones. Call to it, and if it knows you, it will notice you and respond. If it doesn't know you but mistakenly thinks it does, you can teach it your voice and it will remember you.

QRIO was designed to understand spoken words. The seven microphones in its head identify a person's voice and the direction from which it is speaking, and even pick out the words it says. QRIO can even understand the voices of unidentified speakers. It knows tens of thousands of words already, but can also learn new ones.

Bi-pedal motion, balance, self-righting ability, visual recognition, voice recognition. Introduced in September of 2003, QRIO will become a mass produced toy. Imagine what the capabilities will be just 10 years from now.

See also Makimoto links IC future to next-generation robots. From the article:

Concealing very important thinking beneath the veneer of a humorous lunchtime speech at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference here on Tuesday (Sept. 23), Sony Corp. corporate advisor Tsugio Makimoto suggested there is a next big thing waiting in the shadows to rescue the IC industry: a robot...

Finally, the researcher claimed, robots have recently moved beyond just the ability to navigate unstructured environments to the ability to coexist with humans. Makimoto made clear with video clips that for him, coexistence meant interacting with humans on a verbal and even an emotional level...

The role of Moore's Law, he suggested, was to provide the continual increase in computing power necessary to take us from today's embedded processors to the estimated 10⁸ Mips necessary for human-level intelligence. Makimoto outlined a set of challenges, the most demanding of which was the RoboCup: the drive to field a team of robots that can beat a championship human soccer team by 2050.

Produce Picking Robots

Researchers announce watermelon picking robot

From the article:

A team of Israeli and US researchers has designed a watermelon-picking robot endowed with artificial vision to do the job of harvesting... Harvesting watermelon has always been relatively expensive because the process is labor-intensive.

The machine consists of a mobile platform on which are mounted an image-processing system, air blowers and a mechanical arm with a gripper attached. Tractor power pulls the platform through the field while cameras take pictures that the system analyzes. The air blowers ruffle the foliage to expose the fruit. When the harvester sights a melon bigger than a certain size -- and therefore presumed to be ripe -- it extends the gripper to grab the fruit and lift it off the ground.

Onboard software evaluates the image's shape, brightness, and texture to locate the melons. Knives connected to the gripper slash the stalk, and the gripper places the melon on a conveyor belt.

First its watermelons, then it is strawberries, then it is pumpkins and so on. Before you know it, several million migrant farm workers are out of work.

This is certainly not unusual in agriculture. We already have wheat picking machines, corn picking machines, cotton picking machines and so on. The important point with the watermellon picking robot is that a robotic vision system is the enabling technology. As these vision-based harvesting robots come on line, there will also be vision-based retail stocking robots, vision-based hamburger assembling robots, vision-based bathroom cleaning robots, vision-based truck driving robots, vision-based roofing robots and so on, all coming online at approximately at the same time. Tens of millions of workers will be displaced simultaneously. See Robots in 2015 for details.

Robotic Convenience Stores

Automated 24/7 convenience stores

From the article:

"Case in point: Paris based Yatoo Partoo ('everything everywhere') exploits 31 massive refrigerated vending machines in France and Spain.

They resemble mini-convenience stores with the shopkeeper replaced by a robotic hand, ready to take your order 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. "

Robotic Vision

New Aibo to lead the way in robotic vision

From the article:

In robotics, the technology enables a robot to take pictures of its environment, then create a visual map of the room or house. "It allows the robot to know where it is but also have visual representation," Louvat said. "A vacuum cleaner could be taken out of its box, explore its environment, take pictures, create a map and could then be programmed to clean any room in house, and know where charger is." Other potential markets, said Louvat, include work in the work in health care market where a robot could deliver supplies and medicine to different rooms. "The precision can be pretty high," added Louvat.

ER's software can recognise objects when they are turned upside down, or turned at an angle to the camera; recognise objects as they move closer to, or farther away from, the camera; recognise objects that are partially obscured by other objects (ER claims that some objects can be recognised even when they are 90 percent occluded); deal with lighting artifacts caused by reflections and backlighting.

This is in 2002, without any custom vision hardware. In 10 years, the capabilities of vision hardware and software will have advanced significantly. See this article for a representation of where we are likely to be in 20 years.

See also this article.

Robots that look human

The man who mistook his girlfriend for a robot



From the article:

And that, it turns out, makes Hanson's heads unique. The humanoids that have made news the past few years—Asimo, Grace, Kismet—are fine robots all, talented, versatile, smart, friendly. Asimo, the plastic-suited Honda humanoid, walks on two legs and welcomes visitors to the factory that builds it. Carnegie Mellon's Grace, a six-foot-tall conglomeration of metal parts on wheels topped with an animated computer-monitor face, registered itself for a conference last year, found its way to the right room, and gave a presentation. Kismet, the media darling of a few years back, looks people in the eye, smiles when they do, and learns just like a baby would, by watching and copying. Who wouldn't like these three? Other robots are being designed to work as nurses, tutors, servants and companions. But despite their talents, every one of these robots looks ... well, like a robot. They're sometimes appealing in a cartoonish sort of way, but they're metallic, awkward, clunky.

Not Hanson's heads. And for that reason, the next morning at 10:30 sharp the reporters are waiting—a roomful of them—and TV cameras are here to capture the debut of Hanson's latest, most advanced model. Hanson, 33, walks in and sets something on a table. It's a backless head, bolted to a wooden platform, but it's got a face, a real face, with soft flesh-toned polymer skin and finely sculpted features and high cheekbones and big blue eyes. Hanson hooks it up to his laptop, fiddles with the wires. He's not saying much; it might be an awkward moment except for the fact that everyone else is too busy checking out the head to notice. Then Hanson taps a few keys and . . . it moves. It looks left and right. It smiles. It frowns, sneers, knits its brows anxiously. Now the questions start, and Hanson is in his element: The head's got 24 servomotors, he says, covering the major muscles in the human face. It's got digital cameras in its eyes, to watch the people watching it, and new software will soon let the head mimic viewers. Its name is K-Bot, and it's modeled after Kristen Nelson, his lab assistant.

Imagine that you walk into a restaurant. The attractive woman at the door greets you. She recognizes you and asks you how you are doing. She looks completely real, but she is a robot. Because robots will recognize you, greet you personally and remember every detail about you, there will very likely come a time in the not-too-distant future where we prefer robotic restaurants and stores.