Dan Kara is Vice President at WTWH Media, a media company that serves engineering, business and investment professionals through 40+ web sites, 5 print publications, along with many other technical and business events. The network includes The Robot Report, an online technical, business and investment news and information portal focused on robotics and intelligent systems, as well as the Robotics Summit Conference and Exposition, which addresses the technical issues involved with the design, development, manufacture and delivery of commercial robotics and intelligent systems products and services. Dan talks about how a trip to Japan made him start Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness. He also shares his views on what is going on in robotics. Like many others, Dan found robotics early in science fiction. When he was looking for a new challenge, having left the IT industry, a trip to Robodex in Japan inspired him to start Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness. We hear how the focus has shifted from military applications in the early 2000s to more and more consumer focused progress. Agility in production is also discussed as consumer demand pushes manufacturers to refocus from large scale production of similar items to more customer focused production.
This podcast is part of the Wevolver network. Wevolver is a platform & community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate.
Learn more at Wevolver.com
If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, you can contact us at richard@wevolver.com
Per Sjoborg: Welcome to the podcast version of Robots In Depth Episode 11 with Dan Kara in cooperation with Wevolver.
Dan Kara: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.
Per: How did you get started in robotics?
Dan: It took a roundabout. Like most people I was my imagination was fired when I was very young. I read a great deal of science fiction when I was a teenager and even before that and then that followed up with movies. I've always had a technical bent and in college certainly I focused on computer science. I was in the information technology space for a while after doing a couple of software start-ups and was the co-founder and a partner in a number of companies called integrated media company. It’d be a company that did market research and consulting. They would also have websites or publishing and they also did events. I did a couple of start-ups in the area of information technology integrated media companies for information technology computer systems and so on and so forth and sold a couple of those. Then I wanted to move on to something different, a new challenge, a more interesting at the time subject matter. I went to Japan for a couple of times and came back. I went to event called Robodex in 2003. They had about 55,000 people. This was in Japan at a robotics conference, a lot of consumer type of things there so I came back fired up. Then I took that existing model, the integrated media model that I worked with IT and just applied a robotics overlay to it so launched Robotics Trends, the company in 2003 and then the first RoboBusiness event was launched in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Per: It's cool to see that one of the major conferences is 10 years old or more now. It tells us that our business is moving on and maturing I would presume.
Dan: I mean the event has changed over time. It’s weathered a recession. Initially for the first couple of years it was very focused on the military aspects so we had a lot of unmanned ground systems, defense systems, unmanned aerial systems or defense systems and over time the event has changed. If you look at this year's event which is ran very well. I have to hand it to all the folks involved. It looks great. There’s consumer systems. There’s industrial systems. There’s mobile service robots and very little of the defense sector at the event. It’s changed over time along with the industry itself.
Per: Because the industry is growing like wildfire and I think you have a unique perspective in the fact that you've been with us from 2003 and 2004 and on. Could you take us down this road of describing in the beginning it was lots of Defense but was there anything else and then describe that the progression you've seen over the years bringing us to where we are today.
Dan: Actually the changeover going from defense to everything but defense now industrial, consumer and service robots mirrored what was happening in the industry at that time. At one time it was the defense industry which was pushing along the robotics sector outside of industrial robots. Industrial robots have been doing very well for decades now but in terms of the other types of robots it was military funding with the Gulf Wars and a variety of other things were kind of pushing that including the technologies that were developed. What you're starting to see is the complete polar opposite of that. The technologies that are developed for the commercial sector are finding their way down into defense systems as COTS technology, commercial off-the-shelf technology and actually developed in either in commercial entities or in research labs and then spun out into commercial entities and then finding its way back to the military. Actually the event itself is a mirror image of what was happening in the industry at large.
Per: I think that that's probably a big trend that robotics is diversifying but I also think that this fact that we're going from the military who has a very long term, very hard goal to more commercial technology is also an indication that it is maturing because that that kind of customer, the new kind of customer doesn't have the same time horizon or the same budget that's the military do. They need something they can use today.
Dan: They need something they can use today. They don't have 10 years or five years or 20 years horizons. They also need an ROI which in the case of the military was not an issue. Then also in addition to being pushed by the military they came over about eight years ago, maybe a little bit less this huge influx of technology coming from the mobile communication sector. It reduces in prices for enabling technologies such as sensors of a variety type or accelerometers or cameras being driven down by the cost of mobile communications technology, commodity manufacturing. Those technologies are finding their way into robotics products so you've had a push from the military. You’ve had a push from the mobile communications sector and all of this is sort of fuelling the robotics sector at this particular time.
