Sex, Bombs and Burgers (31 page)

But when will this revolution happen, and who will lead it? Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft’s robotics department, believes the new era will be ushered in by a big carmaker, namely Toyota. In an industry where a single leading company has yet to emerge the way IBM did with early computers or Microsoft with software, the Japanese carmaker has a number of advantages over other robotics manufacturers, Trower says. Toyota has decades of experience in robotics, since it was one of the first to make wide-scale use of automated production lines. The company has also produced some amazing examples of advanced robotics, such as robots that can play the trumpet and violin. Toyota also understands the consumer market, has deep pockets for the heavy research and development needed and a distribution network to make mass adoption a reality.

Toyota has taken a smarter approach than most American companies, which have been too fixated on the military market,
Trower says. The biggest market for robotics lies in health-care and personal assistance, which is where the car company is looking. “Rather than focusing on the military applications, they’re focused on the social aspect of how robots will assist us in the future. They are a very important company to watch,” he says. “Toyota could be the IBM of robots.”
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I don’t agree, simply because history argues the contrary. Health care and elderly assistance may indeed prove to be the biggest home market for robotics makers, but it certainly won’t be the first large one. If our story so far has taught us anything, it’s that the early adoption of this kind of technology is almost always spurred by two of our most elemental human behaviours: sex and violence. Toyota has few, if any, links to the industries serving those two markets. Second, while a Japanese company may lead the first wave of mass adoption, it is not likely to be a big one like Toyota. Again, history has shown that big companies rarely lead the spread of new technologies, simply because their very success is tied to existing or “old” technologies. Investing too much in new advances risks the possibility of spreading a company thin or cannibalizing an existing business, which is exactly what has happened to Trower’s own employer, Microsoft, in recent years. Because the software giant made its fortune supplying the operating system on which desktop computers run, it was slow to address the rise of the internet, where it doesn’t really matter which operating system you’re running. Microsoft squandered its position of dominance on the computer to Google, a company built from the ground up
on
the internet. As such, Google now dominates the main form of revenue generation on the internet— search-related advertising—the way that Microsoft dominates computer operating systems. The only difference is that one
business represents the future while the other is shrinking in importance.

The same phenomenon is likely to happen in robotics. While a company like Toyota maintains a significant advantage in terms of resources and experience over the thousands of tiny robotics start-ups around the world, its main business is still selling cars. Toyota’s shareholders may think robotics is quaint and interesting, but their main concern will always be selling cars. They are likely to resist any big incursions into businesses that have little to do with core competency. Small robot companies don’t have such an existing business to protect and are much more likely to seek out and address opportunities wherever they present themselves. One such company, iRobot, is already emerging, and for my money it is far more likely to be the Microsoft or IBM of robots.

Robots That Suck

Based in Bedford, Massachusetts, a short drive north from Boston through leafy New England, iRobot’s headquarters is a single building in an industrial park overlooking the freeway. It’s a much smaller base than what you would expect for what is quickly becoming one of the world’s most important companies. Still, the modest operation speaks volumes about the company and the industry in general—while it is full of promise and has had some success so far, it is still very much a nascent business. iRobot was founded in 1990 by Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks and Helen Greiner, a trio of robotics researchers from MIT, and took its name from the Isaac Asimov novel
I, Robot
—since turned into a movie starring Will Smith—wherein humans and machines live together in relative harmony (at least before the
machines rise up and rebel). In its early days, the company built some impressive robots, including a toy dinosaur, but floundered about in search of a market for its technology. “Probably about fourteen or eighteen business models came along and were discarded as they were found to be little more than a subsistence existence,” explains Angle, the chief executive officer.
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Like many high-tech executives, Angle eschews a suit in favour of casual attire, a simple button-up polo shirt to complement a slightly dishevelled look that he must have borrowed from Bill Gates.

Opportunity finally came knocking in 1997 when the company designed Fetch, a robot that cleaned up cluster bomb shards from airfields, for the air force. That led to a DARPA contract the following year for the PackBot, a robot that resembles a lawn mower, but with tracks instead of wheels and a long multi-jointed arm sticking out of it. The “platform,” as iRobot calls it, can be endlessly customized with whatever equipment is desired. The arm can be equipped with several different types of cameras, including night-vision, as well as additional claw-like “hands” or even sensors for detecting explosives and biological weapons. Weighing twenty kilos and costing $150,000, the PackBot turned out to be a godsend for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its small size and ruggedness allowed it to go just about anywhere, from caves to office buildings, and its customization options let it perform many different tasks, including reconnaissance and bomb disposal, which has come in handy battling the weapon of choice of Iraqi insurgents, the improvised explosive device (IED).

The military contracts gave iRobot financial stability and allowed Angle and his cohorts to think about their real goal: the consumer market. In 2002 the company rejigged the Fetch into
the Roomba, a disc-shaped vacuum cleaner that looks like a big Frisbee. At $200, the Roomba was the first home robot that was affordable, smart and—best of all—useful. With the press of a button, the device vacuums a room and returns to its charging station when finished. It can detect and avoid walls, coffee table legs and stairs, and go where humans can’t, like under the couch.

