Back in 2006, when Bill Gates was making his tear-filled transition from the PC industry into a tear-filled career as a philanthropist, he penned an editorial on robotics that became a rallying cry for… no one. Titled “A Robot in Every Home,” Bill Gates highlighted the obvious parallels between the pre-Microsoft PC industry and the pre-anybody personal robotics industry. Industrial use, research work, and a fringe garage hobby. That was the state of the computer industry before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and that’s more or less the state of the robotics industry now, five years after Bill’s editorial.
Of course, Bill hasn’t been around to make the dream come true, he’s been busy saving Africa and our public school system and the souls of fellow billionaires. He did leave behind a multi-billion dollar sotware company, however, that is perfectly poised to make “A Robot in Every Home” a piece of fact instead of fiction. Since then, Microsoft’s one major (intentional) contribution to the industry has been the sporadically updated Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. It’s a good tool for prototyping and simulating simple robotics, but it isn’t moving anything forward. In fact, it treats the robotics industry exactly like computer industry stalwarts treated the burgeoning PC industry: as a hobby. What Microsoft hasn’t been doing over these past years is building a robot operating system, or making an even greater gamble on actual robots themselves.
Oddly enough, Microsoft’s largest contribition to robotics as of yet was largely inadvertent. The Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 was launched in November of 2010, and was a surprising success with consumers. While normal people snapped up the mysterious sensor by the millions, brought it into their living rooms, and realized how very-out-of-shape they were, pale hobbyists (“hackers,” as they’re known these days) quickly sequestered themselves in their garages (circa 2010 / 2011: poorly heated loft apartments), and taught the Kinect sensor new tricks. The piece of hardware that was originally intended to be a locked down add-on for the 360 became a multipurpose 3D sensor extraordinaire. Microsoft actually issued a mild out-of-touch (and never repeated) threat to the hackers, but the “damage” was done, and hundreds of burgeoning roboticists had a supremely powerful tool in their hands — and incedentally generated millions of dollars worth of free PR for Kinect with YouTube videos of their exploits.
In 1974, when Intel released the 8080 microprocessor, it wasn’t trying to invent the PC, it was just trying to improve upon its existing, limited 8-bit 8008 chip. It was up to the likes of MITS (the Altair 8800) and Microsoft (Altair Basic) to make good use of it. Clones and successors quickly followed, and Intel has obviously kept up over the years. Perhaps Microsoft would be happy to accidentally spark a robotics revolution with the Kinect sensor, but wouldn’t it prefer to be at the center of it? Besides, Microsoft doesn’t actually build the 3D sensor heart of the Kinect, those honors go to a company called PrimeSense, which is offering the same tech to anyone for a similarly low price.
Someone is going to figure this out. Willow Garage, fueled by some mysterious and apparently inexhaustible venture capital, is taking the open source angle with its ROS (Robot Operating System). The project already has a good amount of traction among bearded hackers and ambitious university robotics programs, since it allows altruistic types to build upon the innovation of others instead of continually “reinventing the wheel” (as Willow Garage puts it) and building their own robot operating system and hardware support from the ground up. Still, while ROS has made great strides and is home to some very exciting innovation — along with its fair share of Kinect hacks, of course — it’s nothing a consumer would find useful or even approachable. What the personal computing revolution did was take tools that were already commonplace in the enterprise and hand them to regular cro-mags who wanted to “balance a checkbook” with a spreadsheet application or “word process” without a typewriter ribbon. Microsoft put those tools in the hands of hobbyists, then Apple put them in the hands of regular people, and then Microsoft put them in the hands everybody.
What we need a Microsoft or a Google or an Apple to do — or if they won’t do it, Enterprising Upstart X — is build an operating system that runs on standardized hardware or commodity hardware, with built-in capabilities for doing things that are actually useful for a home user. Buzzing you in when you get locked out, signing for a package, taking that frozen chicken out of the freezer while you’re at work, feeding your pet, and of course the veritable classic of robo-problems: getting you a beer. As simple as these things sound, they’re actually incredibly complex in terms of where general robotics innovation is at currently. That’s why EUX is a longshot, but there’s still room for some barefaced ingenuity. The dawn of the PC was marked by incredible efficiency of code and hardware, techniques that made Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak famous. Currently, the retail robot closest to being able to manage all these tasks is Willow Garage’s PR2, which costs $400,000, harbors two dual-processor Xeon servers (16 cores total) and is still slow as molasses.