Per: I also think that the cell phones and the tablets and the computers we have makes us more likely to be interested in the next technology revolution because we've seen how significant the prior technology revolutions have been and we're looking at maybe I can get the same benefits from a robotics revolution.
Dan: We certainly see that from the vendor community. Where is the next large in their case the consumer marketplace. Robotics is one of the things that we're looking at particularly in the area of consumer drone technology and certainly one where there's a guaranteed win is in the autonomous driving area where you're talking about millions or hundreds of millions or billions of robotic devices and then certainly the technologies that support that.
Per: Where do you see the actual progress is being made today? Where do you see technologies that are mature? They’re applied in the customers operations and they're being used every day because I think that that's something we should really bring out there to the people that robotics is today here right now providing useful service to organizations and to people. Where do you see that being used today and a good example of that?
Dan: The easy one is industrial robotics. It’s an ROI that's easily measured in terms of productivity, in terms of quality improvement, in terms of efficiency. Now in terms of the new era of industrial robotics in terms of agile manufacturing. It used to be just making more things with a higher quality faster and getting them out the door. Now the emphasis is on using robotic technology to manufacture smaller amounts of things very quickly and then changeover and manufacture something else based on customer demand as opposed to just only making large batches amounts. Focus on large batches of basically the same product now to move to a proliferation of smaller batches of dissimilar products. Industrial robotics one time limited to either auto manufacturing or semiconductor manufacturing. Now you're seeing proliferate into other areas from food production in different vertical markets that way and wood processing and that sort of thing all the way down to smaller companies. Not only are they moving to different vertical market segments of large companies they're moving into different vertical market segments and also with small to medium businesses. There’s interesting things going on there in terms of what the number of types of vertical market segments they can target and the number of types of applications that these robots are being used for. It's very interesting at this time just the proliferation of new sensor types that focus on vision systems with these particular robots, the new emphasis on collaborative systems are designed to work in close approximation with human co-workers makes it very interesting in the industrial sector at this time and again all tied to demonstrable ROI and a short horizon in terms of attaining that ROI. There’s other areas as well.
Now if you move into the service robotic sector so we'll now push industrial outside. We see robotics being used for warehouse and distribution center operations, mobile robotic systems coming from Amazon robotics formerly Kiva systems, other types of things doing supply chain automation in internal supply chain automation and in hospitals and distribution centers in warehouse with mobile service robots. Very interesting things going on this time to surgical robots, interventional systems is another example. Day to day in real companies making real money robots are being used all the time. Then you move over to the consumer space in terms of vacuuming robots or even lawn mowing robots. Certainly vacuuming robots are becoming more and more common and the other types of robots, robotic pool cleaners, robotic lawn mowers are proliferating as well. Across the board from industrial to defense, to service robots, to consumer robotics. Robotics technologies is being incorporated into all number of different things being used for all number of applications.
Per: This is also right here right now and I think that that's a good place to start. We know now the kind of state of robotics is in today so where do you think we're going in the future? Is it robotics cars, autonomous car that's going to be that the next product or do you see anything else?
Dan: That's a given. There’s just too much money. The social needs, the business needs, just the impetus behind it in terms of manufacturers in a variety of other areas. That’s pretty much a guarantee. It’s just a matter of when and how that occurs so that's a given. In terms of robotics generally across all of them, all the different sectors so defense, industrial service and consumer you see a number of different things happening. Certainly these devices are going to be much more intercommunicating, will communicate with each other to a much greater degree. They’re going to be internetworked with people, with other robots, with their environment and that's going to be continued. Another tailwind much like we have with mobile communications, much like we have with the defense sector, this initiative to focus on the Internet of Things being driven by large companies with a lot of money driving standards, driving technologies. That’s going to be the third tailwind for the robotic sector. We’re also reaching time whether these robotic systems become much more intelligent. We’ve always had sort of limited processing that was basically on board processing on the robot. Then we went out to the cloud to gather other types of information and object models and data models that sort of thing that we can download but now we're moving into an era where going to have cognition on-demand using deep learning engines and other types of algorithms and other types of sources to pull down basically cognition or intelligence when we want it delivered as a service to the robot. The robot itself is going to become more capable in terms of this cognitive capabilities and in processing power. You’re going to have distributed processing in the cloud. It’s being augmented with distributed intelligence offered as a service and then also due to the Internet of Things you're going to be working in environments that are going to be highly sensored. These sensors are going to tell the robot what these things are, where they are, where the robots located and then the robot itself will just be better using imaging systems or other types of technologies to know where it is and what it's doing. All of these are acting in confluence at this particular time or the very near future to give these robots much greater capabilities.
