Robotics (II)

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The build-up | Good and Ready; After slow beginnings, a big push in robotics now seems imminent. Economist, Mar 29, 2014.
www.economist.com/news/special-r ... nent-good-and-ready

Quote:

“Car companies use the lion’s share of industrial robots; in 2012 they accounted for 52% of robot installations in America. The country with the most robots per person is South Korea, which takes the technology very seriously.

“Used in robotics, the Kinect sensor is a cheap, easy and fairly reliable way to provide both a sense of depth and a kind of ‘person-detector,’ which is a great help to robots that need to map and navigate their surroundings. Most robot laboratories have some version of it, either bolted to a robot or mounted on the wall or ceiling. A shopping mall in Osaka is wired up with the sensors set up by Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International to tell robots where they are and how to spot the shoppers to whom they are learning to give leaflets and directions.

Similar to Google’s Android (free, capable of modification to customize), “Robot Operating System (ROS) * * * is free to use and easily customised * * * Robotics used to be hard to do because to make even a poor robot you had to be good at a whole lot of different things * * * Now a small team with a fresh insight in a single area * * * can use ROS and reasonably cheap hardware to put together a robotic system on which to try out its ideas without being expert in any of the other areas involved [more or less like compiler in coding]. Sometimes there is no need to build a physical robot at all. * * * Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot [is a platform shared by many software developers. There is even] a virtual robot in a simulated environment called Gazebo, which had been developed by the OSRF [Open Source Robotics Foundation, a not-for-profit spin-off from Willow Garage; the latter produced the PR2 robot and the ROS in it] and hosted in the cloud. Being able to try out robot software in real time this way, says DARPA’s Mr Pratt, is a big deal. He draws an analogy with the early days of integrated circuits on silicon chips in the late 1970s. At first the only way to see how well a circuit was going to work—if at all—was to build it. It was only when simulators became available that designers could ensure in advance that the circuits would work, which vastly sped development in the field.

“The biggest [robotics] cluster [in the world], that around MIT, is home not only to Boston Dynamics, to date supported mostly by military R&D contracts, but also to iRobot

“The self-driving car demonstrates the idea; it can mesh information on its whereabouts from its sensors with maps of the world held in the cloud, with various programs using the comparison [with the information stored in the cloud] to generate instructions for the cars’ motors, steering systems and so on. Ken Goldberg of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that a similar use of “cloud robotics”—a term coined by a Google employee, James Kuffner—could make it much easier for robots to recognise objects for what they are and act accordingly.