Imagine a robot that you could buy at Best Buy for somewhere between $2k and $4k, unbox and configure in half an hour, and then just take for granted as an extremely reliable, whine-free household member for the next few years (or, if you bought it from Apple, exactly 12 months before the upgrade lust sets in). It would change everything. Of course, it sounds preposterous given the current state of this barely-there industry, but it’s going to be a reality within the next decade. Who will get us there first?
15 Comments
As long as robots have great pixel density, we’ll be fine.
Paul, you are awesome, and I’m glad I still have something of yours to read. Keep on #winning.
Awesome article, Paul.
So happy your e still writing somewhere, even though you quit engadget.
Great article! I don’t know weather to be thrilled or terrified. But just let m say welcome to our robot overlords!
Yea, robots need to get standardized, cheap, and useful. If people can buy something thats guaranteed not to be forgotten in a year, and will make there lives easier in some way, then robots might just happen. I deffinantly thing people are ready for robots, they just need to “happen” like PCs did. Nice piece Paul, thanks!
Very true about the robots. I know when I was studying Artificial Intelligence at university, all the big ticket AI items – vision, language, knowledge, planning – were proving waaay more difficult than first thought. But I like your theory that now the biggest problem is lack of imagination.
Now i know why you left engadget. To write beautiful things
I never thought about the similarities here. Makes me kind of excited for the possibilities!
P.S. Other possible titles for this post: “Robopocalypse Please” or “Assume The RoBone”
Paul, great article. Do you think that maybe it isn’t Robots that are the next revolution but it is the technology that is being developed on how people can interact with robots that is the next revolution? Similar to your Kinect example.
My thought is that people don’t want a machine to do everything for them but they are looking for new ways to make things easier and to interact with machines. How this will look I have no idea but just a thought.
YES!!! Also, until we get there, I want a PR2 quite badly.
paul, i’d love to see an easy to use robot OS. but your 2-4k price for a robot kit won’t get you very far – even if mass produced. if you calculate 500$ per axis (strong enough servo motor, precise encoder, servo-drive plus frame) you’ll get 4 to 8 axis – barely enough to mimic a simplified hand/arm. those tiny 50$ servos make lovely dancing robots but they fall over when you sneeze
I of course may be mistaken, yet I think this next revolution would only spark from one place – home appliances, we pretty much in no need for another device walking or driving within our living space, we need existing machines to speak better between each other, the only device actually moving across the house (if we don’t speak of a healthcare robots or those for elderly) is a cleaning robot. Others should evolve from intellectual systems within scenarios already present. Thus they will not look like conventional robots and we may not see them coming until we look in a bit of a wrong direction.
I love the sentiment, but I think either you are underestimating the complexity of creating a usable robot or I am totally wrong about the technical barriers to accomplishing such a thing. Isn’t this, in effect, like saying “why don’t we have workable AI by now?”
I think there is a major flaw in your logic with this Robotic Argument. You said that they need to be creating the software to power these new uncreated robots. Isn’t this impossible because to create software you need to have the hardware to build it off of. You gave a counter argument to this by saying, well Intel made the 8080 microprocessor. But Intel made this product off an existing hardware they had, not out of thin air. They improved the computer industry, not inventing an entirely new industry. Also with the Kinect argument, those hackers made the cool software off of existing hardware. They did not just come up with the software on their own. Ok, lets just say, Robotic Engineers should create the software based off of Hondas ASIMO robot. The reason it is so slow today is not because of the software, but because of the power supply. Battery technology is not even close to having the power for Robots. Why don’t we have “good” electric cars, flying cars, jetpacks? The power source is not good enough. NASA has already developed the software for flying cars to fly themselves, but did that spark the industry to make them? No. If someone could create nano batteries or dark matter, then we would see Robots and Flying Cars everywhere. This is not a software problem, but hardware. Engadget was my favorite website, sad to see you go.
Great read Paul, thanks. What do you think of Roomba and the like, robot? or not. I like the autonomous bots that just get things done. Also, do you remember the Big Trak, it was a programmable toy from the 70s. http://www.bugeyedmonster.com/toys/bigtrak/ Do you consider this a bot? I guess what I am getting at is, do you see only humanoids (ASIMO) as bots or any programmable device?
Thanks again.
btw, I really hope you, Patel, Chris and Josh are going to be putting something together soon. Maybe, a gadget blog? (-: