Build Your Next Company Around Robotics.

7/30/2019 Build Your Next Company Around Robotics.

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Daniel Harris

Digital technology [email protected]

ver Googled the term robotics? Theonly major company and productthat show up in the top 100 hitsare Microsoft and its RoboticsStudio, a development tool thatleaves a lot to be desired. (Notone of the dozen or so folksinterviewed for this article

uses it.) In fact, most of the search results

include news, collegiate research, educa-tion, and events.

Yet in 2006, Koreas Ministry ofCommerce, Industry, and Energypredicted the global intelligentrobotics market would reapnearly $90 billion by 2015(up from a couple billion in2005) with a growth rate of57%1. A more recent studyconducted in January by ABIresearch (www.abiresearch.com) indi-cates that the personal robotics market(including toy robots like Sonys Aiboand task-based robots like the iRobotsRoomba) will reach $15 billion by 20152.

Now if thats not exciting enough forpotential entrepreneurs, two things stand outas absolute truths when it comes to the tech-nologies that enable robotics. First, many experts saythat there will indeed be a robot (think humanoid,not a glorified vacuum) in every home one day. Second,the missing elephants in the room are already planningtheir rendezvous to capture what should amount to billionsin revenues.

Thats right. The Microsofts and Intels of the world are look-ing at the future and try ing to make sure their lunch hooks are

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in the kitchen ahead of time, eagerly planning to snatch whatevermorsel becomes available by assimilating robot technologies intothe collective.

No mere mortal company can beat the established semiconduc-tor and software giants in place now. But what if you want to starta company in robotics with only one exit strategy: join the gang

after it throws some dough in your general direction? Whattechnologies that empower robotics should you focus on to

get noticed by the big bossesand not wind up getting

stomped into submission?Most experts would agree that four viable tech-nologies and research areas would be good start-

ing points: cheap sensors, a solid applicationprogramming interface (API), inexpen-

sive kits, and artificial intelligence.Lets say we have a mobile, safe,

intelligent robot for personal use.But if the cost is $100,000, would

anyone buy it? The cost of the electrome-chanical components used in a robot is still

very expensive [with respect to] sensors, actua-tors, etc., says Dennis Hong, director of theRobotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa)at Virginia Tech.

We have seen this in the early 70s with the per-sonal-computer revolution, adds Hong. Unless the

component costs drops down, personal robotics as abusiness wont be able to succeed. iRobots Roomba is

probably the only success story I can think of.

SenSibly Priced SenSorS

Unless youre working on an R&D team for a major corporationor university, you probably get nauseous just thinking about theprice of some of the sensors required for many robotics applica-

tions, especially if they require one or more laser-based sensors.Mobility is one of the primary driving factors.

Field robots (outdoor robots) need to go over rocks, hills,bumps, across bushes, etc., for them to be useful (bomb disposal,search and rescue, scientific exploration). If it cannot reach its goal,its no use. For personal robots (home, indoor use), even thoughthe environment is more structured, it still needs to climb steps,etc., says Hong.

The [robotics] industry needs real-world robust sensors thatare affordable, says Dave Barrett, an Olin College associate pro-fessor of mechanical engineering and director of the schools

Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE).This comes as no surprise if we look at last years DARPA

Urban Challenge. Driverless cars used robotic technologies totravel 60 miles in six hours or less on an urban course while obey-ing traffic regulations and dealing with other traffic and obsta-cles. Seven of the 11 finalists used Velodyne HDL-64E lightdetection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors, costing around $75,000each (Fig. 1).

However, sensors like these may berequired if the auto industry is tomove forward with building carsthat drive themselves, saving aroundhalf of the nearly 42,000 lives peryear lost to traffic accidents that arecaused by human error, according to astatement made at Januarys Interna-tional Consumer Electronics Showby Sebastian Thrun, co-leader ofthe Stanford University team thatplaced second in the 2007 DAR-PA Urban Challenge.

1. The Velodyne HDL-64E high-definition LIDAR scanner is designed for autono-

mous vehicle navigation, mapping, and surveying. It provides a full 360 horizon-

tal and 26.8 vertical field of view, a selectable frame rate, and an output rate of

more than a million points per second. But the price tag is a whopping $75,000per unit. (courtesy of Velodyne)

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Very few people could afford a car with even a single VelodyneHDL-64E sensor attached. So how do we get to a point wherecars that drive themselves are created with a consumers (and nota DARPA Challenge) pocketbook in mind? According to Barrett,whats really needed is a vision system with a good color cameraand a powerful computer behind it.

