Robots Are Coming In A Big Way

Tandy Trower [photo courtesy: Microsoft]

In the 1970s, Bill Gates predicted a personal computer would be in every household one day. That sounded a too far-stretched imagination at that time but, by the turn of the millennium, much of that prediction got transformed into reality.

Now, after three eventful decades that saw revolutionary advancements in almost all aspects of technology, Tandy Trower, who oversees robotics at Microsoft, predicts a day in which robots will be in every home. ...And we believe robots will. [Tandy Trower is general manager for a product incubation project, whose Microsoft career began in October 1981, when Microsoft had just 90 employees. In Trower’s 24-year career, he has also managed the first two releases of Windows, helped to launch Microsoft’s eHome division and helped foster the company’s overall focus on user-interface design, including the founding of its first usability labs].

Inside of e-nuvo [photo courtesy: ZMP Inc., Tokyo]

Yesterday, in International Robot Exhibition (IREX 2007) in Tokyo, Japan's ZMP and Microsoft demonstrated the world's first biped robot "e-nuvo WALK" that uses Microsoft's 'Robotics Studio'. The robot developed by ZMP, has six motors in each leg and costs 588,000 yen ($5,345). The headless robot can take a few steps, lift a leg and kick a small plastic ball. The 35 centimeter (14 inch) tall, 5.5-pound (2.5-kilogram) biped is available online in Japan, but overseas shipments are expected in January. In addition to robots for research and education, ZMP makes consumer products such as the Nuvo humanoid and the Miuro music-playing, rolling robot.

Microsoft's Robotics Studio is free for noncommercial use with 150,000 downloads so far. It isn't an operating system but manufacturers can use it to write software for their robotic components. Once the code for a specific service (for example, a robotic arm to move up or down, grip or release, rotate forward or backward, etc) is written, the action can be done with a single instruction. When a new arm is added or substituted, the same commands work in the same way, thus requiring minimum of reprogramming.

Microsoft's competitors in the field of Robotics include Player, an open-source project partially funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, DARPA, and various artificial intelligence labs; Gostai, a French company and maker of open-source robotics software; and Evolution Robotics, based in Pasadena, California, and Tokyo.

Robot manufacturing (mostly for industrial use) is a $11 billion industry today and, according to an estimate by the Japan Robot Association, it's set to double by 2010 and should exceed $66 billion by 2025. Most of the growth will be seen in nonindustrial applications in areas such as toys, transportation, and health and senior care.

'Hybrid' Supercomputer from Cray

Cray XT™ [Photo courtesy: Cray Inc.]

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. launched the Cray XT5 family of supercomputers, marking a significant step toward Cray's vision of adaptive supercomputing. Incorporating all the benefits of the successful Cray XT line, the Cray XT5 massively parallel processor (MPP) system includes a new compute blade that quadruples local memory capacity, doubles processor density and improves energy efficiency for a significant reduction in total cost of ownership for customers.

Cray has developed a new method of processing large volumes of data that separates the job onto three different kinds of processors, each suited to different types of data manipulation. The technique should create faster and more efficient supercomputers. The new technique will be evident in Cray’s new XT5h units, available in early 2008. The company claims this is the next step on the road to its vision of ‘adaptive supercomputing’, which should hide the complexity of high-performance computing behind an easy-to-use interface.

In addition to the standard AMD Opteron microprocessors found in most computers, the system makes use of vector processors that have a larger memory and that can share information more quickly than conventional chips. These chips are ideal for memory intensive codes that require a lot of information to be stored. The system also contains FPGA chips, which can be programmed directly on the hardware of the chip rather than through an operating system. Although this does make it more difficult to alter the programming once an application has started, these chips are particularly good at performing repetitive operations very quickly.

By integrating these chips into one system, users can split processing jobs onto whatever processor would best suit the requirements of the computations. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre has already bought XT5h units to perform more accurate weather forecasting. To do this, scientists need to solve fluid dynamics equations high in the atmosphere, close to the land and over the sea, each of which can be handled by a different processor. For example, weather systems are unlikely to vary rapidly over vast expanses of land, so these computations are often repetitive and suited to the FPGA architecture. However, the calculations are often more complicated over the ocean and sea ice that cover a greater amount of data, so the vector processors are more useful in this case. The more standard, Opteron chips are more suited to calculating the scalar processes in the atmosphere.

To integrate all these different chips together, Cray have developed a highly efficient method of connecting the different processors together that has increased performance by 30% compared to previous models.

Easily upgradeable and expandable, existing customers can upgrade to the Cray XT5 system from the Cray XT3(TM) or Cray XT4 systems and/or add on to their existing Cray XT systems, thereby leveraging their investment over a longer life. Cray XT5 cabinets can be configured with Cray XT4 compute blades, for optimized compute-to-communication balance, or with the new high density Cray XT5 compute blades, for memory-intensive and/or compute-biased workloads. Additionally, the Linux operating environment in the Cray XT5 system enables optimal performance across a broader range of applications.