The other thing that you'll see in addition to greater cognitive capabilities or greater intelligence and greater interconnectivity is you're going to see increasing levels of autonomy. They’ll be fed by these types of things interconnectiveness, the greater intelligence of these robots. Now it would allow robots to do many more things. We're moving from an era for some types of robots whether it be there teleoperated or very limited in terms of their functionality to where they might be able to do some sort of autonomous navigation, localization and mapping to you're going to move into areas where they're going to have tasks autonomy so instead of just navigation autonomy or teleoperation to navigation autonomy to moving to task autonomy. You can tell the robot to instead of just go there to go there and do that once it gets there. Then eventually you move away from just task autonomy to a much higher level to some people call mission autonomy. I don't want you to go there and do that. I want you to go there and do that and I want you to go somewhere else and do something else and do something else and by the way let us know what you're doing and then if you need other support in terms of robotics you're communicating with those and they're acting in swarms. It gets very interesting very fast.
Per: So for instance this task of autonomy could really be to tell them to, for instance a cleaning system go out and keep this area clean rather than go there and clean that. Say that you then have a kind of a surveillance robots it goes around and checks okay somebody spilled a drink. Here, there's a lot of dust. There wouldn't be the same robot taking care of the problem and the robot that saw notices the problem doesn't take care of it at all. It just tells other robots that here's your work and here's a task suitable for you and whatever.
Dan: That's true and it's very difficult even I think in the near future to make robots that are multitasking and do multiple things. That’s very difficult at this time. Probably what you're going to get is more likely is single task robots that's what we have now and then eventually moving to an era where there'll be single task robots working in groups to accomplish more. Then eventually the robots will be of different types of tasks supporting each other. Actually it's possible now even for the single task robots so these robots as they move around say a mobile ground robot to do sensors to add to your point to communicate other types of things that they see or discover or find out. For example the temperatures getting hotter or there is fact instead of if you're vacuuming this in fact this particular piece of flooring is wet as opposed to just dirty. You can see that as well to be able to add that fairly quickly to a robot that maybe can sense their environment do one thing very well but in terms of sensing that environment can let other systems know that something is up.
Per: Together we'll get a larger robotic system doing it together rather than each robot being very capable.
Dan: This is complex thing. This is complex stuff. We sit here gullibly assuming that communication is not going to be a problem or that there's lack of standard technologies or for whatever. For example for integrating devices within the home there's a number of different standards that are evolving at this particular time but as I mentioned earlier the impetus behind say Internet of Things initiatives and architectures from massive vendors coming in, a lot of money will push that. Eventually those standards will be developed and those communications will get better over time so we're moving into an era now 5G communications. We’re moving into the era of IP6 in terms of the number of nodes on the internet and we're talking billions and trillions and even more than that, more than stars in the sky, more than stars in the universe then molecules and that sort of thing. This stuff is moving forward and much like it was driven by the military and much like it was driven with mobile communication, the IOT will push a lot of this to get to the type of a vision that we're both discussing here.
Per: We also see that in the use of robots that when people get a lawnmower robot, they get a vacuum-cleaner robot they actually adapt their way of living, their way of behaving to that robot because they want the service the robot provides.
Dan: Yes and people are willing to do that. They do more than just adapt their environment. They personalize the robots in many cases particularly the consumer robots. The percentage of people using iRobot's Roomba who give it a name or decorate the robot in some ways. It’s huge and people just have this natural built-in affinity for things that move around or appear lifelike and then they add the attributes of a lifelike entity to those things. It’s an interesting thing and it's not something that's going to go away. In fact that's why many people are betting on this notion of these new generation of these sort of robotic entities that will act as sort of the nexus of control and social interaction as the house something like Jibo Inc.'s Jibo robot which is a social personal robot. The robot will interact with people in a way. Right now for the first version will be fairly limited in terms it'll take photographs. It'll give you access to the internet and you act with it socially but over time that will become the nexus of control for other things in the house because people frankly would rather talk to that little robot that has limited motion and can do some things. It looks somewhat lifelike compared to an ambient intelligence or dealing with a cell phone or something like that.
