• The da Vinci robotic surgical assistant.
• MAARS, the soldier bot.
• Monty reads Outlook Business.
• Aibo, Sony’s robotic dog.

***

Amenacing claw, fitted deliberately instead of a left hand, makes Monty look beastly at first glance. He is short in stature, measuring all of five feet seven inches, and weighs 160 pounds. But the dexterous fingers on his right hand give this robot a human touch. And when his kind but incredibly bright, blue eyes light up, he looks a lot like Wall-E, the adorable bot in Pixar’s animated film by the same name.

Monty lives at robotics start-up Anybots’ unimpressive office in an impressive Silicon Valley neighbourhood—Google’s headquarters is a few blocks away. Today, he is busy improving his grip through chores like putting dishes inside a dishwasher and arranging snooker balls. Simple tasks like walking, balancing, or picking a ball are easy for humans, but difficult for a robot.

Monty is working hard at being human. He is already mimicking the brain’s amazing capacity to teach itself. Instead of limbs and biological muscles, he has air-pressure cylinders and accelerometers. The former, for areas like the knees and the back, are used for lifting, bending, etc. The latter are tiny sensors that sense movements like falling (car airbags use these). They familiarise robots with their environment and help them act accordingly. Monty has learned to balance himself by calculating his movements in real time. So, even if you kick him with all your might, as his creator Trevor Blackwell often does, he will still stand upright. His self-balancing act has been applauded by the robotic community. So has his physical dexterity. He uses 16 cameras mounted on his head to sense his environment. And he uses multiple sensors to pick up a chess pawn, hold a copy of Outlook Business without tearing it, and shake a human hand without breaking it.

Monty has two humanoid mates inside Anybots’ office.

Dexter, a 5’10” giant bot clad in blue canvas shoes, is making chilling Darth Vader-like panting sounds as he tirelessly learns to walk. His other mate is QA, a telepresence robot.

Eventually, Monty’s hands and Dexter’s legs could create a true Anybot—a robot that can do any job, anywhere. The futuristic hybrid could someday be your butler or perform heavy-duty jobs in a factory.  Or who knows, he may even play Darth Vader.

Indeed, robots are already performing many of the tasks that have been overwhelming humans, like defusing bombs or cleaning homes. They are slowly but surely taking over things that human beings don’t want to do. Not in the frightening manner that Hollywood would have us believe, but with the discreet efficiency one would expect of PG Wodehouse’s immortal character, Jeeves the butler.

Everywhere, Every Kind

The global robotics market was worth an estimated $17.3 billion in 2008, according to a BCC Research report titled Robotics: Technologies and Global Markets. That figure will rise to $21.4 billion by 2014, says the research body. Clearly, robots mean business.

“Everybody who is consuming computing technology will want to consume robotics technology in some way in the coming decade,” says Dr Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.

Honda’s Asimo is probably the best known of today’s robots. It has the trademark mechanical movements one has come to associate with robots. This small humanoid can walk or run, and resembles an astronaut wearing a backpack. Honda has been developing this fellow since the 1980s and his current version costs about $1 million.

Toyota, Honda’s famous rival, isn’t far behind. In December 2007, the Japanese giant showcased a polite humanoid robot that played the violin, well, not quite like Yehudi Menuhin, but more like a beginner. 

Pleo, a toy baby dinosaur, is a hit with kids and adults alike. He reacts like a puppy when patted, and widens his eyes and wags his tail when delighted. But if you grab his tail, he screeches in anger, pretty much like a regular dog. Pleo’s fluid and natural movements make it difficult to believe this is a bot.

The bot that’s been hogging the headlines most recently is Chalkbot—a mobile street-printing robot. This July, cyclists and spectators alike found moving messages of hope printed by him on the winding roads of the Tour de France. Chalkbot has become so popular that he’s even being followed on Twitter. Yet, even he can’t compete for attention with Aiko. This lovely fembot is being hailed as “the ideal woman” for single men by Le Trung, her creator. Aiko can clean, talk, make your favourite drink, but will slap you if you act lecherous.

The best example of a robot, however, is Roomba, the vacuum-cleaning bot. It doesn’t look anything like a ‘robot’, and instead resembles a weighing scale, albeit a mobile one. Once programmed, it will switch itself on, clean the house while you’re away and even plug itself in to get charged when required. Roomba ended the fight over which partner’s turn it was to vacuum the house. That explains why it’s so popular—to date, over two million Roombas have been sold all over the world.   

