If you follow the robotics community on the twittersphere, you’ll have noticed that Rodney Brooks is publishing a series of essays on the future of robotics and AI which has been gathering wide attention.

His articles are designed to be read as stand alone essays, and in any order. Robohub will be featuring links to the articles as they come out. They are worth the read.

Steps Toward Super Intelligence IV, Things to Work on Now published on July 15, 2018.

Steps Toward Super Intelligence III, Hard Things Today published on July 15, 2018.

Steps Toward Super Intelligence II, Beyond the Turing Test published on July 15, 2018.

Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here published on July 15, 2018.

Bothersome Bystanders and Self Driving Cars published July 4, 2018

The Origins of “Artificial Intelligence” published April 27, 2018

Time Traveling Refugees published March 17, 2018

The Productivity Gain: Where Is It Coming From And Where Is It Going To? published February 25, 2018

My Dated Predictions published January 1, 2018

AI/ML Is Not Uniquely Powerful Enough To Need Controlling published on December 23, 2017

What If There Were Men On The Moon Today? published December 18, 2017

The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI published on September 7, 2017.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto published on August 28, 2017.

Machine Learning Explained published on August 28, 2017.

Transcript below. 

In this episode, we celebrate our 200th episode! That’s over 6000 minutes of robot goodness and nearly 8 years releasing interviews with your favorite roboticists. The podcast is all volunteer run, a special thanks to everyone on the team who’s made this possible! And thanks to all of you for listening in all these years.

To celebrate, our president Audrow Nash has invited a team of old-timers from the podcast team, and one of our favorite recurring guests, Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics.

The panel is composed of Sabine Hauert, Markus Waibel, and Peter Dürr, all co-founders of the podcast, and Per Sjöborg who’s been part of the team for many years now. They discuss their favorite episodes, what area in robotics is most interesting, their best memories, and lessons learned.

Rodney Brooks tells us about latest developments at Rethink Robotics, including their new robot Sawyer, and the Baxter Research Robot. He also tells us about the importance of science communication in a field that is prone to hype and disinformation.

Rodney Brooks
A mathematics undergraduate in his native Australia, Rodney received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1981. From 1984 to 2010, he was on the MIT faculty, and completed his service as a Professor of Robotics. He was also the founding Director of the Institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and served in that role until 2007. In 1990, he co-founded iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), where he served variously as CTO, Chairman and board member until 2011. Rodney has been honored by election to the National Academy of Engineering, and has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the now the founder, chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics.

Links:

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• Rethink Robotics’ website

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Part One: Panel discussion with the Robots Podcast Team

Audrow: Our first question to the panel is: “What have been your favorite robots podcast episodes?”

Sabine: That was a really tough question. There have been so many episodes over the years – 200 of them – so it is pretty hard to choose. Dario Floreano was one of them; he’s one of the reasons the Robots Podcast exists and he started this all out of EPFL. I also really liked interviewing Bob Full about bio-inspired robots. I also interviewed Rodney Brooks a couple of times, including at the offices of Rethink Robotics. That was fun because I got to tour Rethink Robotics and have a chat with Rod over in his office.

Then there were things that were really outside the scope of what I was used to discussing or studying, like the interview with Ryan Calo, which was about the legal aspects of robotics. That’s something I hadn’t really thought about before, and talking to Ryan back then was quite helpful for me in terms of framing that discussion.

And also Radhika Nagpal – just because she’s in an area that I love and she’s a great researcher.

Audrow: What about you, Peter?

Peter: I’m with Sabine: it’s been really difficult to choose. As the audio editor for the podcast, I get to listen to all the episodes before anyone else and I’m always looking forward to each and every new episode. If you had to pin me down on one, I’m going to go for #166: Quest for Computer Vision, with Peter Corke. I work with computer vision in my day job and I really liked Peter Corke’s insightful interview and his overview over this super interesting field.

Sabine: That interview was one you did, Audrow!

Audrow: Yes, it is – thank you! …  Per, what has been your favorite episode?

Per: I like the episode from the precursor to the Robots Podcast – Talking Robots – with Robin Murphy from Texas A&M, about rescue robotics. Designing robots that actually work and do the task they’re assigned to in a very hard environment – that was great content.

The favorite interview I did had to be the with Mark Tilden in Hong Kong in his amazing apartment. There were probably – I kid you not – 5000 robots there … everything from the Wowwee robots to his BEAM Robotics stuff. It was just amazing to hear his enormous experience and see all those robots, so that was the favorite one to record for me.

But as everyone else has said, there are so many good interviews and I’ve been fortunate enough to meet so many great people. It’s really impossible to choose.

Audrow: What about you, Markus?

Markus: I’ve not been able to pick a single episode either, but I have really enjoyed the business related episodes. I guess that’s how my personal interests have evolved over the years. When we started back in 2006 with Talking Robots, our first 40 or 45 interviews were almost entirely with academics. That was about 10 years ago, and that was what was out there, mostly. But if you look over the interviews we’ve done in the past year, it turns out to be about half industry and half academia, and I think that’s an interesting development for the field.

Sabine: What’s your favorite, Audrow?

Audrow: Like everyone has been saying, it’s really hard to pick. But I think one of my favorites was # 98 on self-organizing systems with Radhika. That episode gave a great overview of the field and it was interesting listening to her describe it. Also #101 on the history and outlook of robotics with George Bekey and Rodney Brooks, because it gave a big picture of what they had seen in field. It was interesting having the interviewer pick into their wisdom, to give me a better perspective on robotics. Those have been my favorite interviews so far.

My next question for everyone is what area of robotics do you think is the most interesting, and why?

Markus: I work with drones every day – small flying machines – so obviously I have a huge interest there.

Apart from that, one area I’ve been really very excited about from the very start is the field of exoskeletons and prosthetics. I think there’s so much potential to increase our independence as we age with these technologies, and as a hobby, I closely follow how these technologies are developing and being brought to market.

Another one is speech recognition. It’s really more AI [than robotics], but I think speech recognition will completely revolutionize the way we interact with technology. Right now data is mostly entered by keyboard or by mouse, and we can’t really communicate with machines in a natural way. I think speak recognition will revolutionize the way we interact with technology across the board if we manage to solve the privacy issues associated with it – which will not be easy.

Of course the next step is then doing something with that speech. I think the prevalent solution right now is to do some type of cloud processing. But with robots like Jibo or Amazon’s Echo, there’s always the big question of whether I really want Amazon or whoever else to listen in on all the conversations I’m having in my house or in my car or in my office. I think it will be difficult to role this kind of technology out in a major way before the privacy issue is resolved.

Audrow: What about you, Per?

Per: Everybody who knows me knows that I love modular robotics and self-reconfiguring modular robotics. There are so many modular systems coming out now (even if they are not self-reconfiguring) – practical systems that are available commercially … off the shelf … and that’s really exciting to me.

I agree with Markus that we’re seeing more startups, and more business being generated around robotics, and also value provided to the customer. That’s probably one of the most exciting things I see in field of robotics as a whole.

Audrow: Peter, tell us what is most interesting to you and why?

Peter: I’m really excited about artificial intelligence. The field has made huge progress over the last few decades. We’ve been able to create computers that can beat humans at chess, and that can not only recognize images (dogs, for example), but can differentiate between them (i.e. different kinds of dogs). They can surpass humans at recognizing human faces, and so on.

We cannot match the human brain (or even animal brains) at certain tasks, but I think we’ve made huge progress in artificial intelligence and I cannot wait to see how intelligent robots will be in the near future. That’s what really excites me.

Audrow: Sabine, what is most interesting and why?

Sabine: Ten years ago when we were starting the podcast, we were worried we wouldn’t have enough material to keep the podcast going every two weeks … that we’d somehow run out of topics. That definitely hasn’t happened. Looking at the topics from the past 200 episodes, they are all very different – it really shows the breadth of the field.

If I had to pick one (and I’m biased because this is the field I work in), I’m quite excited about swarm robotics. The reason is because we have finally reached a point where we can make a thousand plus robots and have them coordinate, and these are the sheer numbers that start to make swarm robotics interesting.

