The Next Generation Of Industrial Robotics

 Robotics

The next generation of robots will they be cheaper and easier to set up, they will work with people rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry parts, hold things, pick up tools, sort items, clean up and make themselves useful in myriad other ways.

Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are expensive and still need human experts to set them up. The capital costs of these robots typically cost more than human labour (at least in the short term).

We have a long way to go before we can replace people in many areas of manufacturing. Investing in robots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers like car makers, who remain the biggest users of such machines, but even in highly automated car factories people still do most of the final assembly. For small and medium-sized businesses robots are generally too costly and too inflexible.

But the next generation of robots will be different. Not only will they be cheaper and easier to set up, they will work with people rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry parts, hold things, pick up tools, sort items, clean up and make themselves useful in myriad other ways.

“The PC didn’t get rid of office workers, it changed the tasks they did,” says Rodney Brooks. Often that meant doing more sophisticated work. In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics to produce a range of machines that would serve as the equivalent of the PC in robotics.

Brooks’s “lips are sealed,” as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston’s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it’s going to set a whole new direction in the field.

Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

In robotics, “today’s technology is going to look so incredibly primitive in a couple of decades,” Brooks told a crowd of about 400, mostly students, gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. And, he added, “you’re the ones who are going to invent” the new robotic technologies that will transform the field.

Over the years, Brooks set up several companies; his first big success was one that became known as iRobot, which introduced the vacuum-cleaning robot called the Roomba. The company also produces military robots that are widely used by U.S. forces to disarm explosives and explore dangerous areas.

Brooks’ latest concept for next-generation robots could, he thinks, revolutionize manufacturing. Instead of huge machines that need to be kept inside protective cages so they won’t injure nearby workers, he envisions smaller, nimbler, more responsive robots that could work alongside people, helping them with tasks. The new robots, he says, will compare to today’s lumbering industrial robots in much the way that an iPhone compares to an earlier, room-sized mainframe computer.

Brooks isn’t revealing anything yet about what his new robots will look like, or what they’ll be capable of doing. But based on his comments at MIT, don’t expect them to look much like people. “If you make them too humanlike, people’s expectations go up, and they’re easily disappointed,” he said. “You don’t want to make it look like Einstein!”


SOURCE  MIT News

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