HOME ROBOT CUTTING GRASS TO WASHING WINDOW

  Frédéric Boisdron run their home with the help of 12 robots.

The robots do everything from cutting the grass to washing the windows. They even keep the cat’s litter box clean.
What they won’t be doing is looking after the couple’s first child when the baby is born in October. But by the time the Boisdrons are grandparents, their children could be enlisting robots to help look after them.
Boisdron, editor-in-chief of the French magazine Planète Robots, was in the Netherlands recently for a tour of robots and robotics research and to drop in on the global robot competition RoboCup 2013.
I ran into Boisdron on his tour, which was hosted the government of the Netherlands. One of the first people we met was Maarten Steinbuch, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, a specialist in robotics and an enthusiastic advocate of a world that will see robots fill many tasks — tasks that, with our aging population, there won’t be enough people to do.
“I think in 10 years there will be some limited applications in the home,” Steinbuch said of the prospects for robots becoming mainstream. “I expect that there will be a market where you will see specialties come up.”
For Boisdron, the future is here.
“We have 12 robots in our house,” said Boisdron. “We have a vacuum cleaner robot, we have a floor cleaner robot that washes the floor with vinegar, we have a litter robot for the cat, we have a robot to wash the windows, and we have a robot to cut the grass.
“I have a little programmable robot that’s about 20 centimetres tall that I use for test programming, and I have a little robot that dances to music and it reacts to you — if you are tender with it, it moves slowly.”
But the housecleaning and cat litter robots are already getting to be a bit old-school, so the Boisdron family will soon be welcoming a humanoid robot into their home.
“We are getting a full-sized robot from the French company Cybedroid,” said Boisdron of the 160-cm early model of what Cybedroid plans to release in a commercial version. “The company hopes to sell it in five years at a price that will be something like 20,000 euros ($27,000).”
The robot will be able to respond to simple commands, and the aim is to help people with disabilities manage in their home.
Boisdron expects his robot will arrive already programmed with some applications, but he’ll be able to program it to do more.
“I’m not ready to let the robot take care of my baby,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think my wife would accept that.”

And just like tablets and smartphones, robots will have their store.

“There will be an app store like Apple’s App Store,” said Boisdron.

Right now there’s an app store for NAO, a 58-cm-tall humanoid robot that is showing up everywhere, from children’s hospitals where it helps kids cope with chronic diseases, to helping the elderly with home care.

Like computers, which were at one time hugely expensive, unwieldy and certainly not found in every home, Boisdron expects robots will follow a similar path.

“For robots like the vacuum iRobot Roomba, the market is already here,” he said. “But for humanoid robots, the life-sized robots, I think the market will be ready in 15 or 20 years.

“The kind of robot you can buy now or in six months is very expensive, slow, and with a very poor lists of applications. But like the computer industry, there will be a boom.”

0e7e810cf6fb11e294a212313d2b58c5 Robotics tour of the Netherlands: Robots at home, at work, in space
Frederic Boisdron / Planet Robots
But house robots represent only the tip of a trend in technology that is seeing robots running everything from factory operations, to rescue missions and space exploration.

It’s a development that’s being mirrored in many countries around the globe, including Canada.

At RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven, teams from Canadian universities competed with others from around the globe and the University of B.C.’s Thunderbots placed in the top 10 in their competition. At the European Space Agency’s largest site, its Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk in the Netherlands, researchers talk not only about Canada’s famed Canadarm, designed and built by Richmond’s MDA, but of the company’s participation through Canada’s role as a member of the European Space council.

Earlier this year, the MDA-created Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency’s robotic ‘handyman’ on the International Space Station, successfully topped off a mock satellite’s fuel tank in a demonstration of how robots could service satellites in space.

Japan is getting ready set to send a talking robot to space, the diminutive Kirobo, who is intended to keep astronaut Koichi Wakata company with conversation.

In a recent robotics tour of the Netherlands, we saw robots that could care for crops, care for people and perhaps some day — like the Jetsons’ Rosie — care for your kids.