An obvious application is the biomedical field because, whether you’re talking about cells or nano-robots or molecules or chemistry, these are things that work in the trillions. In large swarm numbers, a very simple entity could be helpful for detecting cancers or doing something interesting in the body. That’s the field I’m excited about right now.

Audrow: What are your best memories with the Robots Podcast, Sabine?

Sabine: Starting up the whole podcast, and getting it going.

Markus was doing the episodes for Talking Robots, along with Peter, who has always been there doing the audio. We were all at Dario Floreano’s lab at EPFL in those days, and we used to move the couch against the wall to help soundproof the room so there wouldn’t be any echo. Peter is a professional musician, so he had this super sophisticated setup with real microphones, like the ones used in radio shows. We’d have this whole setup right in the laboratory. It was really fun.

In the beginning it took a lot of time. Audrow, you’ve done an amazing job in terms of continuing the podcast and making sure that we can keep going by having it run so nicely. What’s also fun is to see how it’s evolved into something that works, that’s efficient, and to see just how global it’s become. Per is in Tokyo, Markus is in Switzerland, I’m based in the UK, and Audrow, you’re in the US. Seeing that evolution from all of us in this office at EPFL, up to something that’s this global, that’s been great.

Peter: Now that Sabine is telling the anecdotes from the early days, I have to agree that was certainly fun. I think for me it’s seeing the team grow. I’ve been the constant dinosaur in the background with new people like Audrow stepping up to make the podcast better. It’s been really nice to see.

Audrow: Thanks, Peter! Per what have been your favorite moments?

Per: Being able to work with this amazing team, and being able to go out and meet the interviewees and talk to them about what they’re doing their field. I’ve met so many interesting people doing this, and I’m just amazed by all the people I’ve come to know through this work. If anyone out there is listening, doing interviews is an amazing experience: you should try it!

Markus: I’m with Per on this one. For me, it’s all about the people and the people on this team.

I’ve been deeply impressed and inspired by the excitement, energy, dedication and tenaciousness that people have put forward to make this project come alive stay alive for nearly 10 years. Everybody who’s here today has greatly contributed to making this happen and I’m honored to be part of it.

Sabine: What about you Audrow?

Audrow: It’s working with you all. It was an amazing experience going to the same conferences and seeing everyone in person. We were often on calls like this for our weekly meetings, but seeing you in person and connecting, that’s the best part for me.

The final question I have for everyone is: what have you learned from your involvement in the Robots Podcast?

Markus: I think the key thing I’ve learned is that it really matters what people you work with. I’ve long tried to work with people who are better than me, and I think I’ve been extremely fortunate in that respect and I would recommend that to anyone.

Per: Since I’m not a robotics researcher, what I learned from doing interviews is that, when you’re face to face with this person, you’re really trying to be the voice of the listener in that situation. When I listen to an interviewee speaking, I listen in a very focused, structured way – and that’s been tremendously beneficial for me in in general.

Peter: Listening to all the past episodes I notice that the best researchers and most interesting people have a talent for explaining their research in relatively simple terms. I think that’s extremely difficult and it’s a very useful skill to have. In my opinion, if you cannot explain something in relatively simple terms, you probably haven’t really understood it. It’s quite amazing how the best researchers can explain difficult things because they understand them so well.

Sabine: Tying back to what Peter is saying, what I learned is how valuable science communication is. Of all the skills I learned during my PhD, doing the podcast was probably one of the most valuable. Talking to so many researchers about their work opens your mind to all the different areas you might be looking at during your PhD. You have to learn how to ask questions and to master each topic very quickly so that you can talk to them about it. In terms of selling yourself in the real world afterwards, being able to communicate is a key skill, whether you’re in academia or in business.

Hopefully young PhD students will do the same, and will start blogging and podcasting and doing science communication of their own.

Audrow: Alright, thank you everyone. Happy 200^th episode!

Part Two: Interview with Rodney Brooks

Sabine: Hi Rod, welcome to the Robots Podcast.

Rodney: Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be on number 200! It’s great that you’ve had so many!

Sabine: Yeah, we’re pretty excited. The podcast has been running for nearly a decade now and it’s been great to have you on this show all these years.

How has robotics changed since that first interview when you were telling us about the subsumption architecture?

Rodney: Well, in the last ten years a bunch of things have changed.

In terms of subsumption robots, there are now at least 14 million of them out there in the world, so that’s pretty good. There weren’t anywhere near that many ten years ago. The iRobot Roomba is really a subsumption-based robot, and it’s been pretty successful in that niche.

I think the other big thing that’s changed is ROS. I love ROS, but it could have easily been another competitor. It’s sort of been a winner-take-all situation. The fact that so many people are using it means that people get to work together and exchange things, and it’s really taken off and grown the research arena. It has also let people see what robots could do, helping them move toward a lot more practical applications than we had ten years ago.

Sabine: I think a lot of our listeners might go back and re-listen to your more recent interview about Rethink Robotics. How is the company doing? Can you tell us about Sawyer and how it is different from Baxter?

Rodney: We had always intended to have more than one robot, but with a common software platform. When you buy most industrial robots, it’s like buying a smart phone. The manufacturer says, “If you want a camera, you can buy that as an extra, and if you want a microphone you can buy that as an extra. Oh, and by the way, it’s possible to write programs so that it can operate as a phone if you write the code.” In other words, most industrial robots come as empty shelves.

We decided to have a software stack with intelligence that works across multiple robots, and we use the analogy that iOS runs on iPads and runs on iPhones.

Baxter was our first robot. We learnt a lot from it, it’s a great robot, and we’re still selling a lot of them. At the same time, we saw an opportunity for a smaller robot, especially in China where it could work side by side in close proximity to people. A lot of people still think that China has so much labor they couldn’t possibly want robots, but if you look at the demographics in China, the absolute number of 19 year olds is dropping by 30% over a 10-year period. Nineteen year olds are where the manufacturing labor force comes from, so China is in desperate straits in terms of labor for manufacturing.

Really good, well-run companies that make electronics for the western world will have a labor turnover rate of 16% per month. You can imagine how hard it is to run a manufacturing company when there’s such high turnover. The nice thing about that problem, though, is that the electronics manufacturers in China have had to break down the manufacturing cost into a lot of simple tasks that a new person can be trained to do in just five minutes. That’s ideal for being able put a robot in there, because it’s not a complex task with lots of judgment involved. It’s a fairly simple task that we can train a Sawyer to do in just a few minutes also, and a Sawyer doesn’t quit after a couple of months.

Sabine: The markets are very different between USA and China. Does that warrant different types of robots?

Rodney: If you go into Chinese factories (and I’ve been going into them for over 20 years), people really are just two or three inches from the next person. A Baxter is way too large to sit at one of those work stations, so we had to build a much smaller robot to go after the Chinese market. We also saw that there was a need to be able to handle five kilograms, which is more than the Baxter payload.

Also, people have hips and can lean far forward, but the robot doesn’t have hips, so we needed a long reach on the arm too. Sawyer’s arm is actually longer than Baxter’s, and it’s longer than Universal Robots’ and the Kuka iiwa as well – this is so that it can do the task that a person with hips can do.

Sabine: It’s really great to see the evolution of these robots. We have a Baxter at the Bristol Robotics lab, and that’s the first thing we show everyone when they come into the lab.

Rodney: Yes, that lab at Bristol is great by the way.

Sabine: As we mentioned, it’s our 200^th episode and we’ve been doing science communication for a long time now at the Podcast and at Robohub. I was wondering why you think it’s important for roboticists such as yourself to go out there and spread the word about robotics?

Rodney: I think it’s important so that people can understand what robots can do. We’re seeing in the press a little bit of incorrect information coming from people who are outside robotics and misunderstanding what it can do. The fear of robots taking away all jobs – I think it’s misplaced.

What’s really misplaced is the fear that robots are going to rise up and decide to take over the world. That makes no sense at all to me. But people who are well-known scientists or technologists (but not roboticists) were saying that, and I think it’s doing the whole world a disservice because there’s no chance of anything like that happening anytime soon.

