Mundane and esoteric

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2007), "Mundane and esoteric", Industrial Robot, Vol. 34 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2007.04934baa.001

Mundane and esoteric

Sir Isaac Newton once said “If I can see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” and this saying was itself paraphrased from Bernard of Chartres five centuries earlier. I was reminded of this both by one of Joe Engelberger's paintings and also by our News item “Snake-arm robots steer aircraft assembly in a new direction” from OCRobotics, regarding the mounting of one of their Snake-arm robots on the end of a standard Kuka industrial robot. This particular application involves the assembly and inspection of hard-to- reach parts of an aircraft wing, but it highlighted for me a much wider trend within the robotics industry.

What were once considered “wacky” or “extreme” or “blue sky” are now being actively sought after by the conventional mainstream robotic engineers. The esoteric is now being coupled with the mundane – and not as part of some self- serving university research – but out of necessity.

Examples of this are numerous but include flexible grippers such as the BarretHand (as featured on our front cover) which are now in great demand as manufacturers come to realise that these more advanced technologies not only make it possible to do more, but can also save them money as well (in this case on expensive tool-changers).

It has to be said also that some exotic applications are now being accomplished by standard industrial robots simply because their ease of programming, low cost and very high reliability now make them viable in applications for which they would previously have been considered too expensive, unsuitable or dangerous. We covered an example of this in the article by Anna Kochan “Robots provide 24/7 milking service for cows” (IR 31:5) which described how standard ABB robots, with custom end-effectors and guided by machine vision, were being used to milk Dutch cows.

A further example which is linked to this issue's theme of “Mobile Robots” is described by Mike Wilson in his report on the recent RIA Robotic Industries Forum including the DARPA challenge which involved autonomous vehicles traveling 150miles over the Mojave desert. The year before none of the 106 entries had managed to go further than 8miles but this year a very creditable 6 contestants completed the course and the $2 million prize was won by Stanford University.

A few years ago such missions were the stuff of science fiction and mobile robots were finding it hard to navigate a room let alone a desert. The DARPA challenge came about because the US Department of Defense grew tired of funding the research of their normal suppliers and instead opened the challenge to all comers and dangled the carrot of a substantial prize and follow-on military contracts. They did this not because it was fun but because of their perceived need for unmanned military vehicles that are able to deliver supplies and services without endangering human lives.

If our dyed-in-the-wool industrialist need any additional encouragement to at least keep an open mind regarding the strange goings on in university laboratories then they should read the latest IFR “World Robotics 2006” (see IFR News in this issue) where the stock of service robots for professional use is expected to increase by 34,000 units by the end of 2009 as opposed to roughly 200,000 increase in stock for industrial robots in the same period. This totally excludes “personal” service robots for domestic use and entertainment and is quite a turnaround from a few years ago when the numbers were so low that no one bothered counting them.

Clive Loughlin