
Robots Are the Next Revolution, So Why Isn't Anyone Acting Like It? - eguizzo
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/robots-are-the-next-revolution-so-why-isnt-anyone-acting-like-it
======
ChuckMcM
I agree its a pretty weak article but its a blog, not a paper, so I would not
expect it to rise to the level of rigor for something intended for one of the
IEEE journals.

That being said, if you've ever heard of 'charity burnout' there is something
similar called 'robotics burnout.' You discover it, you engage in excitement,
but nothing happens, you can only be excited (or charitable it seems) so long
before you need to take a break. But lets start at the beginning shall we?

So in 1985 the Homebrew Computer Club was waning, it had been the center of
attention between 75 and 85 but with people like IBM in the game and Apple
going much more 'corporate' it was more of a users group than the folks who
were changing the world.

One of the special interest groups from that meeting was the Robotics SIG. A
guy named Dick Prather who was active in that SIG decided that even if the
computer group was dying, robotics was just getting started and so he did the
SIG equivalent of a setsid(2) call and made the Homebrew Robotics Club an
independent organization. It has met continuously since then (yes 26 years).

One of the things about 'robots' that most people don't get, is that
fundamentally a robot is any machine that has some level of program-ability
that does one or more tasks while adapting to its environment. Your dishwasher
is a good robot, it washes the dishes for you, or the pots and pans, or the
stem ware, it uses a variety of sensors to decide if the dishes are clean yet
and it dries them afterwards. If you didn't have it you would be getting a
sore back moving dishes from the counter-top to the sink, to the drying rack.

Folks have argued that to be a robot it would have to do it like humans do,
but that is an angels-on-pins sort of argument. Generally robots are the
expression of automation, and they have (as a market) been growing where ever
it makes economic sense. As processors get cheaper and more powerful more and
more things make economic sense.

Of course for things that are really expensive or really dangerous its really
easy to justify the cost. So for things like disarming bombs, or hunting
people down in a country you are not technically at war with and killing them
are both easily justified costs if you can automate them.

ISRobotics, the guys who make the Roomba, make most of their money selling
robots for things like mine clearing and recon, and yes shooting people.
Founded in 1990 they were making $1M/yr in 1996 with 16 employees[1], that
wasn't particularly sustainable but in 2001, with 9/11 they demonstrated the
value of their packbots. And now at $401M/yr they are doing quite well except
that over 60% of their revenue is "G&I" which is code for "Government and
Industrial".

Now that isn't all bad, its just that instead of comparing the robotics
revolution to the 'PC' revolution you have to compare it to the 'computer'
revolution, which is to say that a whole lot of investment and development is
focused on corporate and government use until the the industry can supply
enough automation to slake their thirst and to give some time to 'regular'
folks.

So in the 80's we had companies like Androbot and Heathkit approaching mobile
robotics as gimmicks/educational, in the 90's we had a lot of toys and the
start of robot (really armored R/C vehicles with minimal automation) combat.
And now in the second decade of the 21st century we're seeing prototype self
driving cars, a number of walking designs, and energy systems that can sustain
things for more than a couple of minutes.

Bottom line, things are going along, and getting better, and in many ways
getting better faster now than they have in the past, but there is so much
eco-system that has to develop around building mobile robotics that can do
useful work that the rate of change feels much more evolutionary than
revolutionary.

When we look at robotics startups today, places like Willow Garage and Anybot
you can get a good feel for how cool things _could_ be and how far we are from
seeing the kind of uptake like we did with personal computers.

[1]
[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/07/08/214354/index.htm)

[2]
[http://investor.irobot.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=193096&p=irol...](http://investor.irobot.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=193096&p=irol-
newsArticle&ID=1527102&highlight=)

~~~
MaysonL
War and toys, the best drivers of technology.

~~~
pstuart
Sex too: VCRs and AOL definitely benefitted.

------
robotresearcher
This is a weak article. First, it ignores the existence of commodity robots.
Something like 4 million Roombas have been sold. They are easy to use
commodity robots that sell in volume from Best Buy.