Anyone who works in robotics understands that we can barely get our robots to do most things. They’re not magic machines. I think it’s important for roboticists to talk to the regular press and help them understand that. And it’s important for roboticists to talk to people like you to reach the robot-loving audience and help everyone understand what the significant research problems are that still have to be solved – because there’s plenty of them, and there’s plenty of room for new people coming with new ideas.

I think my role these days is to talk about the plausible things that robots might do in the hope that it will encourage young researchers to come up with brilliant ideas on how to do it.

Sabine: What are these plausible things?

Rodney: I think the thing that’s really going to drive robotics for the next thirty years is eldercare. If you look at demographics in Europe, in North America, in China and even more so in Japan, the ratio of older people to younger people is increasing rapidly. I just saw a statistic yesterday that within a few years a third of all people in Japan are going to be over age 65, and the ratio of people paying into their social security system for every person being supported by social security is going to go from something like 9.5:1 down to less than 2:1 over the next few years.

There are a lot of people who will not be able to pay for the services that they might want, they are living longer, and they – I should include myself – we, we will want our dignity and our independence as we’re living longer, but we’ll need help.

I see the driver assist features of cars turning cars into eldercare robots because it lets people drive safely longer, which lets them have their independence and dignity longer. I also think robots in the home are going to be necessary to help older people.

I was just at iRex, the international robotics exhibition in Japan. There were lot of industrial robots, and a lot of emergency rescue robots following from DARPA Robot Challenge type applications. But it was also interesting to see a whole bunch of booths from various research institutes and universities with robots to help the elderly, to help them with mobility in the house, help them get into bed, out of bed, to help them wash. These robot demonstrations are not going to be deployable in real homes in the next year or three or five, but I think it’s great that researchers in Japan are now turning to this as a place where they can have a real impact.

I think we’re going to need lots of robots to help the elderly so that the rest of society is not completely swamped by this massive relative number of elderly to younger people.

Sabine: I agree that’s a great application. You mentioned the hype and the misinformation. Is that something that’s changed, or has that just always been the case? And what are some of the things that you need to be mindful with your company when you communicate about your robotics today?

Rodney: I think it has changed because of the high profile of some people who have come out and said rather silly things over the last year or two.

But let’s talk about my own obligations at this company. People see our robot and they imagine it can do any task in any factory, and that’s just not true. It can only do a relatively small number of tasks. Our constant thing is to train our sales representatives on what is possible versus what someone would like the robot to do. They have to be able to effectively communicate that, so that people buy the robot with their eyes open to what it really can do for them.

I remember when Baxter was first announced, a prominent blogger said to me, “I’m so disappointed. I thought I was going to be able to have Baxter steer my yacht.” I was thinking, why would you ever think our robot could take the helm and steer a yacht? There are unbelievable expectations of robots, but a general purpose robot – it’s just not going to be able to do something like that for a long, long time.

Sabine: Maybe in another eight years for our 400^th episode?! What can we expect to interview you about by that point in time?

Rodney: I think we’re going to start to see some companies really being in the elder care space. I’m a little more sanguine about all the companies in the social robotics space … I don’t know if there’s enough room for all the companies that are saying they’re going to have social robots in the home. I’ve taken issue with the idea of companion robots – I’m not sure that’s where it’s going to be. I think it’s going to be more about physical help robots. Hopefully in eight years we’ll start to see some of that.

I think the robots we’re building with arms that are safe to interact with will let more people do research in that area. One of the reasons I’ve really pushed the team to make Baxter available as a research robot was that I thought it was important to have a platform where people didn’t need to worry about the safety of the arms, so they could start doing work with the robot in whatever field they chose. And I was hoping some would choose elder care. There are quite a few university labs that are using Baxters to do things like help an elderly person get dressed or help someone in a wheelchair, or quadriplegic to feed themselves, etc. If you used a regular old industrial arm, that would be a pretty tricky and unsafe proposition for coming into contact with people.

Even though this company is aimed at putting robots in factories, I think the technology of these safe arms is going to enable the next wave of research and companies. Within the next eight years I think we’re going to see some startups in eldercare begin to appear.

Sabine: Excellent. Thanks, Rod, for joining our 200^th episode.

Rodney: Thank you for having me. Congratulations on doing this so well for so long!

The Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Annual Lecture on Science and Technology addresses issues at the intersection of science, technology, and foreign policy. In this lecture, experts discuss artificial intelligence and robot technology, and their economic impact on industry and society over the next decade.

UPDATED Jan 8: In an unannounced funding discovered by Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner, Rethink Robotics sold equity and received $26.6 million a few days before Christmas .

This funding brings Rethink Robotics’ total venture capital to $100.1 million according to CrunchBase. Highland Capital Partners, Sigma Prime Ventures, and CRV (formerly Charles River Ventures) participated in this round, along with new investors GE Ventures and Goldman Sachs. [According to a Rethink spokesman, Baxter robots are already deployed at multiple GE sites attesting to the rapidly changing manufacturing landscape and Rethink’s product adaptability.]

According to Sue Siegel, CEO GE Ventures, “Advanced manufacturing is an important area of focus for GE, both as an investor and a manufacturer. Rethink Robotics is paving the way for a new era of manufacturing in which robots work safely alongside humans, providing new opportunities for manufacturers to improve their production processes.”

“The business of manufacturing is changing more rapidly today than at any time in recent history,” said George Lee, co-chairman of the global technology, media and telecom group and chief information officer for the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs.   “Smart, collaborative robotics have proven to be a significant and disruptive technology.  With a differentiated solution set, an innovative software platform and a forward-thinking product roadmap, Rethink Robotics is well positioned to lead this industry for many years to come.”

Just a year ago Rethink had a 23% layoff after receiving an $11.5 million equity round of funding in November, 2013. Since that time much has happened to improve the product and direction of the company. Baxter, Rethink’s 2-armed robot, got a boost in precision and speed in a major software upgrade at the end of the summer and subsequent sales have shown that this was what was holding up sales to factories and shops.

Rethink, is, at this time, a privately-held company, and doesn’t report its financial information. However it is thought that in the two years to date since they have been manufacturing and shipping product, only 800 Baxters have been sold. If all 800 units sold for $25k, that’s an indication of why Rethink would need this additional funding to sustain its operations and 70+ employes until they hit a profitable (or at least break-even) run rate.

In a recent blog posting regarding what Rethink Robotics’ CTO and Chairman of the Board Rodney Brooks sees in store for 2015, he says that:

• We will begin to see large-scale deployment of collaborative and intelligent robots in manufacturing.
• This will be a breakout year for robotics research.
• It’s been exciting to watch Baxter become the gold standard of human-robot interaction, and even more exciting to see some of the tremendous work talented students and engineers are doing with our robot. And much of their work has nothing to do with improving manufacturing, but with exploring the use of robots in healthcare, elder care, and other endeavors that are critical to the future of our society.
• Emerging technology will be designed to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Rethink Robotics downsizing: 23% laid off
• Rethink Robotics introduces Baxter Research Robot
• Robots Podcast: Rethink Robotics
• Academic and industry collaboration (Part 1): Interview with Rodney Brooks
•  Startup Series #5: Rodney Brooks, Steve Cousins & Pioneers Festival
• Rodney Brooks: Atificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Just last month Rod Brooks chided me that robotic vacuum cleaners were already mainstream in response to what I had written: that they had just recently moved from niche to mainstream partly because big consumer product companies were entering the market.

Dyson and Samsung had just recently announced product launches and LG and Ecovacs were already selling.

Then at RoboBusiness, Colin Angle said in a keynote speech that iRobot had sold 12 million Roombas since they began selling them, that robotic vacuums represented 18% of the global vacuum market, and the market was growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 21.8%. Further, he said that iRobot captures 83% of the North American market, 62% of the European Middle East market and 67% of the Asian Pacific marketplace.

Now comes news that on a single day – Singles Day, a made-up holiday for the Chinese singles and youth market – Ecovacs sold $24.8 million worth of robotic products, mostly their robotic vacuum cleaners. Ecovacs Deebot cleaners sell for between $200 and $500 on Alibaba; higher on Amazon. Dividing $22 million (presuming that 88% of the day’s total sales were vacuums) by $300 per unit equals 73,300 Ecovacs units sold on a single day! That is, truly, mainstream.

