Judging from what can be seen at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently under way in Las Vegas, he has a point about the 30-year parallel. As was the case with PCs in 1977, there are a handful of small vendors with real products -- enough for there to be a robotics pavilion -- plus unbounded plans, dreams and uncertainties.
Of course, on hand was the most successful American robot maker, iRobot Corp., which had its own booth outside the robotics pavilion. It was showing its Roomba autonomous floor vacuum and Scooba autonomous floor scrubber. Both are thick disks twice the size of a dinner plate that navigate across a floor, cleaning as they go, until their batteries run low, and then they return to their charging station. The company claims sales of more than 2 million units. (It also makes scout and bomb disposal robots for the military.)
At CES, iRobot announced iRobot Create, a version of the Roomba with added I/O ports and the vacuum assembly removed, which a robot developer can use as a platform for a larger design. Pricing starts at US$129.
Senior researcher Bryan Adams was showing videos of Create robots that were assembled in days, thanks to Create solving the mobility part of the designs. These included a unit that could pick up socks from the floor, and another that took its direction and speed from the input of a hamster in a plastic sphere atop the unit. Adams explained that the Create kit has 32 built-in sensors, a cargo bay with threaded mounting holes (where the vacuum cleaner used to be), a scripting language that can be controlled from a PC and compatibility with Roomba accessories.
Of course, robotics would not be an industry if the main player did not have competition -- and there was. A few aisles away in the Sands exhibit hall, South Korea's Microbot Co. was showing another disc-shaped floor-cleaning robot, one that does both sweeping, vacuuming and mopping, called the UBOT, explained Sangbin Park, Microbot's marketing manager. With its combined functions, it was about twice as tall as the Roomba. But what made it unique was its reliance on networking -- and not the Wi-Fi kind.
Basically, the UBOT is intended to clean wood floors that are striped with laminated barcodes that are visible only under ultraviolet light, Park explained. In normal light, the floorboards appear to contain rows of faint, square watermarks. Currently, the UBOT and its floorboards are used in new construction, and the buyer gets the flooring directly from the flooring maker, laminated at no extra charge. Laminations for existing floors will be available later this year, he added.
The advantage of the laminated floor is that the robot can be given precise commands in terms of what room to clean, leading to faster, more efficient operation, Park said. It can operate without the lamination, but will act like a Roomba, moving until it runs into something, he added.
Microbot is looking for distribution in the U.S., and when it's available, the UBOT should cost about $1,000, he said.
Microbot was also showing a patrol robot provisionally called the Romi. Basically it was a UBOT with an added superstructure with a camera that could send pictures to the remote owner. There was no estimated price or availability time frame.
With a booth in the robotics pavilion, Yujin Robot of South Korea was also showing a floor cleaner and a patrol robot. Seony Park, chief technology officer, said that the firm's $700 iClebo floor vacuum -- disc-shaped like the others -- was superior to the Roomba because it was quieter, had a more powerful vacuum, and it did not bump into furniture thanks to its use of dual infrared and contact sensors.
Yujin's patrol robot, called iRobi, is about 2 feet high, with a face designed to appear friendly to children. When the robot is first acquired, the user leads it around the house via a remote control to teach it the layout of the premises. Thereafter it can be told to go to a room and take a picture and send it to the owner at a remote location, Park explained. He estimated the U.S. price of the robot will be about $3,000 when it is marketed late this year.
Meccano, the French firm that makes Erector sets, was in the pavilion showing Spyke, a robot Erector project that Michael Ingberg, Meccano managing director, said could be assembled in a couple of hours, in a variety of configurations. It, too, can be controlled through the Internet via a Wi-Fi link, taking pictures and interacting with a microphone and loudspeaker. The prototype shown at CES had hands that were purely cosmetic, but Ingberg said that Meccano plans to eventually offer a toy missile launcher as an accessory. The basic unit is expected to cost $269 and be available by Christmas.
Other booths at the pavilion were staffed by various Japanese government agencies, such as Robot Technology Osaka, displaying various Japanese robot products. Some were hobbyist kits, but there was also Paro, a "therapeutic robot" that looks like a baby harp seal, except that it has fur, making it cuddly, and it is programmed to be friendly. The cost is about $3,500 but is so far sold only in Japan, explained Kevin Kalb, coordinator for the Japanese External Trade Organization office in Chicago, who was also at the pavilion.
Paro won an award last year from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and METI plans to turn its robot awards program into an annual event, Kalb explained. METI has also decided to make robots a major focus, to counter the effects of a declining labor population in Japan, caused by a declining birth rate and aging population, Kalb noted.
Indeed, Kalb provided literature from METI laying out an official plan to assimilate robots into Japanese society, through 2025. In the next few years, the plan includes support for the creation of a robot service market, humanoid robot development efforts, common infrastructure development projects and basic development for "strategic advanced robots." The "spreading stage" should begin about 2010, and the "full-fledged spreading stage" in 2015. By that time the Japanese robot market should amount to 3.1 trillion yen ($26 billion), and general-purpose self-directed robots should be in circulation.
Watching from his corner of the pavilion, Bob Allen, co-founder of OLogic Inc. in Los Altos Hills, Calif., acknowledged that the Japanese had about a decade head start concerning humanoid robots, but, as the Roomba demonstrates, a humanoid configuration is not always the answer.
His firm makes one-off custom prototypes for developers and start-ups. "Most successes have been with toys, and with some small projects for Disney," he noted. "The market is like the PC market 30 years ago," he added, with no reference to Gates. "If we did a specific robot product now and missed our mark in terms of timing or market, we could go down the tubes. We have seen investor groups starting to look at the industry, whereas four years ago, when we started, they were not. They also want to invest in us, but we have decided that we don't need that."
Out on the floor, the crowds -- and a procession of camera crews -- preferred to gather at the nearby booth of WowWee Ltd. of Hong Kong, which sells toys with robotic features. The main attraction appeared to be a singing bust of Elvis Presley, for $249.
CES continues through Thursday at several venues in Las Vegas, with 2,700 exhibitors, drawing a crowd of about 140,000.
Lamont Wood writes about technology from San Antonio.