Per: Because that's how we're used to interacting with people and of course that the Jibo and what we're seeing in that space is also the first version of something that's going to be developing over decades. If you look at that the current version that is like a computer was in 1975. The version of the Jibo we're talking about here in 2035 when we are here at RoboBusiness is going to be vastly different. As you say this is going to be our gateway, our C3P0 and R2D2 if you will of robotics where one communicates with people and the other communicates with robots and they team up.
Dan: Maybe. There’s much study that points out that people would prefer if they're going to be dealing with something other than a human or an animal that it has some sort of attributes that make it look like a real entity as opposed to a box or as opposed to something just amorphous in the room that just talks to you.
Per: But we also see that in the Baxter from Rethink Robotics. They have the face screen so to speak and they can communicate with you by being a frowny face or a happy face. They move the screen and the eyes before they move the arms like you and I do. If I was reaching to pick up I would first move my eyes and face and then move my hand. That’s the way humans are used to communicating and that's why we also like it especially you mentioned here the co-operating robot where people are working in close co-operation with robotics. I think that this kind of communication would be very important for that.
Dan: I mean yes and they've quantified this with a number of different studies but we all know it internally. My grandma would call horse sense. We all know this to be true and so yes you have the research to back it up, decades of research but now everybody kind of knows that people might prefer working that way although sometimes people will take, like we mentioned earlier add human-like attributes to this or lifelike attributes to things that are not lifelike like us iRobot’s’ Roomba or an automobile it's probably a really good example of that where they give them names and they treat them as something other than just a machine.
Per: I also know that iRobot had that experience when they were using the PackBots and they were using them to define defuse IEDs or ordnance and they of course eventually blew up. The guys were bringing in from the field and they said, can you fix this? It’s too far gone. You’ll get a new one. No, fix this one instead. They were thinking that this robot was a part of a team. They wanted that one fixed not a new one.
Dan: They all have names.
Per: Of course they do. This is a very interesting trend and it also brings robots into our homes which is a very hard space to address.
Dan: It's hard space for a couple of reasons. I mean the consumer robotics marketplace other than sort of home care, lawn care is really not taking off. You have maybe educational toys, maybe smart toys and maybe some educational robots but in terms of other things it hasn't really worked out that well. We have the floor cleaners they've done fairly well. We have the robotic lawn mowers they've done well. Pool cleaners is another one and then sort of the educational toys and the smart toys and the educational robots. Then after that there hasn't been a whole lot of success. People are looking at maybe mobile robots for security. There are mobile telepresence for the home but the value and particularly the value given the cost of these particular technologies just hasn't worked correctly yet. People are still struggling to bring robots into the home outside of home care, lawn care, toys and educational kits.
Per: Because the cost is so much bigger than the potential return.
Dan: It's just not worth the money. I mean you could probably build a robot that would that would push snow, push low levels of snow off your lawn or something like that or maybe pick up leaves but it's too much money for the amount of work. Then also frankly there is and this has been also demonstrated that there is something that people enjoy doing certain things around the home. For example to mow your lawn you would think for me I would love to have a robot mow my lawn but my wife likes mowing the lawn. She enjoys that. There’s something about it. It’s like gardening. Why would you build a robot to garden your house or people just enjoy doing that. It’s that aspect as well that includes things like walking the dog. I mean yes, you could probably do a robot but who would want to do that? People just enjoy doing that. The business value or the value there isn't one to be demonstrated.
Per: I think that's also something except walking the dog I think that mowing the lawn, taking care of the kitchen, preparing food, clearing the table, I think that we have to accept this duality there that some basically watch a film on TV or go to the cinema. It’s both not either/or. Sometimes it's better to hang out at home and sometimes it's better to go see the blockbuster in the cinema. I talked to Melonee Wise about this in an earlier interview. You were saying that if we were supposed to build a robot that could clear a table it would need certain concessions basically what you and I talked about with the Internet of Things. Then she said that it could work but you have to make all your plates orange for instance. I was saying that yes, I would accept that and I think most people would now and then. I mean not always and when we have the beautiful dinner party at a Sunday evening or a Saturday evening we probably wouldn't but for the days when we have so much to do and so little time to do it we would make these concessions so that the robots could actually work and to meet the robot halfway but again it's a bit too much money for not enough service yet. We’re waiting for a breakthrough there but I see that mobile manipulators are getting cheaper, arms are getting cheaper. What’s your trend? Do you see the fundamentals that we build our robots with? Are they getting better priced for it?
