Let's Make Robots! Google robot. Image: Cellbots In the first “Matrix” movie, there’s a scene where Neo points to a helicopter on a rooftop and asks Trinity, “Can you fly that thing?” Her answer: “Not yet.” Then she gets a “pilot program” uploaded to her brain and they fly away. For us humans, with our non-upgradeable, offline meat brains, the possibility of acquiring new skills by connecting our heads to a computer network is still science fiction. Not so for robots. Several research groups are exploring the idea of robots that rely on cloud-computing infrastructure to access vast amounts of processing power and data.
This approach, which some are calling "cloud robotics," would allow robots to offload compute-intensive tasks like image processing and voice recognition and even download new skills instantly, Matrix-style. Imagine a robot that finds an object that it's never seen or used before—say, a plastic cup. As an example, he mentioned the Google service known as Google Goggles. An app store for robots. Robots Podcast: Interview with Harvest Automation's CTO Joseph Jones. It's been more than 2 years since we last reported on Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation.
Now Joe Jones, Harvest's co-founder and CTO, has given an interview to the Robots Podcast to let us know what they've been up to. Harvest is not your typical robotics start up. For a start, the experience of the founding and management team is unusual for any start up, and truly exceptional in the very young industry of autonomous robotics. Joe Jones alone has more than 24 years of robotics experience. As the first employee of iRobot, he invented the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, which to date has sold in more than 3 million units, and next to numerous research articles, Jones has also authored three books on robotics, and holds 15 patents.
Also, unlike most start ups, the Harvest team had no particular product or application in mind when they first got together in 2007 under the initial name Q-Robotics. What they've come up with is surprising. Microsoft Shifts Robotics Strategy, Makes Robotics Studio Available Free. Updated May 20, 4:23 p.m.: Added National Instruments comments; 5:49 p.m.: Added Willow Garage comments; May 21, 11:21 a.m.: Added details on competing robotics software platforms; 1:50 p.m. Added Herman Bruyninckx comments. Microsoft's new and now free release of its Robotics Developer Studio includes new 3-D simulation environments like this multi-level house. Over the past year or so, Microsoft's robotics group has been working quietly, very quietly. That's because, among other things, they were busy planning a significant strategy shift. Microsoft is upping the ante on its robotics ambitions by announcing today that its Robotics Developer Studio, or RDS, a big package of programming and simulation tools, is now available to anyone for free.
Previously, RDS had multiple releases: one free but with limited features, a full commercial version that users could purchase, and an academic version distributed only to partners. Not everyone is convinced the new plan makes sense. Read also: RoboEarth: A World Wide Web for Robots. As part of the European project RoboEarth, I am currently one of about 30 people working towards building an Internet for robots: a worldwide, open-source platform that allows any robot with a network connection to generate, share, and reuse data. The project is set up to deliver a proof of concept to show two things: RoboEarth greatly speeds up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.
Robots using RoboEarth can execute tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time. The vision behind RoboEarth is much larger: Allow robots to encode, exchange, and reuse knowledge to help each other accomplish complex tasks. That said, my colleagues and I believe that if robots are to move out of the factories and work alongside humans, they will need to systematically share data and build on each other’s experience. Imagine the following scenario: A service robot like the one in the hospital room [photo, top] is pre-programmed to serve a drink to a patient.
Cloud Robotics. RoboEarth - A World Wide Web for Robots.