Robot Sales Are Exploding

Roland Piquepaille writes "The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) just released its 2003 World Robotics survey. The original press release by UNECE has 15 pages in PDF format, while the full report represents 380 pages. Here are the three essential findings: robot orders in first half of 2003 were up by 26% to the highest level ever recorded; worldwide growth in the period 2003-2006 will reach an average annual rate of 7.4%; and household robots are starting to take off. "It is projected that sales of all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) in the period 2003-2006 can reach some 638,000 units." This overview contains more details including a chart showing the growth of domestic robots for the period 2003-2006."

Comments

Lazy People!

[jolyonr]

I think I'll wait until I can get a robot that'll go down to the Gym and exercise on my behalf.

Jolyon

We know, we know

[Faust7]

all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types)

Excellent gloss-over of "other types." It's okay, we know what you were thinking.

Think ahead

[eyeball]

Someone should prepare the robots for the day when their jobs go overseas to India.

Nice to see the technology is catching up...

[drinkypoo]

...to the desire for household robots. Once upon a time, the very thought of a lawn mowing robot filled people with fear. You're not installing a robot lawn mower near my Fifi. (I'm looooking overrrrr, my dead dog Roverrrrrrr...) But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.

Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".

Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.

While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.

I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.

The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.

You jest, but the truth is fairly scary...

[raygundan]

I had a chemistry professor (Prof. Lipschitz, not sure on spelling anymore) at Purdue during Freshman Engineering that would bring us a different article about a different idiot every friday about someone who had injured themselves masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner-- he managed to find a different incident every week involving the Hoover Dustette. And not just any articles, either-- they had to be from a reliable medical journal. The excuses were hilarious: "I was vacuuming in my bathrobe and fell on top of the vacuum and the robe came undone," etc...

We, of course, all thought it was just his twisted sense of humor. However, at the end of the year, the big lesson was "As engineers, you have to always take into account the unexpected uses of your product."

You see, other people were using other vacuum cleaners for self-gratification successfully, but the Hoover Dustette had an intake fan within only a few inches of the nozzle. Not a good design if you're gonna stick your bits in it.

Fitness for purpose aside, the point is that there are apparently a large number of people using their vacuum cleaners for exactly that.