Dan: In terms of manipulators that's definitely the case. I mean they used to be much more expensive and for the ones that are really highly capable where you need that level of exactitude they still are very expensive but at the same time at one time there was only those. Now you have a proliferation of sort of lower-cost robotic arms and so right now there hasn't been a movement to or a lot of applications for mobile manipulators. We have many robots that are great at moving around and localizing themselves and navigate autonomously. They usually drag some sort of packet with it either with a sensor package or they have a sweeper or they have they're carrying objects in an industrial environment or whatever so they have this thing that kind of drives itself and it'll carry something around. At the same time we have a whole generation of very effective stationary manipulators that are very good at doing things. We have this one group that's very good at moving stuff around and another class of robots that are very good at manipulation. What you don't have is a robot that can find its way autonomously to some location and then do something when it's there in the physical world, manipulate something in the physical world so there's a lot of research going on now to develop you know mobile manipulation systems. The problem is that these things can become expensive and it's difficult to do once you add an arm to a mobile robot then you start getting limit in terms of speed and there's other issues related to stability and a whole pile of other things. In the consumer space it gets difficult because it adds too much cost. It’s a tough thing to do but again you can see a number of applications primarily in the commercial space where it would be very interesting to have that capability to move someplace autonomously and then when you get there do something in the physical world and manipulate objects. Hopefully over time, we've already talked about levels of autonomy, we've talked about navigation autonomy basically done in indoor environment and if you get to a level of task autonomy now go somewhere do something.
Per: I've seen this implemented in a in a ship fabrication facility because those are different if you relate them to normal production which usually progresses from point A to point B and you add stuff to something and one end comes a lot of pieces and the other end comes a car. Ship fabrication, depending on the ship you're producing needs to go between different machines many different times. They usually a square with the machine in each node and say that you're making 50,000 of this ship and it has to go to 12 different locations in different order it isn't realistically possible to make this flexibly without what you're saying and this is exactly what they did. They took mobile-based, put an arm on it and put a receiving station and a delivery station on each machine so the robot could go up. Pick out a number of pieces that were in production, deliver them to another robots' receiving station and kind of give them to that machine. This allow this ship factory to basically route material dynamically so it could go from any machine to any machine at any time. One machine said, okay I'm done with this. Come and get it and you know where it's supposed to go. The robot went there, picked it up and delivered it to the other machine and everything just worked out that way rather than the linear regular conveyor belt thing.
Dan: It goes back to this whole notion of flexibility or agility for manufacturing or for almost anything now. It became much more flexible and agile in your business for almost any business you can think of particularly today in this sort of highly competitive, globally linked world and so yes, that's what all companies are looking to do and you can facilitate that with robotics technology.
Per: Then we simply have to wait for that to grow the volume so that costs come down and then we have to return to the private space because I think I am a father of children and I would love to have a robot that picks off everything off the floor and cleans up during the night. That would be a lovely product.
Dan: It's been a long time for me but I know exactly what you think, the amount of things on the floor to pick up just to put them in a basket or something is just incredible.
Per: I would be prepared to pay quite a lot for that robot so that's a challenge to you guys out there. What I'm thinking also is that we have to say a few words about the autonomous car. What do you think about when will we see one and what changes will that bring to society?