The Roomba became a hot Christmas gift and proved a hit for the company, which then expanded into other home robots such as the Scooba floor washer, the Looj gutter vacuum and the Verro swimming pool cleaner. On the backs of its dual military and consumer markets, iRobot turned a small profit in 2003 and has continued growing since. In 2005 the company went public on the NASDAQ stock market and in 2007, before the global recession soured virtually every industry, reported a profit of $8 million. The next year the company sold more than a million home robots worldwide, bringing its total Roomba sales to three million, and saw overall PackBot deployments reach 2,200.
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The two markets have forced the company to learn different lessons, but in the end they are more similar than you’d think. “The consumer marketplace is very, very price sensitive. Everything needs to be engineered in an integrated fashion. There’s no opportunity to put any fat into the design and still make money,” Angle says. But both markets are utility-driven businesses. “If the Roomba doesn’t actually clean your floor, we don’t sell them. In the military, if the robot doesn’t provide a tangible benefit to the soldier, such that the soldier is demanding to take the robot, then sales don’t happen either. It’s purely a utility sale as opposed to an entertainment or gadget sale because you don’t buy vacuum cleaners on a whim, nor do you lug around a forty-pound robot for giggles.”

One of the big differences in the company’s two main products is their respective degree of autonomy. The Roomba operates with a high level of independence because the biggest problem that can arise is a tussle with the family dog. The PackBot and the company’s other military robots, however, are remote controlled because troops cannot tolerate any unpredictability in their equipment like, say, having it turn on them
Terminator
-style. This is why autonomy for more sophisticated robots is coming in “on cat’s feet,” as Joe Dyer, the company’s president of government and industrial robots and a retired navy vice-admiral, puts it. Dyer, a former pilot who displays the control stick from his old F-18 on the conference table in his office, explains that even today’s super high-tech planes saw all of their automation creep in one small piece at a time, starting with directional stability, then cruise control, then automatic landing. Autonomy for robots will happen the same way. “The next step of this is to say, ‘Look robot, how about if you lose communications, you be bright enough to go back to where you can talk to us.’ Autonomy really does come in on those cat’s feet. It doesn’t go to the governor of California.”

The pace of that autonomy is likely to quicken over the next few years, since the current system of always keeping a man “in the loop” is tremendously inefficient. On a cost level, the benefits of replacing a human with a robot are voided if you still need that human to control the robot. On the consumer front, iRobot probably wouldn’t have sold many Roombas if a human were still required to monitor the vacuum. Militarily, robots still have to transmit everything they see back to their operators, a considerable waste of wireless bandwidth, which is often at a premium in combat situations.

The solution to both issues is to give war robots more freedom by making them smarter. One possible scenario involves a sort of “swarm intelligence” where robots lead themselves. Imagine, for a minute, that a fleet of armed aerial drones are reconnoitering a hostile area when one of them is fired on by insurgents. Sensing that their cohort is under attack, the other drones head to its location to help out with the fight. Once the conflict is over, each individual drone resumes its original position, ready for the next encounter. Such independent swarm-minded robots may sound like the Borg from
Star Trek
, but they could act much more quickly and efficiently than they would if they were individually controlled by humans, who have to approve every move. Such systems, of course, will come in “on cat’s feet” because of the inherent risks involved. “You’ve got to make sure you get it right because for a whole bunch of reasons, you may not see it for another ten years if you screw it up,” says Kevin Fahey, the executive responsible for purchasing robots for the U.S. army.
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Fighting the Future

It’s developing this sort of autonomy, and doing so at a low cost, that was the whole point of DARPA’s road races. In 2003 the agency announced the Grand Challenge, an ambitious 480-kilometre desert road race for unmanned cars between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The contest was framed as a mini– Manhattan Project, with everyone from advertisers, corporate sponsors, science-fiction writers and even movie producers called on to get involved. “In order to make the DARPA Grand Challenge a success, we must maximize participation by everyone from major players to amateur enthusiasts,” the program’s manager said in announcing the race.
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The prize money was set purposely low at $1 million to encourage entrants to concentrate on cost efficiency—after all, no one was going to spend $10 million to win $1 million— while a desert course was chosen not only in case the machines turned on their human masters, but also because of the terrain’s similarity to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inaugural race, held in March 2004, could have been considered a flop, since none of the fifteen participants actually finished—Carnegie Mellon’s “Sandstorm” went the furthest, a whopping 12 of the 480 kilometres. But the entire idea was redeemed a year later. With the prize money raised to $2 million and the distance dropped to 212 kilometres, five of the twenty-three competitors finished the second race, led by Stanford University’s “Stanley,” which clocked top speeds of sixty kilometres an hour.

Six of eleven teams finished the third race, in 2007, led by the “Boss,” despite the heightened complexity of driving in an urban environment, a city setting recreated on a closed military base in California. DARPA director Tony Tether was ecstatic about how much progress had been made in just three years. “The 2004 event was equivalent to the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, where their airplane didn’t fly very far but showed that flight was possible ... The significant progress after 2004 was due to the fact that the community now believed that it could be done.”
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Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford artificial intelligence guru who led his team to victory in 2005, summed up the whole affair best: “We all won. The robotics community won.”
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DARPA’s main reason for holding the races was to help it meet a military transformation strategy mandated by the Pentagon. The process started in 1999, after the army
experienced yet another embarrassing example of its own bloat and inflexibility. Confused logistics prevented the army from getting its Apache helicopters into Albania for use in the Kosovo war, which led to the conclusion that U.S. forces needed to get lighter and faster—and quickly. The Future Combat Systems plan, which featured a heavy reliance on small unmanned robotic vehicles, was drafted and approved by Congress in 2003. With an estimated budget of more than $200 billion and an expected completion date of 2030, military officials called it the most ambitious modernization of the army since the Second World War and the most expensive weapons program ever.
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The plan called for the progressive introduction of unmanned air and ground vehicles, starting with a host of reconnaissance and explosives-disposal robots, then eventually moving to machines with weapons. With troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was easy to rationalize the inclusion of unmanned systems. “If you’re at war, the Department of Defense asks for money, Congress moves it around. For the most part, people fund it. They want to support those in harm’s way,” Fahey says.