RoboDevelopment: It’s The Future, People
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 4:28 am
Not having reliable internet access made it somewhat difficult to post from the RoboDevelopment conference last week. But in retrospect, I’m glad I’ve had a chance to digest it for a few days. The overwhelming feeling, alluded to in almost every keynote speech, was that robotics is going to be HUGE over the next decade(s). It was more than just speculation, too… According to one of the Thursday keynotes (given by Tandy Trower, the GM of Microsoft Robotics Group), the robotics industry in general is going to double in market size by 2010 to nearly 25 billion dollars. By 2025, it’s projected to be approaching 70 billion, over half of which will be made up by robotics in the home.
So, that’s the future, but where are we now? Lots of speakers throughout the conference were comparing the current state of robotics to computers in the 70s. And there certainly are a lot of parallels: Both large industry and the government have been using robots for years, and are starting to rely on them more and more heavily. Most people, though, still view robotics as a hobby, much as PCs used to be. Consumer robots currently take some degree of specialized knowledge to interact with, and are only effective for very specific tasks. Like the PC, robots are evolving towards user-friendliness and more generalized integration into daily life. A more appropriate metaphor for robots might be the automobile in the early 1900s: you’ve seen them around, you know they’re useful, but at the moment they’re pretty esoteric and anyway, you’re happy enough with your horse. It’s just a matter of time, though, before your horse gets run over. A bit more, plus some spectacular video, after the jump.
In this context, the overall theme of RoboDevelopment is a lot easier to understand. It’s not about where robotics is, or even specifically where it’s going, since all we know is that it IS going somewhere fast. RoboDevelopment is about how we can get from point A (where we are now) to point B (wherever that is) as quickly and effectively as possible. So, as I post my coverage of the conference, try not to get disappointed if you don’t see the latest and greatest in consumer robotics. What you WILL see is the sort of technology that is going to become integrated into consumer robots in the next two to three years. But don’t worry, there were lots of nifty robots there, and I took plenty of pictures and video. If you’re also interested in the more abstract stuff, audio and PowerPoint presentations from the keynotes (and all the other sessions) are supposed to be showing up on the RoboDevelopment conference website in the next few days.
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