Dan: Actually I think it's going to be faster than you think. It’ll be incremental these are all pretty much obvious. We'll add different types of assistive technology and eventually get on to full autonomy at some point and they're going to have to change the infrastructure and a variety of other things but it's interesting to think because usually when you think about the reasons of moving to autonomous cars okay or autonomous trucks it's usually given in a matter of we can reduce the number of accidents. We can reduce congestion. We can improve the environmental issues and a variety of other things, all good. It all sounds great but I recently saw a film and I don't remember the company that put it out where it just had a young girl narrating and using Claymation to show what the world would be like. She started focusing on other things that this would drive in our environment. For example you could come up to a time where there would be no traffic signs or no traffic lights. All of that stuff that's up there would just go away. You could come to a time where maybe there's a four-lane road, two lanes going one way, two lanes going another and you have that now because the cars they'd be driving efficiently. I mean we're pretty good at it but it's inefficient. You could actually just remove two of those lanes because the cars would be all computerized and all internet worked with each other it would be highly optimized meaning that what was once a lane of traffic can now become a lane for people to walk through. All the parking that we have for each individual cars would go away or much of it would go away because the cars themselves you would get a car when you come out of the airport the car would come and pick you up and drive you home or if you needed a car at home to come and get you. It doesn't have to sit out while you go to the airport and sit there for a couple of days. There’s other things in addition to the increase in efficiency, the environmental impact, the safety impact, all that kind of is all great stuff to just give you more time. The amount of time you spend in a car be great to have so that you could do other things but it would also impact us in a lot of other ways that are kind of tangential to all that but in fact might even be more of a better fit than these kind of things that we can measure very easily like number of accidents and that sort of thing. Can you imagine where there used to be a parking lot are now trees in a park and so where you used to be able to walk and you have a sidewalk that's basically made for two people and now it can hold five people going across so it gets very interesting once you start projecting where this will go as it evolves over time.
Per: Exactly what we talked about before that we accommodated the new technology, the car, we adapted our cities. I recently had the pleasure walking through Paris and we saw how much space the cars were taking. The part we walked through is very old and I was thinking I wonder how this place looked before the cars and it must have been a totally different place where people could move freely and go however they wished and they could meet each other and they could they weren't divided up by the fact that here's a road. There’s lots of cars coming at high speed and we can't be there. I think that what this film showed you and this is a very interesting aspect that I haven't thought about before that it's going to have wide-ranging consequences rather than just as you said the more obvious ones.
Dan: It might impact some ways that we might feel uncomfortable with because this in this particular film in intersections all the cars just go at once because they can communicate with each other and they can kind of interweave with each other while driving. In fact you don't have a system where all the cars stop. You wait for one group to hold and wait for them. In fact they all can go because they all know within millimeters of how to move through this particular thing so it would be like driving in an environment where you might you might feel very uncomfortable but I think over time you just realize it in fact you know it's all handled.
Per: It's going to take a while to get used to that when approach an intersection and swish. The first time, the first hundred times that happens to me I'm probably going to be a bit anxious.
Dan: I don't know when this would evolve but you can see you know we're not attaching a time limit here. Will this occur? Yes, it will occur so it's just a matter of time. When it will occur is another whole question. It’s going to be messy and it's going to take time but eventually we'll get there. It’ll be cobbled together because at one time like you said there were no roads. There were no parking lots. There were no parking buildings to park in. There wasn't traffic lights. All this stuff just evolved organically over time and now it runs pretty well for the most part. I mean there are a lot of accidents but if you consider the number of people on the road all the time I'm amazed that it isn't like a fireball constantly as you just drive down the road.
Per: I noticed that I thought about that too and I think about driving it's amazing that you're allowed to do it and that it actually works that well. That’s an amazing thing and I think that this is what we're going to see in other areas in robotics too but the self-driving car is such a good example of it. It's easy to illustrate but having these new areas come in and we see the direct change and we can talk about that but there's also going to be second and third, fourth, fifth generation change going far from that and some of it is going to be something that takes a while to get used to you but other things we were just going to say wow, this is so cool.
Dan: You can see it moving in the other areas so for example even something like shipping. These massive cargo ships about 30% of their costs for those trips are people. You really don't need once you're out of the harbor, do you really need a whole lot of direction. This isn't dry driving on a road. This is pretty open for the most part and they go fairly quickly but they aren't moving along at 85 miles an hour or whatever like something like that. Imagine just transportation of cargo ships. We're talking about these things are heavily laden with technology as it is and we have satellites encircling the globe so it would be very easy for these ships to actually in some ways reduce the amount of crew that they have and just move through autonomously to some degree.
Per: Two questions what are we talking about in robotics 2025?
Dan: Ten years.
Per: Ten years, it's a substantial amount of time. Hard problems can be addressed in that time.