Doing Every Thing

Robots are being put to innovative uses in practically every field. Take Carnegie Mellon University’s and Nasa’s rover robot Zoë, for instance. Zoë detects micro-organisms living in Chile’s Atacama Desert—the driest desert on Earth. It is helping Nasa understand how life survives in such an arid area, in order to eventually study whether life exists on Mars. Zoë is helping shape astrobiology, an emerging field that studies life in the universe. Then, there’s Online Investing AI—a robotic software to produce stock-trading strategies that are consistent, low-risk and yield positive returns.

At Your Service: Personal bots like Honda’s Asimo could one day be at your beck and call at home.

Since they are at the helm of such innovation—which could create several new industries altogether—the dozens of start-ups that are developing robotic applications are in stealth mode, understandably so. Heartland Robotics is the most famous of them, primarily because the legendary Rodney Brooks is behind the venture. Brooks was a Founder and the former CTO of iRobot. He also headed MIT’s AI Laboratory for a decade and is currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT. 

Marketing Is Key

While the nerdy engineers are busy perfecting their robots, their suave MBA colleagues are fine-tuning commercial strategies. It’s a battle that makes or breaks the best engineering marvels. Consider what happened to Sony, a robotics pioneer. The Japanese company introduced its robotic dog, Aibo, as early as 1999. Shortly thereafter, it unveiled QRIO, its humanoid. Both robots wowed the world and inspired robotic developments. However, both were terminated in 2006. The reasons were “profitability, strategy and growth,” according to Junko Sato from Sony’s Electronics PR section.

While numbers weren’t revealed, it is believed that Apple’s iPod was the reason for the shutdown. The iPod had unceremoniously walked Sony’s Walkman—and other players—into oblivion. The company incurred huge losses due to which it was forced to abandon R&D in robotics, which is an expensive proposition even on a good day. For a start-up, that is a very, very grim story. If a Sony could not sustain its robotics division, a start-up could be wiped out altogether.

“Robotics is still a big risk. Yet, real growth will be led by start-ups,” says Jenkins. Small companies like RedZone—which didn’t have Sony’s resources to get the buzz going about its robots—had to think out of the lab. To get quick market penetration, RedZone tapped Christy Todd Whitman, who was the former Governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush’s presidency. Thanks to Whitman’s connections, RedZone’s client list shot up from three to 15 in 2005-06 alone. Today, the company has 80 clients globally, including in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. 

iRobot decided to refrain from spending millions in advertising the Roomba. Instead, it invited the international press to its lab and its Consumer Electronics Show booth in 2003 to see it in action. “Seeing is believing is our strategy. Once the consumer sees the product and tries it out, he’s more likely to buy it,” says Colin Angle, CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder, iRobot. The press gave rave reviews, which was the best publicity Roomba could have asked for. Demos were also offered at retail outlets to let consumers see the wonder cleaner for themselves. Of course, once Roomba became a hit, it got a lot of free advertising from other players. One such instance was a Pepsi commercial in which a Roomba-like device cleans up after a guy and attempts to clean up his can of Pepsi as well. “Our sales tripled thanks to Pepsi, which must have spent millions on the ad,” says Angle.

Not Quite There Yet

While it is fair to say that the world is on the threshold of a robotics revolution, it would be naive to believe that this revolution would be led by humanoids (human-looking bipeds). “Robots are already in the public psyche. People’s perception of them has changed recently, thanks to iRobot,” says Sarjoun Skaff, Co-Founder and CTO, Bossa Nova Robotics. “Still, science-fiction films have made people expect far more from robots than is technically possible today.”

It’s not as if robots are something new; on the contrary, they’ve been around for almost 50 years. However, they can reach their full potential only when computers, a key tool in AI and robotics, achieve their full potential. “Today’s robots are mostly like what mainframes were once to the computer industry,” says Dr Jenkins of Brown University.

The drastic evolution of computers in the past few decades has seen some robotic ideas of the 1950s and 60s come to life. “Despite the progress, computers are yet to reach their full potential, which obviously means that robotics too will have to wait to grow completely,” says Rajat Chopra, a semiconductor engineer turned roboticist, whose start-up is currently in stealth mode. “Only when computing becomes as powerful as, say, the brain can we have robots that will bring to life the magic of science fiction.”

It’s impossible to say when that will happen. But happen it will. And when it does, perhaps, the robotics revolution will have as great an impact, if not greater, on our lives as the PC and Internet revolution did. Speaking to Outlook Business earlier this year, veteran Silicon Valley-based technological forecaster Paul Saffo predicted: “Everything is in place for a robotics revolution. Somewhere out there is the Steve Jobs of robotics.”