Alibaba has trademarked the Chinese double 11 symbol in their effort to make Singles’ Day (11/11, November 11th) an international online shopping event. According to an Ecovacs press release, 85% of Singles Day sales were sold at their online (Alibaba) store.

Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world. Learn more about us here. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Rethinking iRobot, Samsung and Dyson robotic vacuum cleaners
• Why is Japan the first to get Dyson’s new 360 Eye?
• Recent robotic vacuum launches change industry from niche to mainstream
• Housework 2.0: The battle of the robot vacuum cleaners begins!
• Dyson launches new robotic vacuum cleaner
• Has Dyson’s robotic dream become a reality?

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

I have a bone to pick with you! Robotic vacuum cleaners didn’t just become mainstream as you said in your article. We have sold 12 million by now and are the biggest seller in Samsung’s home (Korea).

He went on to say that Dyson is a small player in the global vacuum marketplace and that Samsung has gone through many iterations of improvement yet iRobot’s Roomba’s still outsell them in their core market.

Robo Vacuums: Samsung (left) and Dyson (right)

Brooks was referring to my two articles in The Robot Report where I commented about Samsung’s and Dyson’s new robotic vacuums. He wasn’t really angry; just having fun. But I began to think about what he was referring to, considering whether I had said something incorrect or possibly hurtful. The second of my two articles had the headline: Latest robotic vacuum product launches change industry from niche to mainstream.

In those articles I said:

Should iRobot be worried? Definitely! Dyson has considerable experience in the higher-end vacuuming market – selling more than 10 million devices a year! Dyson generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2013 of which at least 40% is vacuum-related versus iRobot’s $487 million. Consequently, if the new Dyson 360 Eye robotic vacuum is as good as other Dyson vacuum cleaners, there is much reason for iRobot to worry.

iRobot, over the past 10 years, has sold 10 million Roombas, mostly through online distribution methods. With the global consumer distribution channels that both Dyson and Samsung bring, it’s conceivable that either (or both) could sell 10 million of their products in a single year!

In the two articles, I was attempting to describe the transition that often happens with unique consumer products as they switch from niche markets of early adopters to the massively larger mainstream household products market. And even though iRobot has sold 10 million Roombas over a 10-year period, that’s just a fraction of the 50+ million global vacuums sold annually for $11 billion (source: TechNavio).

Both Dyson and Samsung have upgraded the vacuuming function of their robotic cleaners to be equivalent to non-robotic cleaners. Consequently, they have endorsed what iRobot invented many years ago: a convenient robotic method of cleaning carpets and floors. But their endorsement comes at the expense of competition that is sure to happen in the years to come.

A sad day at Rethink Robotics. 21 jobs have been cut in Rethink’s first layoff.

Although Rethink Robotics is downsizing, their action is not indicative of the robotics industry, which is booming and hiring.

The Boston Globe reported that Rethink Robotics, maker of the $22,000 Baxter 2-armed robot, has cut 21 jobs from their staff of approximately 90.

In the Boston Globe article Rethink CEO Scott Eckert said:

The layoffs are the result of Rethink deciding to focus on the market segments that have been most receptive to Baxter since its launch: plastics manufacturing, consumer goods packaging, warehousing and logistics. Our volume trends are encouraging, our customer pipeline is encouraging, and we expect to see significant growth in 2014, however we will be able to achieve that in a more focused manner with fewer resources.

Since 2005, Rethink Robotics (previously named Heartland Robotics) has taken in $73.5 million from Boston-based VCs and Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment fund of Jeff Bezos), the most recent $11.5 million in November, 2013 (source: CrunchBase).

Rethink Robotics’ Rodney Brooks.

Rethink Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Rodney Brooks has been an energetic and eloquent spokesman for building and selling an affordable, safe and easy to train plug and play robot to help US manufacturers — particularly smaller shops and factories. With such a robot, Brooks assured, these businesses could increase productivity and keep jobs from migrating offshore. The two-armed Baxter robot is his vision. Thus it comes as a big surprise that Rethink needs to retrench their operations and cut 23+% of their staff to focus on the few industry sectors in which they have deployed robots.

Brooks has been right on the mark in describing the needs of small and medium-sized manufacturers. He’s defined the marketplace, defined their needs, and gotten people to accept that an easy-to-train robot can help improve productivity, be safe to work alongside and have affordable metrics. He’s even built and funded a company that ramped up to be able to produce 1,000 of these robots a year. But the robot itself doesn’t measure up to those needs at present. It’s been a work in progress — a miraculous achievement but one not fully ready for factory operations. Perhaps this highly publicized ramping up has clouded the focus on improving the product to live up to their promise (and the sizzle that Brooks has been selling).

Baxter’s main competitor has many of the same positive characteristics as Baxter: relatively low cost, it’s safe to work alongside humans, it’s plug and play, and training is relatively easy. Universal Robot’s UR line of robots cost a bit more and only have one arm. However, they work much faster, with more precision, can carry a heavier load and are engineered to have a longer work life.

Universal Robots has sold 2,500+ robots in 50+ countries through more than 200 distributors in the last five years. The Danish robot manufacturer added 50 people in 2013, a 100% increase in the company staff currently totaling 97 worldwide, and is hiring for 2014. They are ramping up to move into larger facilities with a much greater manufacturing capability.

Ed Mullen, the company’s National Sales Manager in North America attributes the growth of Universal Robots to the quality and capability of the robots the company has been able to create. “They meet the expectations of SMEs: a collaborative, user-friendly robot presenting a plug&play automation solution for a wide range of industries. Not only have we been able to penetrate large accounts — supplying the first collaborative robots to BMW and VW — we’ve also been able to get our robots on the shop floors of many small and medium sized businesses that never thought they’d be able to employ a robot due to cost and complexity.”

With financial news reporting big robotic acquisitions by Stryker ($1.5 billion for MAKO Surgical Robotics), Apple ($350 million for PrimeSense) and Google which has set up a robotics division and seeded it with seven start-ups and an eighth acquisition announced today – Boston Dynamics (of Big Dog, Cheetah and ATLAS fame) – it seems clear that the layoff at Rethink is not indicative of the robotics industry in general. In fact, there’s a hiring boom searching for robotics talent country-wide.

How can it be that such a prominent headliner as Rethink Robotics is regrouping? Four likely answers: (1) they were trying to do too much with too many people; (2) they were rushed to market by their VC investors; (3) they provided a product (the Baxter robot) that offered too much but didn’t do it too well; and (4) they haven’t yet finished the development of their product so that it delivers what the buyers want and need: a fast, safe, flexible, cheap and easy-to-train co-robot.

It’s not every day you get to ask pioneering robot startup founders about their journey. The Robolution panel at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna comprised Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics and previously iRobot, Steve Cousins from Savioke and previously Willow Garage, Noland Katter from Anybots, and Walter Wohlkinger and Michael Zillich of Blue Danube Robotics, a new startup from Vienna University. Between them the panelists have started or spunoff well over 15 robotics companies, started the first robotics venture fund and been hugely influential in shaping the current rapidly emerging robot startup space. ‘Fast, cheap and out of control’ was Brooks’s 1987 insight into robot exploration of the solar system, but is very apt today, as drivers like open source software, affordable COTS and crowdfunding expand possibilities.

And here’s an excerpt from a great article on Robohub.org “Is this the right time for robotic startups?” by Torsten Andre who attended the event as a startup founder.

In the end, Rodney Brooks said that the trick is to find applications where robots can do something useful and the customer is willing to pay for it. Costing over $200,000, Willow Garage’s PR2 is probably not one these robots. But, as Steve Cousins points out, robots can also be built for approximately $15,000. Assuming a lifetime of two years, robots have to generate a value of about $20 per day for an investment like this to break even – something he thinks can certainly be accomplished. He expects robots to be present in our day-to-day lives within the next few years, making this indeed the right time to found a robotic startup.

Read more from our Startup Series.

