Robotics industry to expand

According to a recent Forbes magazine article,  cleaning, lawn moving and pool cleaning robots are expected to be a $1,8bn industry by 2014.

Beside these ‘helper’ robots, a range of robots for entertainment or companionship has also become popular. These include Sony’s AIBO robotic dog, the cute and furry Furby by Tiger Electronics and iRobi, a robot that reads the news and recipes to you and even acts as a karaoke machine. One of the most advanced domestic humanoid robots, Honda’s ASIMO, has not yet become commercially available.

Outside the household, robots have also found their way into the military. There are more than 700 bomb-disarming robots deployed by the US Military in Iraq and Afghanistan. iRobot has also recently been awarded a $286million contract to deliver 3000 robots to be used for surveillance and scouting missions by the army.

But the ultimate vision for roboticists is complete self-navigating robotic helpers and robotic vehicles. These ambitions are currently actively pursued in research labs and competitions. The 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge entailed university teams having to make actual vehicles function completely driverless and then self-navigate around a 96km urban area course. The 2007 challenge was won by Carnegie Mellon University with Stanford in the second place.

Another major contest is RoboCup. This annual event seeks to promote research and education through a competition where teams design multiple robots that play variations of soccer against each other. The overall aim of RoboCup is to “by the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.”