Thursday, April 1, 2010

I'm Ordering One of These for My House

This sure beats the Roomba vacuum cleaner. This is what UC Berkeley project in "personal robotics" has accomplished:



The only problem, this thing is as slow as molasses. You can tell they speeded up the film to "show off" the robot's clothes folding ability. It will take another generation to get this up to a tolerable speed. But the good news is that robots doing real work in the real world are getting closer. As with any exponential growth, the arrival of robots with real capabilities will surprise us because we have such a hard time understanding exponential growth, as shown by these stories.

Here is a vision of the near future by Peter Nowak from an article he published in The Globe and Mail. Here is the key bit:
The reality of the impending revolution hit me that day in Las Vegas. Robots are no longer science fiction; they aren’t just automated arms in car factories or cutesy toy dogs any more. They are here, they work (mostly) and they will soon be everywhere. Self-driving cars will be only one small phase of the coming wave. The global robotics market, made up mostly of those automated arms, was pegged at $17.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow massively over the next decade as new uses take off—up to $100 billion by one estimate. There are now an estimated fifty-five million robots in homes around the world in the form of toys, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and security monitors, and some people believe it won’t be long before every household has one. Indeed, the government of South Korea has mandated such a plan to be in effect by 2020. Robots will soon feed us, clothe us, wash us, keep us company and fetch us beer from the fridge. Eventually, we’ll even have robots to control those robots. Many look at the industry’s ramping growth and compare it to the early personal computer market of the seventies. “We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present,” says Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

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