Almost all of the big industrial robot makers have or are working on lightweight and human-friendly arms, but none are offering them at low cost, or with user-friendly training, or the plug and play and safety features. There are other robot startups in the SME marketplace – and on the horizon – but none are as far along in their development and low cost as Rethink Robotics and Universal Robots.

Rethink Robotics’ Baxter

Rethink Robotics‘ new Baxter robot is getting a software upgrade. Big deal? Actually, it is. When Rethink Robotics launched Baxter late in 2012, it was obvious that Baxter needed some improvements. Rodney Brooks promised those improvements incrementally over the next few months and year. Brooks’ vision was to have a hardware platform frequently enhanced with new software and capabilities – and it is happening as promised and on schedule.

Rethink recently launched an academic version of Baxter with a Software Development Kit (SDK) enabling users to train the robot and share their programs with other Baxter owners. Although the SDK academic version is different than the production model, after a while, the concept of an open SDK and an Apple-like app store will be enabled across Rethink’s whole product line.

Just the other day Rethink upgraded their operating system to V1.1 to make it easier to integrate existing factory machine synchronization, I/O and task sequencing and ordering systems into Baxter’s repertoire of programs – a very neat and necessary feature. Now Baxter can integrate and connect with up to 9 digital ports to existing automation systems through signaling. This new update also enables users to coordinate actions across Baxter’s two arms.

Baxters are being produced at a pace for sales of 500+ units in 2013.

Universal Robots UR5 and UR10 Robots

Danish Universal Robots (UR) has quickly built an extensive North American distributor network of 16 experienced robot integrator/distributors.

One of those new distributors, Scott Hendrickson, CEO of Olympus Controls, said: “The quality of new leads has been off the charts. Most of our existing clients are Fortune 500 companies, but now we’re able to better service small business owners on Main Street as well,” he says, attributing the growth to the cost and ease of use of the UR robot. “In typical robot solutions, you multiply the robot cost by three or more to get the end price due to safety guarding and expensive programming. None of this is necessary with the new Universal Robots.” Hendrickson went on to say: “We believe these new robots will soon cross the chasm between early adopters and mainstream users.”

“A key selling point of our robots is that they are continuously upgraded”, said UR Sales Manager Kristian Hulgard. “Once purchased, our users can expect a steady stream of software upgrades giving them access to all the new features on the latest robots to leave the factory. This makes their investment future-proof.”

UR is building 100+ robots a month of which approximately 25-30% are for customers in the U.S.

Both UR and Rethink are finding price acceptability and each have provided case studies of how their robots are being utilized.

Features Comparison

A Couple of Examples of How These Robots Are Being Used

At a Johnson & Johnson factory in Greece, a UR5 is used on a production line where it performs repetitive pick and place tasks as a link between two parts of a production line.

The robot takes bottles of cream from one production line, and places them onto the packaging line. Flexibility is the key requirement because there are several different types of cream containers coming down the line, each positioned differently.

The Greek integrator/distributor, InnoPro Technologies, which sold and installed the robot, said that J&J engineers were 100% satisfied and have even given the robot a name.

A Baxter robot has been deployed at the Rodon Group, a Hatfield, PA injection molder and is among the first plastics processors to deploy a Baxter robot. It is being used for repetitive tasks like picking up parts off a conveyor and placing them into boxes or onto a nearby packaging line.

The robot is being “trained” by the very people it is assisting. Because Baxter is oblivious to heat or noise, it can take on those “hard to fill.”

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Rethink Robotics is downsizing
• Unbounded Robotics launch affordable, all-purpose UBR-1
• Co-robots really ARE a BIG thing
• Factory-in-a-Day: EU FP7 invests €7.9M to make robotics affordable for SMEs

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

Recently, many of these explanations, predictions and proposed solutions focus on robots. Robots seem to have found their way into an increasing number of titles, photos and articles about our economic future, whether from economists like Paul Krugman, journalists like John Markoff, roboticists like Rod Brooks or futurists like Ray Kurzweil.

Disagreement about robots and our future is flying fast and furious. Are we on the edge of a robotics revolution, analogous to the PC revolution of the 70s? If so, will we see similar patterns of economic activity – automation of a great deal of work, death of some occupations, birth of others? Are current-day robots a harbinger of times to come, just as canaries were for coal miners until the early 20^th century? Or are we experiencing a “robot revolution” in name only? Are cutting-edge robots like Baxter a red herring – do they misdirect our hopes and fears about our future?

If you’re looking for the punch line of this piece, here it is: we have evidence that robots are both red herrings and canaries in a coalmine. We are arguing about this issue as if it’s either/or when both views can be usefully seen as true.

Robots as Red Herrings
Imagine a robot that costs almost nothing to produce (as in less than a cent), costs almost nothing to ship, that runs on almost no power, that could be customized for a wide variety of applications and that could execute billions of tasks every second. Obviously this robot would be software. We’d be excused for assuming it would sell pretty well, and for assuming software might play some role in the economy.

Because it already has. According to the BES, there was an installed base of 1.85 trillion dollars of software and related hardware in the US in 2011, which has grown an average of about 3.3%/year since 2004. Though there is ongoing disagreement about the role of IT in our economy, recent analysis lends strong support for the view that IT is mostly being used as a substitute for human labor on routine, non-physical tasks. Many economists point to IT as a key contributor to the “hollowing out” of the global economy – otherwise known as the “death of the middle class”. As Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT is fond of saying, it’s hard for a tax preparer to compete with TurboTax – especially when this software is actually free these days to new users, and integrates seamlessly with Mint.com, a free, online tool for personal finance.

From this angle, software has had a truly massive impact on the kinds of tasks humans can do and get paid for. On a global scale, we’re talking hundreds of millions of jobs and livelihoods, broad changes to the structure of work and occupations, and dramatic shifts in the way we encounter each other and the working world.

Yet when we talk about change associated with technology in the economy these days, we talk mostly about robots.

This seems a little strange, given that the IFR (a global authority on the robotics industry) estimates that there is an installed base of just 9 billion dollars of robotic systems in US and Canadian industry put together. That’s less than half a percent of the installed IT base. While recent growth numbers are large (38% in 2011), the IFR projects the global annual growth rate at about 6% through 2015. At quadruple this rate, it would take robotics 23 years to catch up with IT, assuming IT stood still. So if we want to investigate the technologically-related automation of jobs, work and the economy, maybe we should be focusing more (maybe a lot more) on Watson, Google and Robo-Traders on Wall Street. Maybe robotics is a red herring.

Robots as Canaries
But then again, maybe not. Many roboticists, economists, and journalists are claiming that we are on the cusp of a period of discontinuous progress in robotics technology. If this is true, then maybe we’ll soon see exponential – not linear – growth rates in robotics. Then again, maybe we already have.

How could we tell? One promising first step is to judge robotics based on performance per unit of time. While Moore’s law predicts the number of transistors on a chip as a function of the passage of time, its progress is almost perfectly correlated with performance-oriented metrics in other domains, such as processing speed, memory capacity and sensor quality. From this perspective, it is reasonable to assume that robots’ performance of basic tasks would correlate well with progress in underlying technical domains. If it hasn’t, then a revolution seems less likely.

Given that we all seem concerned with robots that may replace non-routine physical labor, Rod Brooks has suggested in a few talks that we should look at performance in autonomous robotic navigation as an indicator of progress. This does seem like a reasonable proxy: autonomous navigation requires a system to sense its environment, plan next steps and enact those steps through actuated movement, more or less without human input. The greater the performance of such a system, the more sophisticated each of the component technologies (sensors, AI and actuation). These requirements and related technological progress seem likely to generalize to other physical tasks in a dynamic environment.

So where do we stand on this front? Hans Moravec’s (Stanford) lab robot could navigate 20 meters in six hours in 1979. Ian Horswell’s (MIT) robot could navigate 2000 meters in six hours in 1992. The best car in the second (2005) Darpa Grand Challenge navigated 212 kilometers in 6.52 hours (about 194,500 meters in six hours). The winning car in the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge navigated 96 kilometers of dynamic urban environment in 4 hours and 10 minutes (about 23,000 meters in six hours). By 2010, the Google Car was capable of autonomous navigation for six (or more) hours straight in normal traffic. If we presume it obeyed the speed limit and did this driving on a highway (at 65 mph), the car could travel 390 miles during that time (or roughly 627,000 meters). Here is a plot of these achievements (on a logarithmic scale) over time:

If anything, this approach may underestimate the rate of change; the task has gotten more difficult. The 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge cars would have made much better time if they had to traverse 212km in a straight line, indoors, with no obstacles. Incidentally, the cost of just the camera on Moravec’s 1979 robot was $159,000 (in 2012 dollars); a far superior camera can be purchased today for less than $1.

