On 08/02/2008, J Storrs Hall, PhD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Any system builders here care to give a guess as to how long it will be before > a robot, with your system as its controller, can walk into the average > suburban home, find the kitchen, make coffee, and serve it?
Robots which can navigate in the home, knowing where the "kitchen" is, are a near term prospect. With simple navigation systems such as northstar, commercially available robots will be able to do this within a year, although they will require multiple projectors to cover an entire house. More sophisticated navigation and object recognition abilities will require a less trivial approach using vision and possibly lasers (although I don't see lasers playing a big part in the future of home robotics). I know there are commercially available robots which do this already, but they're somewhat pricey and are typically confined to factories so it may be a while before the price/performance comes down to consumer levels. This is something which I'm working on, and I think a fairly conservative estimate is in the region of 5-10 years. With luck I'll have a working solution within the next few years. Making and serving coffee is more difficult, and success in recognising and handling objects will depend very much upon earlier developments with navigation. Perceiving objects in 3D requires very similar algorithms to the SLAM methods used in navigation, just on a smaller scale. There will probably be a substantial amount of crossover between robotic manipulation and the development of human prosthetics, such as the recent "luke arm". Grabbing and holding objects may actually be easier than it may appear, relying heavily upon dense tactile sensing and passive compliance. Loosely coupled control of a compliant system seems to be the way that we handle many things. So I think competent manipulation is a longer term prospect (maybe 10-20 years), but simpler forms of manipulation, such as situations where the coffee maker is specially adapted for robotic handling, will be available much sooner. As a side note, once you have a domestic robot capable of making coffee in a similar manner to the way that humans do it, then a large amount of human labour will become obsolete fairly quickly since such a machine could be applied to many other tasks currently done by people. I don't give Wozniak's robot prediction much credence. The video just seems like random, not especially informed, stream of consciousness stuff and as far as I'm aware he doesn't have much knowledge of what's going on in robotics or automation industries. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=93139505-4aa549
