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
What does Reversibility mean for the Defense industry? On January 5, the new U.S. Defense Strategic Guidance was released. Much attention was paid to the following:
“DoD will manage the force in ways that protect its ability to regenerate capabilities that might be needed to meet future, unforeseen demands, maintaining intellectual capital and rank structure that could be called upon to expand key elements of the force.”
This line of thinking can be described as “ reversibility, ” a buzzword that has assumed prominence among those vendors who are trying to navigate the planned drawdowns and future budget cuts. “Reversibility” acknowledges the overwhelming historical evidence that we have a rotten track record of preparing for the next war, and we need to be able to change course as the situation warrants. Read more
I am going to make a number of assumptions about a certain group of roboticists. They:
If the above describes you, guess what? You are wrong; the “Uncanny Valley” may impact your work, and sooner than you think.
It may be hard to remember all the way back to 2010, but when the iPad was first introduced, no one was sure if the public would actually adopt it. “People already have a smartphone and a laptop,” ran a common refrain, “What’s the point of another mobile form factor?”
Are keyboards dead? In view of their ubiquity, and proven usefulness, this may seem to be an absurd question, but some people are considering this possibility. The success of the keyboard-less iPad in penetrating the business market was one of 2011’s big surprises. Also, in an interview in the IEEE Spectrum, journalist Sally Wiener-Grotta noted the impressive number of stylus interfaces on display at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES). She even cites studies that claim that when we use handwriting input, “… we absorb information better and we express information better…” Read more
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
Here 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
As reported previously in this blog, the 2nd Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) appears to have successfully tested ARMY’s communication systems. Not all the results were reassuring. For example, there was some nasty feedback about the Nett Warrior. Most surprising was that many warfighters claimed that they didn’t want or need a smartphone. The ARMY’s smartphone program is threatened by other dangers as well. As noted in Wired, the smartphone could be a casualty of proposed Defense cuts. However, one of the most serious problems is the one that was identified in the earliest days of the program: security.
I haven’t heard too much about it from the ARMY recently, but some recent news items have raised the prominence of this issue: Read more
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
The Army has just finished its second Network Integration Evaluation (NIE). This large exercise appears to have accomplished its primary goals of accelerating the notoriously slow acquisition process, field-testing entire networks, and gathering valuable end-user feedback. Sometime massive bureaucratic efforts do work.
Although complete tactical communication systems were tested, the smartphones were the center of attention. Some results are already filtering out. Read more
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