Put together, this indicates the cost of robotic systems is dropping rapidly just as performance is increasing exponentially. While it is all the rage to predict the future based on exponential technological trends, this “back of the envelope” exploration should put us on notice: stories of linear progress in robotics should be justified, not taken for granted.

Robots as Red Herrings and Canaries in a Coal Mine
Work is scarce and wealth is increasingly in the hands of a few. This leads many of us to be scared, angry and curious about the future. Robots are a lightning rod for these emotions and questions – they move with apparent intention, they do tasks that sit at the core of what most of us define as “good, honest work”, and they’re rapidly getting cheaper and more capable. If we want to point a finger at technologies that are “responsible” for the inequities and challenges in our economy, however, it seems pretty clear that we should be pointing to IT. The vast majority of tasks that are being handed off to technology are still going to software and computers, and the evidence indicates that this will be true in the short and medium term. Robots are a red herring from this perspective.

But from another perspective, they are also canaries. We have seen apparently exponential progress in robotic capacity over the last 30 years. How many of us think that, in a hundred years, we won’t have highly autonomous, mobile, dexterous robots that can adapt to a wide range of tasks in a wide range of environments – for less than the cost of human labor? Are we willing to bet our national education and job training investments on the assumption that this is a hundred years away? Fifty years? Thirty? If this transition is going to happen on a mass scale, at best we probably have seventy years to prepare for it. That’s only two generations away, and that means we should be planning for it now.

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

This is the first in a four-part interview series about collaboration between academia and industry, conducted by a group of scientists from the ECHORD project at Technische Universität München. Well-known and established experts in the field of robotics were asked: How can one connect industry and academia effectively? What obstacles are there and what makes collaborations effective? 

The first expert is Rodney Brooks, who was interviewed by myself in Eskilstuna during the Robotics Innovation Challenge 2012. Brooks is professor emeritus at MIT and a successful robotics entrepreneur who just recently launched Rethink Robotics’ Baxter.

[Florian Röhrbein]
What are future research fields in robotics that should be worked in collaborative effort by both academia and industry? Are there specific fields where you think they are especially suited for this sort of collaboration?

[Rodney Brooks]
In general I think there can be collaborations across all fields as long as the expectations are right on both sides. Academia should only be involved if you are not too close to the product. In terms of technical readiness level it would be a 6 or even less. By the time it gets to 6 I think academics have lost interest.

Also the different reward systems of universities and companies seem to be a problem.

Yes, but you can also view this as a strength! With different reward systems innovations are different in the two places and you get the best from both. You cannot view either as a subset of the other.

Are there platforms or tools developed by companies that should be used more in academic robotics research?

It is interesting that ROS, the robot operating system, is now pervasive. One of the systems out of my lab, YARP, started to get used by the RobotCub people. But now ROS has taken over. In ROS you get a lot of tools that then become accessible and can easily be moved around – for example kinematic or dynamic tools. I think it is not so much ROS itself that has become important, but rather that there is now a place people can use as a repository, so that those tools start to become more universal. I think it is like how Open GL made graphics much easier … The same sort of thing is happening with robots.

Looking at this topic the other way round: are there emerging topics that you feel researchers should focus more on in order to ease future collaborations with industry partners?

I think that in industrial robots, and manufacturing in general, we have not really seen the impact of information technology in the same way we have seen it in the office and information spaces. It has been very slow to be adopted. When information technology or computation is brought into manufacturing, it is brought in like it was with mainframes. Imagine, if you had to program in COBOL in order to use this device – it would be useless! But I think that is the level where we are with trying to bring new technologies to manufacturing: right now it is all about how to achieve them and not about making them simple to use. It is the simplicity of use that leads to a high rate of adoption, and I think we have not seen that penetration yet. And this involves both industry and academia. These things have to be people-centric. Adapt them to people, not the other way around. This is where the big payoff is going to be.

Which routes of knowledge transfer do you consider most efficient?

I think the only way it can happen is by exchange of personnel, by people moving back and forth. I ran the Computer Science and AI lab at MIT with 839 people involved. We had a lot of collaborations with large and small companies, but it was only satisfying and successful when people really knew people in the other organization and moved back and forth. Academics were spending time at the companies and vice versa … several months, sometimes a year at a time. The companies and the academics have to be willing to make that investment. But no one wants to make that big an investment if there is no payoff!

What else would you consider a best practice for facilitating this cooperation between industry and academia?

In my experience, the most successful cooperations were those where we set up a joint lab. We did that with Nokia, Quanta Computer from Taiwan and with NTT from Japan. In each case, people from the company and from the university are equals, on all aspects. It is not “We’re the people with the money, we pay you”, or “We’re the people with the ideas”.

What do you think are the main obstacles in collaborative projects between academia and industry and what would be the means to overcome them?

Here’s a generic problem that I’ve see happen many times: The CEO of the company says “I want to bring innovation into my company by working with academia”, goes and signs a deal with some academic group, and then the CEO hands it down two levels in the company. And now it’s someone’s assignment: “Oh, I’m supposed to get innovation from …”

[interrupts] And then it doesn’t work anymore.

It doesn’t work at all. You’ve got to have someone who really understands what is wanted and is part of their mission and not get it handed off to people … they have to cultivate some group that is really going to do it. Within the company, the CEO says “Yes we’re gonna do this.”

Is this somehow collated with the size of the company? It might be easier for small companies because there are not as many levels involved.

Even in a small 50-person company I have seen it not quite working. Surprisingly, one very large company where I have seen it work very well recently is John Deere. The former CEO, Bob Lane, and the current CEO, Sam Allen, keep pushing it, and keep showing up at the places. And everyone in the company sees that this is important, that they really mean it. The CEO has to mean it by participating at some level. So they are running along to demonstrate they are on board.

Regarding upcoming research trends and robotic applications, do you think there are differences between North America, Europe and Asia?

The most important thing is cross-disciplinarity. I think Japan has a large failure on that, because robotics tends to be in mechanical engineering departments. These departments are so strong in academia that they do not have computer scientists or electrical engineers working on robotics, but only mechanical engineers. In my experience, places where the boundaries between the departments are much more flexible do better – for example with a lab structure across multiple departments. The differences are not necessarily by country, but also by institution. Some are too department-driven and others, like MIT, have a strong lab culture. It really depends on the individual institutions.

Thank you very much for your time.

From left: Pete Wurman, Rodney Brooks, Russ Angold and Henrik Christensen

 

1. Manufacturing – manufacturing represents 14% of the GDP and 11% of total employment. Close to 70% of net exports from the US are related to manufacturing. Thus manufacturing and robots are a very important area to the general economic health of the country.
2. Medical Robots – with 40+% annual growth over the last few years in the number of medical procedures performed using robots, it is essential to continue to develop and deploy robot systems and to reduce the overall cost of care.
3. Healthcare – finding cost-effective robotic solutions for rehabilitation and necessary household and personal tasks for the more than 11 million Americans living with severe disabilities.
4. Service – annual growth in professional service robots (which includes inspection of power plants and infrastructure such as bridges and transmission lines) is 30%, and in domestic service applications (such as vacuums, lawnmowers and toys), the growth rate is 20%. US companies have dominated this area and it is considered economically important to maintain the momentum.
5. Space – tremendous progress in science exploration of Mars and at the space station through the use of robotics has offered important insights into how the same systems can be used in daily lives. Partnerships such as with NASA’s Robonaut team and GM, and enhanced teleoperation and remote presence consulting are examples.
6. Defense – more than 25,000 robotic systems were deployed in ground and aerial systems in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dual use opportunities are tremendous as the FAA opens civilian airspace to these types of robotic devices. In a decade, airfreight may be transported coast-to-coast or transoceanic by remotely piloted aircrafts. This is another area where US companies have dominated and it is considered important to maintain the momentum.