Also, according to Todd Dickey, a lead engineer for the HondaAdvanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO) project, sounddetection is getting a lot of notice right now. In a large environ-ment where there is a lot of ambient noise, it is difficult to deter-mine what [sounds are] being directed at the robot, says Dickey.

So Honda is spending beaucoup dollars in researching howa robot can determine sound thats directed at it versus othersounds. For humans, this may be as simple as making eye contactor some using other gesture followed by dialogue. For robots, atleast for the time being, more may be required, such as calling therobot by its name.

Researchers at Honda are looking into higher-resolution andmore accurate cameras, too. According to Dickey, the latest infor-mation out of Japan indicates that the ASIMO can quickly distin-guish people and items and react accordingly.

Speaking of Japan, Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka Univer-sity offered his thoughts about where improvements are needed:Actuators are very different from human muscles, he says, notingthat theres a need for more humanlike muscle actuators. To doso, actuators need to be made more linear and should not rely onreduction gears.

But sensors arent the only hardware lacking in robotics tech-nologies. William Lovell, CEO of c-Link Systems, says thatsilicon-wise, there are not many motor drivers out there, withSTMicroelectronics being the most predominant player.

He also indicated that c-Link would like to see more H-bridges,as the company currently builds its own. It would be nice to have

off-the-shelf H-bridges with temp monitoring, among otherfeatures, says Lovell.

And then, of course, theres the software.

Wanted: roboticS aPi

When it comes to robotics, companies are re-inventing thesame mousetrap over and over again, especially on the softwareside. But it doesnt take a robot scientist to note that much of thisre-invention business stems from the lack of any sort of decentrobotics API.

Isnt it feasible to capture the description of robotic tasks, suchas movement and rotation, in a well-written (and hopefully com-mittee-based open-source) API? Surely, the devil is in the details.But why do companies like iRobot need to develop all of theircode in house?

Couldnt tasks such as mapping an area and object avoidance

be broken down into a set of functions that, if well coded, applyto diverse areas and environments? According to Hondas ToddDickey, the need for a good robotics API is especially urgent inindustrial robotics, where each software package and user inter-face is different.

National Instruments (NI) seems closest to creating an APIfor such a purpose, and it should make an appearance in its Lab-VIEW product before the end of the year, according to Anu Saha,the academic product marketing engineer at NI. The first API willtarget as many sensors as NI has assigned developers.

The motivation for this was simple: There are no standardtools, and people are rolling their own code in C and C++, saysSaha. What is needed is a tool that speaks the language of motors

[in the form of] a human robotic interface (HRI).NI also believes a design environment that works with FPGAs

is desirable since FPGAs are so very handy when it comes todeveloping robots. There are some gaps, but it is a good startat getting all of the components working together, says Saha,describing LabVIEWs role in robotic development.

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2. If you pop open

the Intelligent Brick

part of the Lego MindstormNXT kit and slide the LCD out of the

way, you can see an Atmel 32-bit, ARM-based

microcontroller and an Atmel combination flash,

SRAM, EEPROM, and ADC.

3. Legos popular Mindstorm NXT robotics kit may look like childs play. But it

packs a serious punch for developers who want to sharpen some of their owndesigns too. (photo: 2004 The LEGO Group)


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FIRST Robotics Competition alumni

Matched comparison group

88%53%

77%63%

55%

28%

41%

13%

27%

3%

45%20%

31%

8%

71%30%

7

28%

4

13% 30%

8%

20%

2

3%

Attend college

Aspire to post-graduate degree

Major in science or engineering

Major specifically in engineering

Internship/co-op job during freshman year

Expect to have a science/technology-related career

Pursue career in engineering

Perform community service

4. Programs such as FIRST can have a major impact on students interest in robotics. Students are three

times as likely to major specifically in engineering, roughly 10 times as likely to get an apprenticeship,internship, or co-op job in their freshman year, and nearly four times as likely to pursue a career in engineer-

ing after participating.

If you look at the spectrum of software,there is a lot of academic [code] out therewritten in C/C++, and it is convoluted,says Barrett. Robotics is obviously interdis-ciplinary, and some mechanical engineerswouldnt give a hoot about C/C++, so astrong design environment is also desir-able. Products like LabVIEW provide anenvironment in which mechanical engi-

neers can prosper, not struggle, he says.LabVIEW bridges the gap between

block diagrams and reality, Barrett adds.While Microsoft offers Robotics Studio,the software is not quite on par with Lab-VIEW, so there are plenty of opportunitiesfor smaller companies to be snatched upby Microsoft.