Second, many people, going back to the early 20th century, have imagined
buying cheap general purpose robots, just as they have imagined buying jet
packs and holidaying on space stations. Just because I imagine it doesn't make
it feasible. The reason there aren't many autonomous-robot startups is that no
one knows how to do the AI. It may make sense to you that you ought to be able
to put together robots like you put together a spreadsheet, but that's not how
it turned out to be. The article admits this, describing day to day tasks as
"incredibly complex". Yet then asks us to imagine the cheap, capable robot.

Third, the "mysterious" capital behind Willow Garage is Scott Hassan, an early
and thus very rich Googler. It says so on the WG web page
[<http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/about-us/history>].

Fourth, Microsoft has Robotics Studio, a package that competes with ROS in
many respects. It is exactly a "robot operating system" on top of Windows.
Researchers pretty much ignore Robot Studio, but why does this journalist do
so when he says that "what we need Microsoft [...] to do is build an operating
system....". It has been trying for years. Thanks for the advice, though.

A low-quality piece for Spectrum, picked up from a blog.

------
noonespecial
I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that they have been the next
revolution since Karel Čapek gave us the term in 1920. If you haven't read
R.U.R. you should. It feels like it belongs in last weeks Wired.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Čapek>

~~~
zeteo
After reading R.U.R., it's amazing how many themes of the subsequent 90 years'
worth of dystopic literature it predicts! Robot rebellion, androids, human
fertility crisis - it's all there, and more.

It's also kind of ironic that the same piece of literature that introduced the
concept of the robot also introduced the perennial concept of the coming robot
rebellion.

~~~
skermes
It's not actually that ironic. Robots tend to be symbols for an oppressed
underclass - their masters have (or think they have) a high degree of control
over their every thought and action, they're often tasked with menial or
dangerous labor, and frequently considered 'other' and 'less' than their
squishy human overlords. And what's every slave driver's worst fear?

As literary devices, robots don't have much to do _besides_ rebel. If they
just did what we told them to do, there wouldn't be much story to tell. (Note
that that's part of why _I, Robot_ was so mind blowing - a lot of it was about
things going wrong when the robots did _exactly_ what we told them.)

~~~
zeteo
I think it had more to do with Čapek subscribing to Marxist theories about
historical inevitability and such. His robots are in fact a mental
abstraction, a caricature of early 20th century proletariat that was
supposedly bound to revolt, sooner or later. Čapek is taking this to extremes,
purporting to show that even a race that was bred especially for labor would
inevitably revolt, if only they were afforded the modicum of intelligence that
was needed for that labor.

Of course, we now know that Marx's inflexible theories were wrong, and
proletarian revolution is by no means inevitable. We are, however, still stuck
with a half-baked idea of the inevitable robot revolution, which tinges the
whole field of robotics research, at least as seen from the outside, with a
subconscious bitterness of fear.

------
huxley
If you were thinking multipurpose C3P0 style robots, then the revolution has
been 5 years in the future for the last 30 years.

However single-purpose robots have become part of the fabric of most
industries. Heck, most people don't even think of them as robots. So the
revolution happened, it is now the new normal.

~~~
msluyter
I had a similar thought the other day while using an automated paper towel
dispenser. "Isn't this primitive robot?" Yet, I'd never really thought to
apply the term "robot." It'll be interesting to watch the evolution from
dumb/single-purpose robots to smarter/multi-purpose ones.

~~~
Semiapies
If that's a primitive robot, we've had primitive robots since the first push-
button elevator or automatic door, many decades ago.

It's like the defining-down of AI. Proponents promised strong AI Real Soon Now
for decades; now they say that we're just being unfair if we don't count email
filters as "AI".

------
johngalt
Two xeon server class machines in the robot? 16 cores?! That's a lot of
horsepower to carry around.

Amazon Robot Brain anyone? $0.25 per robot hour.

Or cheat the system with Mechturk?

~~~
tkahnoski
A mechanical turk powered "machine" sounds like an absolutely fascinating
experiment.

The tricky bit would be designing an interface for turkers to manipulate the
robot.

The other complicated bit is making sure the turkers can't cause serious harm.
(We don't want turkers controlling UAVs...)

~~~
skidooer
That is actually something I have been thinking about recently. People spend
hours upon hours playing games that resemble, to some degree, real jobs.
(Think FarmVille, CafeWorld, etc.)

If you could craft the game in such a way to provide the control to the robots
for things that are not easily automated, people's entertainment would provide
the labour required to control the operation for free. A capitalistic dream.