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Photo by Gillian Shaw
But human interaction is a stumbling block. Would you trust a robot to look after your aging mother? Advances in robot technology is giving rise to debates over ethics and legislation — should robots be governed by their own laws? What if your self-drive car runs over the neighbour’s ca, or worse, the neighbour. Who goes to court? You or your robot?

“In Korea, they are already making laws for robots,” said Steinbuch, who is also director of the automotive systems graduate program at Eindhoven TU, which focuses on autonomous cars.

“A car is becoming a robot,” said Steinbuch. “Sometimes, I call a car an iPad on wheels.

“There will be a time when you will be able to get out of your car, say ‘Go find a parking spot,’ and your car will go and park itself.

“There will be an app so you can call it back on your smartphone when you’re ready to go. The technology is almost ready. … That will be in the next 10 years.”

Robots are already performing many tasks around us — we either don’t notice or count it as something other than robotics.

At TU Eindhoven, researchers are participating in a project to help robots learn. Dubbed RoboEarth — it gives robots their own Internet, using the cloud to store a huge database of information where robots can share and learn from each other. RoboEarth Project coordinator is Marinus J.G. van de Molengraft in the university’s department of mechanical engineering and control systems technology group.

As a simple example of how RoboEarth works, imagine your home robot needs to know what a can of Coke looks like so it can deliver it to you on a hot summer’s day. Your robot would not only learn to recognize the can of Coke, it would share that knowledge with the RoboEarth cloud database so every other robot would acquire that knowledge at the same time.

But it’s not just about getting you that can of Coke. RoboEarth bring machine-based learning to tasks ranging from map navigation to manipulation strategies and other items on the robot curriculum.

“At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behaviour and their environment,” is the project description.

“Bringing a new meaning to the phrase ‘experience is the best teacher,’ the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.”

Gillian Shaw’s travel and accommodations for the robots/robotics tour were provided by the government of the Netherlands.

Take two apps and call me in the morning.

Dr. Kendall Ho, an emergency room physician at Vancouver General Hospital and director of the University of BC’s eHealth Strategy Office, is turning to mobile apps as a way of helping patients help themselves.

In a newly launched project Health-e-Apps, with the tag line, ‘improve your health in a mobile minute,’ the eHealth strategy office is reviewing health and wellness apps and encouraging smartphone and tablet users to try them out. And it’s using Twitter, YouTube and other social media networks to crowdsource feedback and get suggestions from its users on their favourite apps.

“There are now on the market a lot of great apps that can help people achieve better health and really reach excellence in health,” said Ho. “Some of those apps are actually free yet they’re very, very useful.”

In a demo at the Faculty of Medicine’s eHealth office by VGH, Ho reviewed three apps and talked about why he finds them useful both as a physician treating patient and for improving his own health.

“We are looking at introducing these apps on a regular basis so that we have a video, a short video one-and-a-half to two minutes or so just to quickly introduce that app and how it can be used,” said Ho. “We really want the readers and people who go there to actually look at the app, try it and let me know, let us know how that app is helping you.

“This way we can learn together on how to best use these appBelkin promises its new FastFit iPad mini keyboard case is the lightest on the market

Belkin has announced its FastFit Bluetooth wireless keyboard, billed as the lightest of its kind on the market.

If you haven’t already got a keyboard for your iPad mini, this is quick and not too pricey way to turn that tablet into a laptop lite. Useful for  keeping up with email, taking notes at school or university or as a handy carry-around for work when you don’t want to be weighed down by your laptop.

It combines an ultrathin keyboard cover – thinner than the mini itself, with magnets that strap the keyboard onto the mini. If you’re looking for a keyboard that comes close to having the feel of your laptop, the FastFit’s Tru-Type keyboard has keys that are larger than most seven-inch keyboards and with a spring mechanism that provides tactile feedback.

Its 200-mAh battery will last for 155 hours between charges during active use and on standby up to three months. It also has an “autowake” that will put the mini to sleep when the cover is closed and power it up when the cover is opened. Its builtin stand will work with the mini both in portrait and landscape modes. It’s priced at $80.