Dan: Hard problems can be addressed at that time so what I suspect you'll be seeing is a lot more assistive technology in some levels of autonomy being added to self-driving cars or driving cars not completely self-driving but certainly some capabilities there. That will just move on and over time will add more capabilities. The other thing you probably see is I will think you'll see greater use of mobile robot in places like hospitals and again in warehouses. Right now they're just beginning to proliferate in warehouses and distribution centers. In 10 years’ time I suspect that's going to be commonplace technology for a lot of delivery and sort of internal supply chain or intralogics I think sometimes they call it.
Per: Will we see them in the supermarket too stocking shelves and shops and stores?
Dan: I don't think you'll see that. I do think the hospitality marketplace there's a lot of initiatives in there so doing things like those robots that we've seen here in RoboBusiness might be able to deliver a newspaper or deliver an orange juice or something like that up to your room. We’ll have to see if there's an ROI figure attached to that whether it makes sense. In some cases I haven't heard of the hotel industry suffering because they couldn't get people at a price where they can't have somebody do that personally like for example drop newspapers in front of your hotel door every day. Are they really developing in technology kind of in search, they have a technology now that is it's in search of an application. That might be the case for that but you also have to take in consideration also the use of these things as a marketing tool. There’s a dollar value added to that as well. We have this robotic technology allows you to come into your into your hotel and people just for some reason or another they're not enamored with that. I do believe you'll start seeing more in public places so things such as in stores to act as helpmates and avatars. They don't have to do a whole lot. All they have to do is they recognize you when you walk in or they might be able to tell you can I help you or assist you. They probably won't do a whole lot of manipulation still even 10 years’ time at this particular time but they will be a lot more mobility. You’ll start seeing those more into public sphere and they're looking for applications for it. Things maybe such as security robots first things such as malls or maybe the peripheries of airports and that sort of thing so a lot of more mobile service robots I think will become much more common at this particular time.
Per: Which is also a great way to introduce robotics to the public. If they interact with the robot in their local supermarket they want to know where is the lemon pepper. I'm new to this store. Could you show me where I can find this, that and the other thing? This is a great way to introduce them through robotics. The more they see them the more likely they are to accept them in their homes.
Dan: True and again there's a marketing and emotional appeal to these types of things but on the other hand people like dealing with humans as well. For example if someone who walks into the store and they ask someone can you show me the peppers. He said, oh I made dinner with peppers last night. We’re having a sale on these peppers. People like that and they enjoy that. You won't get that from a robotic system. I do think that 10 years from now you're going to have a lot smarter robots and I think they're going to be much more highly connected with the public spaces, the work place, in the home and just could be much greater levels of connectivity. I do think that there'll be new types of applications we are unaware of yet. Basically we start hitting a wall and robotics has sort of done this. It’s kind of moved in leaps and bounds and then it's held up a little bit. We found real applications. We found real applications in industrial robots. That’s a given and we've got new types of versions. We found applications on autonomous cars. We found applications with mobile service robots in hospitals and warehouses and distribution centers in other ways. Now we're trying to see if we can take these mobile service robots and bring them into other places like hotels or like in the malls or in like in museums but we don't know if those marketplaces are going to play out yet. I suspect over time we'll start seeing other real market places evolve much like we saw with mobile service robots and for supply chain delivery services. Where those things will be I don't quite know. It’s not as easy as you think. If robotics was easy there'd be many more people into it. It’s not as easy as making money in software. We deal with the physical world and interacting with the physical world, moving through it and manipulating objects in it. It’s tougher to build systems. There’s still a sense of what are these next-generation applications. People are reaching out. They’re reaching out with mobile telepresence. They’re reaching out with that's one type of applications. They are reaching out with these new social robots. We don't know how that marketplace is going to play out. They’re reaching out with new classes of robotic toys and they're reaching out with a number of other things. Some of them will succeed and some of them won't but the technology will improve definitely. More autonomy, more intelligence, more connectivity.
Per: I'd like to thank you for taking the time to do an interview.
Dan: Thank you.
Per: I hope you liked this episode of the podcast version of Robots in Depth. This episode is produced together with Wevolver. Wevolver is a platform and community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate. It is how engineers stay cutting edge. Aptomica is the founding sponsor for Robots in Depth. Aptomica runs anything in modular robotics. Dream, rent, build. Visit Aptomica.com to connect. I am your host Per Sjöbor. Until the next episode thank you for listening.
END OF TRANSCRIPT