~~~
noonespecial
Sorting recycling comes to mind. The manual labor version of it involves
standing over a slow moving belt of stinky trash and picking out the valuable
recyclables.

Seems like a Fanuc with a suction gripper and a hires web cam is all it might
take to get a little "trashville" going. Give the housewives who collect the
most alu while the kids are away at school day passes to local spas as prizes
and you've got a win.

------
secretasiandan
Because there's much lower hanging fruit.

Extracting information and optimizing actions based on it via
purchasing/timing decisions. Requires much less capital commitment and
potentially much higher ROI.

------
andrewtbham
FTA: "Buzzing you in when you get locked out, signing for a package, taking
that frozen chicken out of the freezer while you’re at work, feeding your pet,
and of course the veritable classic of robo-problems: getting you a beer." -
imho these are terrible examples of what a robot could do... there are much
simpler solutions for most of these problems than buying this:
<http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview>

~~~
spitfire
I thought that was so cool, until I got the price - $400,000 Something makes
me think they're aiming for the useless academic toy market.

~~~
forensic
Once the software gets better the hardware can be made far less robust - and
therefore cheaper. PR2 is a good start.

------
danboarder
Looking for general purpose robots misses the evolution in home robotics
already in progress. I've used a iRobot Roomba for vacuuming our home for
about two years now, it works great. I expect future versions will be able to
do more tasks.

Consider the progression of the iPod as a music player to a general purpose
touch computer (running iOS apps of all kinds) that is is today -- this is
perhaps a good picture of how home robotics may progress from single purpose
to multi-purpose household machines.

------
b_emery
Here's a group aiming to be the Arduino of robotics with a $1000 iRobot, ROS
and Kinect based robot platform:

<http://www.bilibot.com/about>

I guess this still goes into the 'Homebrew Computer Club' category, but now
all we need is a Wozniak-Jobs-like pair to take it to the next level.

------
endergen
It's the term robot. For most people that means human like machines. Making
human like machines is a terrible waste of energy compared to just making the
form of a machine match it's tasks.

If you instead say machine automation rather than robot, well then you see
that we probably are in that revolution.

------
hunterp
I've been working on a theory on this one. In the most abstract sense,
computers are an extension of the human self. Cave Paintings, Papyrus scrolls,
Guitars, Printing Presses, Pens, Televisions, Computers are all an evolution
of this. You can think of a mobile phone as a inanimate (non-sentient) robot
that lacks the ability to self-ambulate. There is a distinction between
sentience which has not yet been achieved, and partial autonomy. There simply
is not a mass market use case that makes small scale robots like the finch
popular enough. Instead, I believe that mobile devices will continue adding
new and interesting features. NFC will be the big thing next. After that, some
new pathways will be: printing from mobiles, and possibly some of them will
have movable parts that developers can program.

Eventually, the mass market appeal of mobile devices will combine with the
usefulness of a physical manifestion of our ideas into reality. You need to
make a cheap robot USEFUL.

Ultimately, it is the person that controls the robot that will get the most
use out of it. Just like a master craftsperson can use his or her tools far
more effectively than any random person.

So...in one idea, the reason robots are not really here is that there is no
mass market appeal to justify the hundreds or thousands of dollars that they
cost.

------
zafka
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. All the parts are laying around,
and I just need to start putting them together..literally, I have steppers and
servos, and some DSP test boards. I am getting de ja vu all over again. When I
was finishing up school, i commented that if I had a little more sense i would
just quit, and make web pages. Here it is 15 years later, and about time to
close up the pottery shop. Zafka Robotics does have a nice ring to it.

