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Brooks’ Baxter Bot

By Tandy | Published September 23, 2012
Filed in: Emerging Robotics Market, Enabling Technologies | Permalink

With the recent announcement of ReThink Robotics’ Baxter (see link below if you haven’t seen it), I received a lot of questions about how their robot may impact what Hoaloha Robotics is doing. http://vimeo.com/49683995 First, let me say that this unveiling reflects the tremendous progress of robotics technology. Dr. Brooks is one of the preeminent pioneers in this field, having formerly served not only as the head of MIT AI lab, but also as one of the founders of iRobot, creators of the popular Roomba vacuum cleaner bots and the military Packbot. Brooks left iRobot and MIT around the same time I left Microsoft. While the precise details of what he would build weren’t known, Rod was open about his intent to move industrial robots out of the factory where, for safety sake, they are fenced to avoid dangers to humans; and instead able to operate alongside people. This required not only…

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These aren’t the droids you’re looking for

By Tandy | Published May 28, 2011
Filed in: Emerging Robotics Market, Strategic Overview | Permalink

I recently spoke at InnoRobo/RoboLift, a European robotics conference, held in the beautiful city of Lyon, France. Since my last trip to a European robotics conference was about 3 years ago, I was looking forward to catching up on how robotics was developing in this part of the world. One of the first things I noted was that the conference organizers had invited speakers from the design and user research community including Cynthia Breazeal, professor from MIT’s Media Lab. I particularly like to hear about Cynthia’s research because I share her philosophy that robot interaction needs to be designed as a social experience. Her work with Kismet, Leonardo, Nexi, and other robots really stand out as great examples of where the design of personal robots needs to go. This was refreshing, because many robotics conferences I have attended (except for the annual HRI conference) typically focus on optimistic market projections or demonstrations of…

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Elementary, My Dear Watson

By Tandy | Published March 6, 2011
Filed in: Enabling Technologies | Permalink

The impressive demonstration of IBM’s Watson supercomputer competing against human players on Jeopardy is certain to stir a lively debate about the implications of this technology. Is Watson a breakthrough or a clever set of programming tricks that have inherent limitations? Will technology like Watson replace humans? And who will be liable if a human makes a bad decision based on technology like Watson? Even within the computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) community, Watson’s performance will provoke disagreements about its significance and its practical applications. However, such questions and issues often arise with the creation of new technologies, whether we are talking about healthcare, communication, transportation, energy, or other innovations that impact our daily lives. Such concerns rarely stop adoption. It seems clear that Watson is not a substitute or replacement for human reasoning or actions, anymore than our desktop computers or smartphones, but like them simply a tool….

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