Robot Handiwork

For those who do not think robots are ready for prime time, here is a gif showing a robot stitching the skin of a grape. LINK  

Robo Marimba

Here is something you do not see every day. It is a robot that plays music in relation to what human musicians are playing.

Shimon, engineer Guy Hoffman’s robot musician, does not play programmed music, it improvises in ensembles with human players, communicating with a expressive head and favoring musical ideas that are unlikely to be chosen by humans, so as to lead the performance in genuinely novel directions.

The robot combines computational modeling of music perception, interaction, and improvisation, with the capacity to produce melodic acoustic responses in physical and visual manners. Shimon has performed with human musicians in dozens of concerts and festivals from DLD in Munich Germany, the US Science Festival in Washington DC, the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle WA, and Google IO in San Francisco. Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology is Shimon’s patron.

Here is a three minute example of the pleasant outcome. LINK

Robots are Coming

Many industries are feeling the influx of robots. Changes are coming faster than in the past. There were only 1,000 robot-assisted surgeries performed in 2000. By 2014, that number was 570,000.

Only 10% of worldwide manufacturing tasks are automated right now. That is expected to increase to 25% to 45% during the next 10 years as robots get much cheaper, smarter, faster, and easier to use.

Some companies, like China's Foxconn are investing in robots that can put together the tiny parts in Apple's iPhone.

Robotics is Growing

An analysis of 752 of The Robot Report's global database of robotics-related startup companies shows that 25% of the startups were focused on industrial robotics and 75% address new areas of robotics such as: unmanned aerial, land and underwater devices for filming, marketing, delivery, surveillance, security, surveying, and for the military, science and oil and gas industries (25%); robotics for the agriculture industry (6%); mobile robots as platforms for various uses (7%); personal service bots (3%); professional service bots (7%); medical, surgical and rehabilitation robots (7%); consumer products such as for home cleaning, security, remote presence and entertainment (9%); educational and the hobby market (5%); etc.

Support businesses such as AI and software, engineering and design, component manufacturing, 3D printing, vision systems and integrators make up the remainder. More than half of the startups are predominantly software based and indicative of the new metric that the hardware component represent less that 1/3 of the overall cost of the product.

The industrial robotics sector, whose revenues have represented 75% of the industry's overall sales for the past few years, is forecast by various sources to have double-digit compounded annual growth for the remainder of this decade. However, when one studies the figures for the biggest five user-countries, all except China are projecting CAGRs of 6% to 9% while China is expected to exceed 25%. Service robots are also expecting double-digit growth with over 80% of those new companies located in Europe and North America. This explosive growth shows that the next 5-10 years will all be double-digit years for the industry as a whole.

Incidentally, Oxford Martin School researchers estimate that robotics and artificial intelligence are on track to take over 40% of the US workforce within 15-20 years.

Robot Persons

Some lawmakers in Europe want to declare robots "electronic persons" as part of an effort to anticipate a future legal framework and to be able to tax them as people.

Robot Reporting

I love all things tech and I love writing. This program (or app or algorithm) stokes both of my passions. Robots are now writing mainstream media articles. Three minutes after one of the earthquakes hit Southern California a few weeks ago, an article was ready for publication, before reporters were awake or aware of the happenings.

The author was quakebot, a program created two years ago, that reacts to input from devices that report seismic activity. It is called a 'bot', because it reacts to outside stimulus without human intervention. The algorithm adds text to fill in between the 'facts' to create a readable story, suitable for publishing. In this case, it extracted the relevant data from the US Geological Service report, plugged it into a pre-written template, and sent it for publication in the LA Times.

Here is the actual article created: "A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author."

There are many other examples of 'bot' reporters and one company even  has some that scan entire books and publish indexes of words, by topic, and sells the results, in the form of books, on Amazon. Wow, honest reporting without humans twisting the story to fit the politics. There is hope.

Robot Builds Furniture

MIT has built a robot that can assemble IKEA furniture without human intervention. It can assemble flat-pack IKEA furniture all by itself. It has a specialized gripper hand that can grab the pieces and screw them together.

Humans feed the robot a design file that describes the product, such as how many pieces, what do they look like, where the screw holes are, etc. The robots do not need to be instructed how to assemble it. From knowing what the parts look like, the software can decipher how something needs to be put together.

Robot Pole Dancer

This struck me funny and had to share. It is a pole dancing robot shown at the Tobit Software booth prior to the opening of the CeBIT IT fair in Hanover, Germany, on March 5, 2012. It should destroy the myth that nerds do not have a sense of humor.

You can find this and many more robots for work and play at LINK.    

Is it Real

Here is an interesting set of pictures of mockups, practice drills, lifelike works of art, simulators, puppets, robots, models, prototypes, automatons, and more. All for your viewing pleasure. LINK I especially like the robot built to pull a rickshaw.

More Robots in our Future

Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and owner of Foxconn, recently announced that it intends to build a robot-making factory and replace 500,000 workers with robots over the next few years.

It already has 10,000 robots busy at work in its factories, and the plan is to increase the number of robots to one million by 2013.

Hon Hai now has about 800,000 employees and a yearly revenue of about $60 billion. The company signed a letter of intent to invest $3.3 billion in robots for its Taiwan factories. He said the robots will increase the production value of Foxconn by about $4 billion over the next three to five years and create about 2,000 new jobs. It plans to build most of the robots itself, due to lack of production speed from some suppliers. Seems like some of the science fiction stories of robots making robots are coming true. The name Singularity leaps to mind.