Disruptions: dining with robots in Silicon Valley
August 13, 2012
The PR2 robot (credit: Willow Garage)
The next wave of robots to enter the home and work force will be remote-controlled telepresence robots, suggests Steve Cousins, president/CEO of Willow Garage, Nick Bilton reports in New York Times Bits.. They will be given more functional bodies, including arms, so they can interact in a physical space.
Robert S. Bauer, an executive director at Willow Garage, predicted that the first wave of robots would most likely become “the body for people with physical disabilities.”
Other possible applications for robots in the near future include robots that drive cars and prepare food, swarms of fly-size robots that could patrol a home or office like guards, and robots like Willow Garage’s PR2 that can pick things up, fold laundry, open doors and bring cups, plates and other small objects to people.
Comments (6)
by Dan Robinson
At first I thoght Gordon meant would the robots be able to live at home and get Medicare. I tend to wonder if the android form will ever be the most useful, at least on floor or level ground
by melajara
I applaud to the M3 DARPA program to look for robots up to 2000x more energy efficient than current ones, see http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/DARPA-Officials-Aiming-for-More-Efficient-Robots-301700/
There is currently huge hype about a forthcoming invasion of robots for everyday life applications.
I see them coming too, but not with the current crop of robotic bodies all too brittle, whatever would be the “brain” behind.
Current robotic “bodies” are just glorified toys at best, and DARPA itself acknowledges that your typical $100k+ robot in the field is “autonomous” for 10 to 20 minutes!
Think of it, hardly the time to deploy them, and it’s already time to go home or you lose that flashy toy in the field!
As we have adipose tissues evenly distributed to serve as repositories of spare energy, at the very least, we should have robots with a distributed battery (or set of), stuffed around the robot body parts. We have also to promote a much more scaled down componentization, it’s no time (yet) to strive in robotics at mimicking life down the cellular level, but we should have mini bricks like Lego parts easily and massively manufacturable with normalized i/o to assemble them in equivalent of robotic “body parts”.
Besides, why the research on artificial muscles is still irrelevant in producing real actuators? We have now interesting materials, with better leverage than the actin/myosin couple responsible of muscle contraction, but this is not demonstrated in current actuators.
Time for a serious collective effort here!
by Gorden Russell
The big question is this: Would the Republicans let Medicare supply these robots so that the physically disabled would be able to live at home? In the long run it would save money, but the Tea Party wants cuts right now.
by Bri
Are you kidding? They are literally practicing slash and burn agriculture. I know you MrG, from other posts. I loved your reference to Egypt and stone axes. Means more to me than you realize, but republicans giving something away? Sounds like your practicing lucid dreaming.
by Spikosauropod
If the Republicans can save medicare from Obamacare, Medicare will probably provide these. They will be too expensive under Obamacare and the committee (also known as the death panel) will not be willing to fund them.
by Bri
I’m not a fan of Obama care. I agree that everything would continue to balloon in price, I just don’t have faith in the republicans. It will be interesting to see how things degenerate. I think regenerative medicine will make health care more affordable. One of the biggest drivers of future healthcare costs is diabetes. Ray spoke of research in relation to the genes that store fat. Experiments in mice have shown that altering it’s function would eliminate heart disease, obesity, type one and two diabetes. You would think that would be first priority. That one treatment would save billions of dollars. I don’t know the status of that treatment, but I’ll bet we won’t see it any time too soon. Sorry to have sounded partisan, but I think the party symbols say it all. The dems are a bunch of jack( you can’t say that!) and the Republicans squash anything in the room with them.