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.