Robots are hot!! I mean in commercial apps. Huge opportunities here. My guess is this technology will follow a similar path to mainstream computing, where an operating system is developed, and some high level languages that make it easy to program the apps- specialized robots to wash dishes or hang clothes on racks at retailers or what have you.
From medicine to military, machines finally arrive
The robots are coming. And when they get here, they will take out the trash.
Mobile, intelligent robots that can perform tasks usually reserved for humans are starting to creep into mainstream society and could become a multibillion-dollar market in a few years.
Carnegie Mellon's technological prowess in this area will be tested this weekend in the DARPA Grand Challenge, when driverless, robotic cars will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for a US$1 million prize. The university's Red Team Racing is the favorite. Other contestants include academics from the California Institute of Technology, a team of brothers from upstate New York and a group of students from Palos Verdes High School near Los Angeles.
On the performance side, for instance, Seegrid, co-founded by Carnegie Mellon professor Hans Moravec, has developed software that allows a mobile device to create a dense 3D map of a hallway or room after a single pass. Global positioning systems, too, can pinpoint a robot or any other object anywhere on the globe within 10 centimeters, and on-board processors, which crunch sensor data and coordinate a robot's movements, also continue to increase in performance.
asia.cnet.com |