------
cellshade
There's _is_ a very successful consume robotics product that everyone knows
about. I have one, and it's fantastic. It's called Roomba.

~~~
lwat
iRobot is amazingly successful not just in home robots but also in the
military and public sectors. I love my Roomba and I'll be purchasing the
Scooba 230 too.

------
ziadbc
The phenomenon that the articles title refers to is caused by something
simple.

The tech world got into media, and since then media related technologies get a
sizable chunk of the attention.

------
ivankirigin
There are very real technical limitations that make the kinds of robots
available limited. Tele-operation is ok for the military, but interfaces
aren't good enough yet to, say, enable a human size robot to open a door
quickly. Automated driving is up and coming, but still a few years away from
being a real product.

This is a combination of perception and manipulation problems. There is only
so much that can be done by a robot moving from point a to point b, and we're
seeing products that leverage that. Roomba, toys, packbot, grand challenge
bots - none of them really see, touch, and grab things. This isn't a matter of
some discoveries in a university that are waiting to be productized. No one
has found the right answer.

I left a job in robotics to work on more interesting products, but I hope to
return when the tech is real.

------
ccarpenterg
Is there a HN-like community for Robotics/Satellite stuff?

~~~
tezmc
There's a Robotics subreddit. It's not super-busy but it seems to get a couple
of submissions per day.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/>

------
ecuzzillo
Nobody ever acts like the next revolution is the next revolution. If they did,
it would be the current revolution, or at least the current fad.

------
melling
I almost got a Roomba but I went with a Dyson instead because all reviews said
you still need to vacuum. I'll probably get the next generation, which should
be out in a year or so.

Moore's Law is a bit flat at the beginning. For example, only 1% of the human
DNA was sequenced at the first half of the project and the other 99% during
the second half, if I remember the story correctly. We need a few more 18
month periods before robots start to become more useful in a non-controlled
environment. My money is on 2015-2018.

------
giberson
It's all about price points. The crux of the problem is glanced in the last
paragraph of the article "Imagine a robot that you could buy at Best Buy for
somewhere between $2k and $4k." Right now, that just isn't feasible. For
autonomous mobility you need components that qualify the following criteria:
fast, quiet, safe, and precise. Unfortunately, such components just aren't
affordable yet.

The revolution frenzy won't hit until your upper middle class income family
can afford it.

------
anonymousDan
It seems to me the problem is that there is so much variation in the
underlying robotics hardware that it will be difficult to come up with a 'one-
size-fits-all' OS.

~~~
VladRussian
the hardware, as usually, is abstractable into drivers.

Take for example hand movement - you may have the model of the robot's hand
including actuators' input/output abstractions, length/weight of the arms,
etc... It is common for all the robots with arms and very mathematically-
mechanically complicated task to calculate the dynamic of the hand from
current position, at current speed to another position with another speed,
including recoil on the rest of the body, ... Mathematically it is a
complicated smooth manifold in the high dimension space and various analyses
and optimizations on such objects have been a very fruitful source of many
Ph.D.s and articles :) Though on practice any "good" suboptimal solution would
do. The 3D orientation and environment sensing is also abstractable - here
again the calculation and effective algorithms (which are really hardware
independent - for example stereo analysis is dependent basically on the
resolution and the speed of the input sensors and teh CPU power and effective
algorithm - sounds familiar?) is the heavy part. The [speech] command
processing - has been also abstracted into input devices and processing core
algorithms.

------
ahuibers
One big reason robots aren't very good is because actuators are not very good.
There are no good artificial muscles. Motors are great to power wheels and
propellers but not much else. On the sensor side, robots can see, hear and
even touch quite effectively. I think the software is slowly making progress,
as is the # of computations we can do per watt. But lack of actuator progress
severely hampers the future of robotics IMO.

~~~
billswift
Hydraulics and pneumatics work pretty good, but they are really tedious to
work with, especially for people used to electronics. Their biggest problems
are cost and seals, especially seal durability. And of course the cost in
energy to keep them powered - when I get around to it, I expect to need to use
a IC powered version out in the garage. But then energy budget is a problem
with all mobile robots.

------
rsaarelm
I figured robots haven't gained momentum at anywhere the same rate as personal
or distributed computing since robust sensing and interaction of the physical
world is still mostly an unsolved problem. Robots are useful in carefully
physically constrained areas like industrial assembly lines and can be finicky
toys that are too limited to do much anything useful, and there are things
like Roombas that are somewhere in between the two.

A solution to the robust physical interaction thing sounds like something that
would be pretty much AI-complete and would imply a lot bigger changes than
housecleaning robots. This would just get you the science fiction humanoid
robot that can walk into a house and start cleaning up and renovating the
walls, but given the amount of flexible smarts and learning ability a general
solution for being able to pull that off involves, it could probably start
doing your job for you as well.

