While pundits were wringing their hands over whether the show was a dud and if there even would be another Comdex, the robotics industry quietly set up shop on the floor and at an adjacent restaurant. Comdex organizers would prefer to paint the event as an all IT/enterprise experience, but robotics stole the show, and the field could prove, one day, to be what saves a still-struggling tech industry. With so much possibility and potential in this bourgeoning market sector, I thought a guided tour of some of the wonders I found would be worthwhile.
Notable for its ultra-low price and anime-style body, the $199 Wowee Robosapian humanoid robot can walk, pick up light objects and do other sundry tricks—some cute, some a bit disgusting. It's not autonomous, though, requiring a remote control to work. The company producing it has a track record in toys, not research or robotics, so I remain skeptical about the device's true potential.
The servomotor and robot-kit manufacturer Megarobotics, nestled in a tiny, nondescript booth on the show floor, was displaying small, intelligent motors that resemble those found in Sony AIBOs, which have roughly 20, and the old i-Cybie robopup. You can buy the AI Motors in single $45 units and as a $900 kit that lets you build your own Robodoggy. I watched a robot made from a kit do handstands and—what else—virtually pee.
My favorite robot on the show floor, though, was the remarkable Therapeutic Robot, Paro. In our Best of Comdex awards, this robotic, RISC-based baby seal was a surprise finalist in the gadgets category. When I approached, I thought it was simply a stuffed animal, but then it moved and blinked its large black eyes. I froze and almost involuntarily began petting it. It responded immediately. Takanori Shibata, senior research scientist in the Bio-Robotics division of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, developed the robot. He explained that the body is covered (underneath the white fur) with sensors, and that the robot uses speech recognition to learn its own name and respond to your voice. Paro learns over time, so it can differentiate between a stroke and what might be an aggressive pat. It charges via a pacifier-like device inserted into its mouth, leaving the illusion of a real seal pup unbroken. The robot, which will launch early next year, will cost in the neighborhood of $2,500 to $3,000 and is designed for hospitals and nursing homes, because interactions with pets have proven therapeutic for the ill and infirm.
Although fascinating, what was happening on the show floor paled in comparison to the scene I found just across the street at Piero's, a posh restaurant. It was a bit like a day care center, but instead of children, we had hyper and sometimes truculent robots (autonomous and remote-controlled) racing back and forth across the carpeted floor. They were scurrying between and around our legs and bouncing off walls and each other with little or no purpose beyond exploring the restaurant and, perhaps, entertaining themselves.
This odd sight was the culmination of a half-day robotics conference sponsored by VIA Technologies. The maker of Mini-ITX motherboards has long been popular with the DIY PC crowd and has become the new darling of robotics hobbyists, but has also, apparently, gained favor with nascent robotics companies. Representatives from some robotics firms—White Box Robotics, Robodynamics, Roboteq, and others—gathered at the conference to talk about the new vitality in the robotics market and demonstrate their various creations relying on VIA's low-power integrated motherboards.
VIA's motherboards are attractive to manufacturers because of their remarkably small size, affordability (typically under $100), low power requirements, and integration of graphics, sound, and core CPU on a single board. And robots built around the VIA motherboards are hybrids of PCs and bots. In other words, although a device like the Sony AIBO may have a CPU on a small circuit board, the board will typically lack the I/O interfaces—USB, sound, and video, for example—found on full-fledged motherboards like the Mini-ITX. Using a true motherboard also provides a shortcut to connectivity and compatibility with other hardware and software. From my perspective, this is good and bad news. The bad news is that some of the robots at the conference were more rolling PCs than true robots. White Box Robotics, for example, demonstrated a robot that looks quite a bit like a cousin of R2-D2, but has standard PC bays for hard and optical drives. The good news is that PC bots may be helping to speed the development of new robots.
Robodynamics, for instance, is just a few months old, but company CEO and Founder Fred Nikgohar has already built a working prototype (okay, it was working until he got to the conference and the motor burned out) of the Personal Droid Assistant (PDA). Designed for entertainment, security, and even telepresence, the four-foot-tall prototype is still little more than a plastic toy retrofitted with a mini-ITX motherboard, some PVC tubing from Home Depot, and a Webcam. Still, Nikgohar predicted that the commercial product might be ready for market as early as Christmas 2004.
