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Explosive UGV market growth, Fact or Fiction?

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UGV Market GrowthWintergreen Research is publicizing a finding that the “…first responder and military ground robot marketplace will expand at close to 20% annually for the rest of the decade.”  Furthermore, “Markets at $4.5 billion in 2013 reach $12.0 billion by 2019.”

This is welcome news for the developers of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV).  Robohub points out that this projection is consistent with a Markets and Markets report that predicts a 17.4% CAGR for the same time period. Of course, any headline in the media must be greeted with a certain degree of skepticism. Do these projections make sense?

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Big Brother, We are Watching You: An Opinion about PRISM, New Technology, and Privacy

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Big Brother and Privacy

Privacy in the news

If you follow the news, it seems that many technological advances – computers, internet, emails, cell phones, and even unmanned systems – have turned against us.  Instead of tools that serve, they have become instruments that watch and track.

Leaked documents revealed widespread government intrusion into emails and telephone metadata. Senators have raised suspicions about intrusive FBI investigative techniques.  States fear Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and are restricting police access to them. Activists groups are agitating for privacy protections.

Even Superman is annoyed. In the movie Man of Steel, he trashes a UAV that was following him, while growling, “You can’t find out where I hang up my cape.”

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Unmanned Turkey Systems

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Turkey robot

Leg Lab’s first bipedal walking robots was Spring Turkey. “Developed as an experimental
platform for implementing force control actuation techniques, motion description and control techniques, and various walking algorithms,” there is no word as to whether it gobbled.  Far from the rarefied academic atmosphere of Cambridge, another turkey robot earns it’s keep by catching poachers for the U.S. Forest Service in Arizona.  AMREL wishes you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving, and hopes that none of the turkeys on your feasting table are mechanical.

 

 

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AMREL Demonstrates at ROBOT RODEO

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AMREL’s superlight handheld, the ROCKY DB6 will be used as a payload controller & OCU to display autonomous functions.  “The really amazing thing is that in less than 30 days, off-the-shelf DB6s have been integrated into two robots to perform multiple functions,” states Ron McMahan, AMREL’s Vice President of Engineering Solutions.  Look for us at the MacroUSA demonstration at the JIEDO challenge. Read more about the Robot Rodeo here.

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Why are there more unmanned platforms than customers?

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Why are unmanned systems developers offering so many different kinds of platforms and ideas, when there is comparatively little demand by the civilian market? Why are there more offerings than customers?

These questions were raised in the Unmanned Systems group in LinkedIn. It provoked a number of insightful comments about the current state of unmanned systems and its future. If you are a member of LinkedIn, and can log in, you can read the discussion here. Read more

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Tanga Robot

Why you should care about the Uncanny Valley

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Tanga RobotI am going to make a number of assumptions about a certain group of roboticists. They:

  1. May have heard the term “Uncanny Valley.”
  2. Are vaguely aware that it has something to do with people’s revulsion of certain types of humanoid robots.
  3. Feel the concept of “Uncanny Valley” has nothing to do with them, because they deal with “real” robots, not those faddish, impractical, Japanese human imitation contraptions.

If the above describes you, guess what? You are wrong; the “Uncanny Valley” may impact your work, and sooner than you think.

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Telepresence: The killer app for robots? UPDATE

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 Update: This telepresence article inspired more than a few comments in LinkedIn discussion groups.  With the authors’ permission, we are reposting comments made by Tandy Trower of Hoaloha Robotics, and Jim Gunderson of Gamma Two Robots.

“For certain types of scenarios, telepresence is very useful. For example, it has enabled us to explore the surface of Mars, inspect the nuclear reactor buildings in Japan, and enable soldiers to remotely defuse bombs. However, for business and personal/consumer scenarios it is much less clear if the value proposition works. Read more

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Is There a Robot in the House?

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robot_housecleaner_275Here we are, well into the second decade of a new millennium, and not only is there a conspicuous absence of jet packs, but also no robot butler made my breakfast this morning.  Domestic robots are not completely unknown, of course.  There’s the famous vacuuming Roomba, and home-based medical robots are starting to appear.  Yet, while robots are ubiquitous in industry, and rapidly expanding in the military sphere, their presence in our homes is minimal. Read more

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Where are the Japanese robots? – DECEMBER UPDATE

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December Update If you are not reading The Robot Report (and you should be; it’s one of the best things on the web about the robotic industry), you may have missed their article about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.  Much of what it says will not be news to the readers of this blog, but one paragraph caught my attention:

“In the case of Fukushima, both iRobot and QinetiQ, companies that volunteered equipment to Tepco, instructors found that senior Tepco employees were chosen to be trained to operate the American and British robots yet they were less suited to the task than the 20-year olds who had gamer experience. The remote-controlled PackBot and Talon robots and the RC Bobcat tractors, all used gaming consoles to operate their devices and the senior employees were slow to learn. In a recent Webinar on the issue by Robotic Trends, the trainers found that 20-year olds learned in less than a day while it took the older Tepco employees many days to gain the same level of competence.”

With the recent rapid growth of unmanned systems, there has been much speculation about the disruptive effects of their wide-spread adoption.  A commonly-held view is that low-skilled workers will be displaced, while an educated elite (presumably people who make robots) will continue to thrive. Read more

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Walk n’ Roll

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10065456 funny robot walk with cogwheelShould robots walk or roll?  While the answer to this question is obvious for certain applications, it has implications for the entire robot industry, and society as a whole.

Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, has seen the future of robots, and they aren’t walking. In an interview with Pilots Presence (reprinted in IEEE Spectrum), Angle criticized the millions of dollars spent on developing bipedal robots.  These systems often require large groups of support personnel during operation, and have a Mean Time To Failure of 45 minutes. Angle compares these delicate, slow-moving, humanoid systems to the robust iRobot Warrior UGV, which uses treads. Watch this video of the Warrior 710 running rampant over rocks and up stairs, and you will understand his preference for non-legged robots. Wheeled/treaded robots are cheaper, simpler, and more rugged. Read more

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