On Sunday, January 13, CBS News 60 Minutes reported on robots. Their focal point was jobs and the changing nature of work. As a backdrop to their comments they showed Tessla Motors’ robots retooling themselves, Adept’s robots stuffing boxes with packaged lettuce and also assembling Braun shavers, watched ReThink Robots slowly pick and place an item, saw Aethon’s tugs in action in hospital corridors and had a brief glimpse of InTouch Health’s RP-VITA remote presence medical robot and a more descriptive view of the VGo Communications VGo robot at school and for home care. In the process the reporter, Steve Kroft, discussed a new definition of robots and robotics in sharp disagreement from the definitions posed by the International Federation of Robots:

Steve Kroft said, “The broad universal definition is a machine that can perform the job of a human. The machine can be mobile or stationary, hardware or software.”

This is different than the robotic industry’s most recent tentative definition of service robots which, in short, says the following:

A robot is an actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks. Autonomy in this context means the ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing, without human intervention.

A robot has to have at least two degrees of freedom plus autonomy. A fully autonous car (2 degrees of freedom (DoF); steering and transmission) would qualify for a mobile robot as would 3D printers. But a washing machine (1 axis; 1 DoF), airline or other kiosk, or adaptive cruise control (all which could be considered as 1 DoF) would not fall under the category of robots. Thus Kroft artfully crafted his own definition to fit what he and his camera crews saw as “robotic.”

Regarding jobs and robots, Kroft relied on the comments of two MIT professors (Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee) who jointly wrote a book entitled “Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy” in which they attempt to answer:

• Why has median income stopped rising in the US?
• Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly?
• Why are our economy and society becoming more unequal?

A popular explanation is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation — a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity. But the two authors suggest a very different explanation. They show that there’s been no stagnation in technology — in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating at an exponential rate. They say in the 60 Minutes interview:

Technology is always creating jobs. It’s always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.

The changes are coming so quickly it’s been difficult for workers to retrain themselves and for entrepreneurs to figure out where the next opportunities may be.

The catalyst is computer learning or artificial intelligence — the ability to feed massive amounts of data into supercomputers and program them to teach themselves and improve their performance. It’s how Apple was able to create Siri, the iPhone robot, and Google its self-driving car.

We now have robots gathering intelligence and fighting wars, and robot computers trading stocks on Wall Street.

It’s all part of a massive high tech industry that’s contributed enormous productivity and wealth to the American economy but surprisingly little in the way of employment. We absolutely are creating new jobs, new companies, and entirely new industries these days. The scale and the pace of creation is astonishing.

What these companies are not doing, though, is hiring a ton of people to help them with their work. Because they don’t need that many people to work in these incredibly large and influential companies. To make that concrete, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are now all public companies. Combined, they have something close to $1 trillion in market capitalization. Together, the four of them employ fewer than 150,000 people, and that’s less than the number of new entrants into the American workforce every month and the number of employees that work for GE.

I’d love to open this up as a discussion because the IFR’s definition, still tentative as far as I know, doesn’t cover the growing marketplace of service robot-like devices that perform human tasks. CBS News 60 Minutes did this with their new definition and with their report.

The producers at CBS News 60 Minutes also provided additional web and video extras that you are sure to find of interest:

• The actual segment that appeared on TV
• The transcript of the segment
• The Robot Waltz: An Appreciation (a video of the robots that they photographed for the segment)
• An extended interview with John Dulchinos, CEO of Adept, about how technology is leveling the manufacturing playing field
• An extended interview with Rodney Brooks, CEO of ReThink Robotics, on the same subject

Speaking at CMU Robotics Institute as part of their RI Seminar Series, Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics (originally Heartland Robotics), talked about their new Baxter robot, what drove its design, and the circumstances surrounding the formation of the company. His talk is followed by about fifteen minutes of Q&A.

Link to audio file (34:39)

Link to transcript

In today’s episode we speak with Rodney Brooks at the offices of Rethink Robotics about their first product Baxter, his ambition to revolutionize manufacturing and latest tips for young entrepreneurs.

Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks built his career as Professor in robotics and former Director (1997 – 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In the 1980s, he revolutionized the field of robotics by introducing the idea that the world is its own best model, and that to be robust, robots should react to their environment (behavior-based robotics) rather than rely on complex models of the world. From this research in behavior-based robotics, Brooks then studied human-robot interactions with former graduate students, now well known researchers, such as Cynthia Breazeal and Maja Mataric. He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 – 2011) and former CTO (1990 – 2008) of iRobot.

In 2008, Brooks founded Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based company aimed at revolutionizing manufacturing and reducing offshoring by making low-cost robots that can easily be taught to help with different tasks on the work-floor by everyday employees. Their first product “Baxter” has five cameras and two arms, each with 7 degrees of freedom, a payload of 5 kg and equipped with interchangeable manipulators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjPFqkFyrOY

In this interview, Brooks tells us about his vision for manufacturing and the design decisions that were taken to address challenges such as vision, manipulation, and human-robot interactions. Businesses will need to “rethink” their idea of automation before embracing adaptable, compliant and human-like robots rather than typical assembly-line super-performers.

Links:

• Download mp3 (21.8MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Rethink Robotics
• Rodney Brooks

Many reporters, including myself, saw Baxter at Rethink’s headquarters in Boston in the past two months but were embargoed from writing about it until today, the launch date.

Looking at the stories – as they appear all over the web and in news print, three stand out, in my opinion, at the head of the class:

1. the Rethink Robotics press release
2. the NY Times article and video by John Markoff
3. and the in-depth story in Spectrum by Ackerman and Guizzo

Markoff’s story uses everyday language and is directed toward a wide audience – the kind of multi-layered audience, multi-interests audience unique to The NY Times; the Spectrum article is for engineers and roboticists.

As an aside, Markoff’s article makes me ever more aware of the difference between a blogger/writer and a paid reporter from a reputable news source. John’s article made me wish I could write like him. I saw what he saw, got the same demo, played with the machine similarly, heard the same details. But I came away disappointed.

• John saw, as I did, that both arms don’t work together. He wrote that they will in the next version. I couldn’t imagine them bringing the product out without the arms working together (although they are aware of each other’s location and can avoid hitting itself).
• John saw, as I did, that it was big but he just described it as a 9′ span that, with the stand, brings Baxter eye-level with a standing worker. I saw it as big and clunky.
• John heard, as I did, that the price was $22,000 yet Brooks had been touting an affordable cost of less than $15,000 for a long time and cited polls that said that the price point for new shop tools was $15,000 or less. John just wrote the facts and let it go at that.
• We both saw that the grasping mechanism was a two-fingered plastic device and heard that, in the future, third party mechanisms could be quickly retooled to enable Baxter to do different tasks. I thought this was an awkward solution and found that Baxter could only lift 5 pounds and didn’t have enough torque to push/screw in a screw which, in my opinion, would be a necessary task for any shop assistant. John just showed what it could do with it’s two fingers.
• John described the need of small shops to augment their workers with robots which can do the dull, repetitive parts of their daily work much easier, thereby freeing up the worker to do higher-level tasks. But he didn’t indicate that this version of Baxter is far away from offering that capability. Nor did he talk about other promises and expectations missing from this launch, namely an app store where Baxter’s training can be transferred to other places where other Baxters are installed.
• We both saw that Baxter’s speed was slow and its precision not too precise but John just reported what he saw; I wondered how long it would take to speed up the processing and enhance the mechanisms to be more precise.

I could go on with the comparisons but, bottom line, John Markoff deserves to work for the NY Times because he reports things as they are. Opinion and spin are left to bloggers and PR people.

Markoff only writes a robotics story every month or so; Ackerman and Guizzo write every week or so. But every day there are hundreds of stories that need sifting to see whether they fall into News or Views and if News, whether the article is applicable for our readers as they do as we do: track the business of robotics.

