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Bill Gates on Robots
mstaj noted that Bill Gates has an article in January edition of Scientific American A Robot in Every Home."Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when — or even if — this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world."
This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot, so I'm reasonably familar with what's going on in this area. It was amazing to me how much progress was made in three years. Much of the progress was in subsystems. Four years ago, a high precision combination GPS/INS/compass system cost about $100,000, and required 4U of rack space with air conditioning. (CMU's first vehicle actually had such a unit.) Now, such units are about $6K, the size of a thick book, and don't need A/C. LIDAR units have gone from mechanical line scanners to solid state 3D flash units; although these are still expensive, low-volume items, there's no fundamental reason they couldn't be brought down to camcorder prices.
More interestingly, computer vision in unstructured environments is actually starting to work. That was the real innovation in the Stanford vehicle - a vision system that could look at a distant section of a road and decide if it was similar to the nearby section. Several LIDAR units profiled the near section, and if the near section was OK and the far section was visually similar, the vehicle could outdrive its LIDAR range. I was amazed that that worked, but it did. It's a Bayesian statistics system, and quite clever.
Then there are the new generation of hobbyist robots. See Robots Dreams, which follows Japanese hobby robotics. You can get a good humanoid robot about 50cm high for about $1000 now. It's interesting how this happened. Robotics hobbyists have been playing around with R/C servos for decades, and quietly, under consumer pressure, those servos have been getting better. The motors used to be too weak, but better magnets fixed that. Then people complained of bearing failure, so the manufacturers switched to ball bearings. Then applied loads would sometimes strip gear teeth, so the manufacturers had to go to better gear materials. Then the things were overpowered for their dumb control algorithm, so each servo got an embedded micro controller. Then it was necessary to tune the control algorithm depending on load, so the interface became more intelligent and bidirectional. And suddenly we had servos strong enough for the legs of a small running robot.
In the hobbyist community, though, the software is way too dumb. Hobbyists are still using BASIC STAMPs and typically don't do much very exciting on the control front. By contrast, Grand Challenge vehicles typically had many CPUs running highly concurrent software. We had two Pentium IV machines running QNX and running about fifteen real time programs, along with five programmable motor controllers each closing some control loop. Gates is onto something with building better tools for hobbyist robotics. The Microsoft approach to robotics is clunky (it's a rehash of web technologies, including SOAP), but it has more integration than anything seen before, so it will catch on.
Once we get the theory and technology from the high end down into hobbyist level hardware, things are really going to take off. We have the parts now.
Motor control has progressed a fair amount over the last 25 years. But are the motors themselves that much different?
At the small (DC) end, they certainly have, and that can be scaled up if necessary.
Example: I'm not sure when the change happened, but back when, cheap small electric motors (as used in toys, portable cassette or CD players, etc) were low-powered, largish (0.75 to 1 inch diameter, 1 to 1.5 inches long), and heavy. Most of the culprit was the weak and bulky magnets. Modern rare-earth magnets allow for smaller and more-powerful motors. I just got my kids a cheap R/C airplane that uses two small electric motors (maybe 0.25 by 0.5 inches) that turn tiny props at high speed, with an on-board lithium polymer battery that'll keep the thing flying for about 10 minutes. 25 years ago, between the weight of the motors and the weight of the batteries, there was no way to build an electric airplane. (This is no motor-glider either, it looks a bit like an F-16).
There's a demand for small, powerful motors. Toys aside, every cell phone and pager has one (with an unbalanced flywheel for "vibrate" mode). The market probably isn't there yet for 1/3 horsepower motors as small as could be made with modern magnets (most motors that power and up don't use magnets at all, but coils), but the technology is waiting there for the market to happen.
-- Alastair
The number of people who've actually done anything in this area isn't that big yet, and not many of those who have write much beyond academic papers. There's something of a dearth of mid-level robot material. There's the low-end stuff from Tab Books, and the theory from IEEE Transaction on Robotics, but not much practically-oriented material in the middle. I try to encourage people to take the high end technology and actually use it.