CNET Tours iRobot, Spots Roomba Torture Chamber
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 19 of July , 2010 at 1:11 am
CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, aka lucky sod, got to spend the day checking out iRobot’s headquarters in Massachusetts. While there he got some footage of these Roomba reliability testing chambers, where Roombas (tethered to power sources) vacuum until they can vacuum no more, at which point someone figures out what happened, fixes it, and then puts them back to work.
Daniel also spoke to iRobot’s president of government and industrial robots division, Joseph Dyer, who had a few things to say about military robotics. More, after the jump.
Until now, [Dyer] explained, there has always been a one-to-one relationship between the robots and the soldiers who operate them in the field. But that ratio is about to change dramatically, Dyer predicted. “The one word answer to why,” he said, “is autonomy.”
He likened today’s robots to the state of fighter planes 35 years ago, when limitations in electronics and other technologies meant that a pilot had to devote 80 percent of his or her time to attending to the plane’s airframe, engine, and navigation, leaving just 20 percent to their mission. But over time, thanks to significant advances in fighter technology, those numbers are almost entirely reversed, Dyer said.
Similarly, with today’s telepresence robots, about 80 percent of the operator’s time is spent focusing on the technology, while just about 20 percent is available to focus on the mission. But thanks to things like Moore’s Law, he predicted, it will take far less than 35 years to reverse that ratio, meaning that within a few years, the technology will exist to make it possible for a human operator in the field to focus almost entirely on the task at hand and not have to worry much about the practicalities of getting their robot to do what they want.
Read the rest of the interview (it’s quite interesting) at the link below.
[ CNET ]
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