StoP Kitting around

Robotics, like golf, can be an incrediblyexpensive hobby, with many of the DAR-PA challengers looking at a minimum of amillion dollars just to get their foot in thedoor. Therefore, driving the cost of robotickits down is a rather important goal.

Even the Lego Mindstorm NXT robot-ic kit makes an expensive stocking stuffer,priced at about $250 retail at lego.com. Still,this very nice learning tool for children ages10 and up includes some rather sophisti-cated features, including four sensor types(light, sound, touch, and ultrasonic vision)and three interactive servo motors.

T h e k i t a l s o b o a s t s a n A t m e l

AT91SAM7S256 microcontroller basedon the 32-bit ARM7TDMI RISC proces-

sor; an Atmel ATMEGA48 combination4-kbyte flash, 512-byte SRAM; a 256-byteEEPROM; and an eight-channel, 10-bitanalog-to-digital converter (ADC) (Fig. 2and 3). For more information on the Mind-storm kit, see The Mind Of Mindstormsat www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online16149.

artificial unintelligenceWe cant even seem to get a general com-

puting platform to do what we want it tomost of the time. While robot scientistshave made impressive progress over theyears, much more work needs to be done.In fact, according to Dickey, AI is the mostheavily researched field in robotics today.

Ishiguro and his research team at Osa-ka Universitys Department of AdaptiveMachine Systems are attempting to applycognitive research to facilitate human-likebehavior in robots. According to Ishiguro,this is by far the most difficult aspect ofdeveloping a humanoid robot.

The timeline on the software is verychallenging [to facilitate] mimickinghuman behavior, says Ishiguro. Yet he feelshis team can develop something reason-able within the next five years or so. Buteven coming close to perfecting this ismore like 50 years off, a figure both Hondaand Ishiguro agree upon (see To Be AlmostHuman Or Not To Be, That Is The Question,

ED Online 14763).

Unless it is teleoperated, the robotneeds to be smart. Even if teleoperated, it


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needs to show some partial autonomousbehavior to make it useful, says Hong.The DARPA Urban Challenge was agood example of addressing the challengeof developing intelligent robots. The robotcars needed to drive by themselves, nego-tiating the urban traffic and following all

the rules. CMU (Carnegie Mellon), Stan-ford, and Virginia Tech are the three lead-ing teams in this effort.

elementary, my dear WatSon

The year 2015 and its potential for rev-enue arent as far away as they seem, so now

is the time for today s youth to get involvedin robotics. However, very few colleges anduniversities offer bachelors, masters, orPhD programs specifically in robotics.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute offers aBS in robotics engineering. Georgia Techoffers the first interdisciplinary roboticsPhD. And then there are other programs,such as Carnegie Mellons minor in robot-ics as part of an engineering degree. Afterthat, there are a few tracks and classes, andthen the crickets are chirping.

That s why programs such as DeanKamens For Inspiration and Recogni-tion of Science and Technology (FIRST),which has had an incredible impact, are so

important (Fig. 4). FIRST now involvesmore than 150,000 students ages 6 to 18and 44,000 mentors competing in nearly40 countries (see Young Engineers NeedYou! at ED Online 18106 and Team Awk-ward Turtle Takes Second At FIRST atDrill Deeper 18476).

danger, Will robinSon

We know that robotics will play a big partin the future, but its unclear how it willunfold. Who is going to step in to bringthe cost down? The U.S. federal govern-

ment seems a likely candidate.Many other governments have shown

the willingness to pay to get the cost downthrough research and development activi-ties, in much the same way the cost of GPStechnology was tamped down over theyears. For example, the Japanese govern-ment has coughed up nearly $42 millionso far for the first phase of a humanoidrobotics project.

Companies like Honda and other largecorporations are developing robotic tech-nology in house and plan on outsourcingtheir technology to third parties once theywork out all the kinks. So, the future looksbright for robotics. Theres only the ques-tion of who will step up and deliver.

referenceS

1. hud hv es B cuk f gb

rb Mk, www.kois.go.kr, o. 19,

2006

2. Ps rb idus gw $15

B b 2015, www.gizmag.com, J.

2, 2008

3. Jp ks b fuu, news.yahoo.com, M 1, 2008

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