I wrote this meandering message because of a quote I think appropriate about Baxter: George Carlin, the late comedian said: “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”

Other stories about Baxter and Rethink Robotics from reliable sources:

• Bloomberg Businessweek: Smarter Robots, With No Pesky Uprisings
• Technology Review: Meet the Other Robots Set to Invade Manufacturing
• The Wall Street Journal: Baxter Robot Heads to Work
• PC Magazine: Meet Baxter the Robot, Your Potential New Co-Worker
• Forbes: Manufacturing Gets A Makeover With Baxter
• Popular Mechanics: It’s Time To Welcome Our Robot Underlings, Starting With Baxter
• The Engineer: Rethink Robotics Unveils Humanoid Factory Robot

A positive indicator for robotics startups is the improving financial climate. There are signs that the US housing market is stabilizing. Fannie Mae, the government backed mortgage company, has posted a profit for the first time since 2007 without needing a government bailout. The decline in home prices is slowing, as are mortgage delinquency rates and the rate of American home purchasing is on the rise again.

“We expect our financial results for 2012 to be significantly better than 2011,” Susan R. McFarland, Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “As our serious delinquency rate declines and home prices stabilize, we expect to reduce our reserves, which combined with revenue from our high-quality new book of business will drive our future results.” [1]

While not everyone is getting rich yet, the overall financial indicators show that the U.S. economy has rebounded faster than predicted. The stock market has doubled since 2009, corporate profits are surging and the U.S. economy is growing at 3% pa. As financial journalist Daniel Gross puts it:

“Like the world’s first bionic man, the U.S. economy has come back—better, stronger, and faster than most analysts expected, and than most of its peers.” [2]

While this is a U.S. centric view and some of Europe is still in financial crisis, nonetheless China and S.E.Asia are surging and many African economies are showing very promising proportional growth rates. There are other sources that describe the current world economic status but it’s no longer a bad time for a capital intensive industry like robotics to grow. Particularly if business models lower the risk by utilizing lease models or the rapid cheap trial and error methods of startups.

Where Defense budgets are tightening on traditional robotics, like unmanned systems, the Whitehouse is committing spending towards other newer robotics growth areas. All this indicates that robotics is ready to support itself as an industry, rather than be supported as a research project. Legislation is being passed allowing the introduction of driverless cars and by 2015 we may see changes permitting the commercial use of small drones in U.S. airspace.

3. Maturity of Robotics Technology

Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot and current CEO of Heartland Robotics, is one of many expressing the view that robotics has progressed beyond a cool new research area and into the world of robot products. While making new discoveries is exciting, there isn’t enough effort going in to using those same exciting new technologies in everyday applications.

 ”Users just want to get a task done. They don’t care if it’s a cool robot. You may, but they may not care if it’s a robot at all,” [3]

So, the question now isn’t what robots can we build, it’s what can we do with the ones we’ve built already. The robots that are successful products seem simple and boring, eg. industrial arms, vacuum cleaners, cars. But when applied to the right problem, even simple robots are transformative. The first successful consumer robot was of course iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner with more than 7 million sold worldwide. But the biggest acquisition of a robotics company was Amazon buying Kiva in March 2012 for $775 million.

Kiva’s system relies on small orange turtle like robots that move shelves around in warehouses. The brains are largely on servers. The robots aren’t ‘cool or exciting’. They are barely even robots. But they solve the problem that sank WebVan, one of the most spectacular e-commerce failures. You can only do half your e-commerce in the cloud. Somewhere real products have to be shipped to real places.

Kiva founder Mick Mountz is an MIT engineer who worked at WebVan. “We decided products that could walk and talk on their own would be the best way to solve the problem,” he laughs. [4]

Think of Kiva bots as the hands and feet of the Cloud.  They are not autonomous Star-Trek-like agents, but are wirelessly connected to and controlled by the Cloud in real-time. [5]

Amazon, like WebVan, has to ship product. Reportedly, phsyical order fulfilment cost nearly 9 percent of Amazon’s $40 billion global revenues. This is a big enough pain point for some companies to be willing to trial the Kiva System in a few locations, especially smaller retailers, like Staples in 2004, who faced increasing competition in cloud commerce.

Kiva’s robots today are processing millions of orders a year in retailers’ warehouses across the United States, the UK, and Europe, quietly driving Kiva’s startling 80 percent annual growth. On the distant horizon is a plan to bring Kiva’s approach to the manufacturing sector. [6]

Jeff Bezos from Amazon is also investing heavily in Heartland Robotics. Brooks has a vision of transforming the workplace by making robots that can be safely worked with, shifting robots out of sterile, safe factory environments and bringing them alongside people. His analogy is with mainframe computer systems in the 1960s to the personal computer of the 1980s.

“Originally ordinary people couldn’t touch computers. Now they can. What if ordinary people could touch robots?” [7]

The future of robotics is exciting, but we’ve barely begun to fully explore the potential of the simple robots we already have.

next post: Increasing modularity & commonality plus decreasing component costs

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/business/fannie-mae-profit-signals-a-stabilizing-housing-market.html
2. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/29/myth-of-decline-u-s-is-stronger-and-faster-than-anywhere-else.html
3. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57391570-76/robots-still-lack-the-human-touch/
4. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2012/03/23/amazons-kiva-robot-acquisition-is-bullish-for-both-amazon-and-american-jobs/
5. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
6. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
7. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/05/heartland_robotics_will_unveil.html

The real story of our success was the roboticists, our robot mentors or demo coaches. These amazing people came early and stayed till midnight, even when their robot platform wasn’t being used [Elad Inbar of The Robot App Store and Ted Larson of Oddwerx]. Then they went home and built more robots to bring in [Tully Foote – Willow Garage]. They pulled apart their own personal robots [Melonee Wise – Willow Garage] to provide parts for teams. They flew in from far away [Ross Ingram and Adam Wilson – Sphero, Harsha Kikkeri and Jay Beavers – Microsoft Robotics] bringing boxes of robots and giving them away as prizes to the winning teams. But mainly they gave away their time, smiling. We were all inspired by the robot track, but it was the roboticists that really did it.

Harsha Kikkeri, robot mentor from Microsoft Robotics at MEGA Startup Weekend, April 13-15, 2012.
Photo/image credit: Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Rodney Brooks, from iRobot, recently said that the real question for robotics now isn’t “what CAN a robot do?”, it’s “what SHOULD a robot do?” Startup Weekend is a wonderful opportunity to test assumptions about what a robot should do, to do it rapidly, to iterate and to validate. While we had some very good robot businesses, the winning team, “Eyes on Demand” had an incredibly strong value proposition, achievable cheaply with available technology.

The team had a strong connection to a section of the community, people with impaired vision, and the team understood the real pain points, eg. reading mail or food labels. They started with a clear problem and then looked to available affordable technology and put things together in a new way. This democratization of robotics technology, as seen in the DIY drone community, is something we’ve all been waiting for.

Although world domination through robots and startups is definitely on our agenda, Robot Launch Pad is a small group in the Silicon Valley area just starting to grow. We were both touched and surprised to be contacted recently by Paul Doyle, Head of ACCESS, Research and Development at Hereward College, UK. Paul wanted us to hurry up and get people making real affordable robots for people with disabilities. He foresaw the possibilities of rapid prototyping and the startup movement.

“Hereward College in the UK supports many students with physical sensory and cognitive impairments. For years we have been awaiting the arrival of the practical assistive robot as many of our students could and should benefit from their availability.

What we have currently is a number of high cost ubiquitous machines, with little or no practical application in the real world.”

Paul wanted to know if there were any DIY robots coming in the future and to inspire us to build robot solutions based on affordable technology, easy for consumers and staff to work with and replace. Of course we still need sophisticated robots, but MEGA Startup Weekend proves that we can iterate around existing technologies, putting people centered design at the heart of robots. I was delighted to tell Paul about “Eyes on Demand”. He was thrilled too, and his whole college wants to be first customers. I think there’ll be quite a queue!

MEGA Startup Weekend was a MEGA success for robotics. And created a new hybrid event, a mashup of startup weekend and hackathon, with arguably the best of both worlds. I think I got Shacked Up this weekend.