I'd guess there is also a less scary technology branch, where the current
limited scope robots become somewhat more feasible with better manufacturing,
materials, computing and communication technology, taking use of things like
human telepresence and heavy duty data mining that have become easier due to
just plain Moore's Law instead of groundbreaking AI research. These kind of
robots are going to require environments tailored to their limitations, like
the existing assembly line robots, as well as doing the R&D on figuring out
just what kind of robot and environment combinations are going to do useful
stuff, so it's not going to be the sort of lightning-fast development we saw
with personal computers. More like the gradual development from 19th century
homes to late 20th century homes full of electrical household appliances.

In fact, electrical household appliance probably is the metaphor for thinking
about these sorts of robots, not a metal man walking about and enslaving
humankind. That might explain why people aren't vastly enthused about them,
even though there's probably a market for them.

------
mmcdan
Robots are the next revolution, but not because of the examples listed in the
articles. I don't get that excited to hear about robots getting my packages,
cooking my dinner, talking to my (future)wife, etc...I think the real
revolution is with robots that can provide oxygen to people in burning
buildings, locate/extract people under debris after a natural disaster, and
find my lost car keys.

As for the robot in every home, I think a cheap, easy-to-program home
automation processor that connects wirelessly to custom hardware is more
appealing. That way I could set my bird-feeder, alarm system, and central-
heating to "vacation-mode" and leave with peace-of-mind.

------
yters
Robots don't have true intelligence, that's why.

However, if someone could create a general way to power robots with
intelligence, i.e. plug a robot into the intelligence grid and there it goes,
they'd be billionaires.

Anyone figure it out?

------
BoppreH
Comparing the software revolution with a robot revolution is just unfair. The
hardware part that fueled the software revolution was multi-purpose, so there
was a fixed initial cost while the cost to develop the subsequent (amateur)
programs was negligible.

The develop-test-debug cycle is also much faster in the software industry.

But I do dream of a world where Lego Mindstorms are widely available and used
as any other toy.

------
barrkel
Seems to me that until we have robots that collect energy and resources and
build other robots - or alternatively, some kind of programmably
reconfigurable substratum like a low-tech T-1000 (Terminator 2) - the capital
costs are hard to overcome.

~~~
FEBlog
Exactly! that is why I am so interested in Self-reconfiguring modular
robotics, there are several companies that are starting to offer modules to
the general public, although all but one are for manually reconfigured system.
But I see a lot of movement in both business and research over the last years.
I think that it is likely that you will be able to buy reasonably priced Self-
reconfiguring systems in 5-15 years. and in the meantime you can play with
cublets :-) <http://www.modrobotics.com/blog/?p=187> more on SRCMR
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
reconfiguring_modular_robo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
reconfiguring_modular_robot)

------
mitko
what about the robots in people's pockets. iPhones and Androids can do so many
things and have so many sensors. These are robots, just not in the shape we
imagined they will take. And they are not yet in the autonomous decision level
we imagined they will be.

Disclaimer: I'm a masters student in robotics and don't use iPhone or Android
(yet)

~~~
wladimir
How are phones robots? Doesn't robot imply that it has actuators as well as
sensors?

~~~
mitko
Actuators in phones include - playing sound, displaying images, connecting to
networks and other appliances, vibrating... etc.

------
mildweed
Standards-compliant hardware and software platforms. Community documentation.
Publicity of successes.

------
Apocryphon
I wish someone would revive the cyberpunk-prophesied revolution from the '80s:
Virtual Reality.

------
Ben_Dean
Because robots have been the next revolution for at least 50 years.

------
jasongullickson
I am :)

------
phlux
They are! but the ones who are, are looking for way to kill you with that
robot.

------
matthewslotkin
Really interesting idea. While I know nothing about robotics, this makes me
wish I did.

Does anyone know the startup costs of building a robot vs. making a computer
in the 70s? My guess is the cost and complexity of building a robot far
exceeds that of building your own computer (even from just a # of required
parts perspective). Then again, a walking robot like the one Honda has dumped
millions into may just be the wrong way of thinking about it. Perhaps a rumba-
esque creature is a better indicator of what the first PR (personal robot)
will look like.

