Enjoy robotics

Citation

Muscato, G. (2010), "Enjoy robotics", Industrial Robot, Vol. 37 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2010.04937caa.002

Enjoy robotics

Article Type: Viewpoint From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 37, Issue 3

Each time a colleague of our Engineering Faculty, but of a different discipline, visits our laboratory he remains fascinated by the experiments of our students and researchers. Small airplanes and helicopters, autonomous wheeled and tracked vehicles, dogs and small humanoids playing soccer or climbing systems are undoubtedly things that stimulate curiosity. At the end of the visit there is often the sentence: “You are very lucky to be paid to play!” In this case depending on my humor, and the time I have, I can answer that this is true, and I feel like a very low paid sport player, or I answer that it is due to people that play in this way that we can see two robots that in the last six years explored the planet Mars as nobody else before, or we have many ordnance disposal robots or surgery robots that each day save human lives, just to give him some examples. Then I ask myself, also looking at the work of my robotic colleagues around the world, if it is important to separate work from entertainment, or if the funny, thoughtless part of the work, the one without rigid constraints or contracts, is really the origin of most of new applications and discoveries.

The dichotomy between work and entertainment is experienced also by the other component of my job as a University Professor, that is teaching. Each year we participate in and organize robotic competitions, involving group of students that compete with other groups. The students have fun, work overnight, their colleagues are again convinced that they are playing, but at the end they learn a lot of things without realizing it. When I meet years after graduation a student that participated to a competition, each time he confirms that this was one of the most important experiences in his career as a student. There are many robotic competitions around the world at different levels and these are always a really good opportunity to have fun, to disseminate research results to the public and to teach students what does it mean to work in a group, to try to win against competitors, to have deadlines, to have time and budget constraints.

To write reports full of mathematical formulas, to review scientific articles written by unknown people, to write project proposals that in many cases will not be funded, to sometimes examine students that apparently do not understand what we said, it is not fun and is the other side of my job. But this is without any doubt compensated by the possibility I have each day to try to discover new ideas and new challenging applications for robots in the future.

Nowadays the web allows us easily to look around the world, but also to investigate the past. It is interesting to look at newspapers or journals of 20 or 30 years ago and to see that many forecasts concerning robotics were totally wrong. These same forecasts periodically appear again today in the news, each time a new robot is presented, saying that in a few years we will have a personal robot in each home or something similar. The real problem is to better understand what we need and how much we would spend to get it. Moreover, there is still a wide distance between academic research, that must be of high level to be called “science” and must prove all results and their reproducibility, and industrial needs, very often only connected to time and cost constraints.

There is a lot of room between space exploration robots or precise industrial robots and robot toys or simple vacuum cleaner robots. Many new applications and new sectors could gain a lot from development of simpler but cheaper robots. Agriculture, for example, is in my opinion a sector where robotics has a lot of opportunities in the near future. The organization of a modern field or a farm is nowadays very similar to industry and automation is going to play a big role. However, the environment is different and new kinds of robot must be specifically developed.

This issue of the journal comprises some papers from the last CLAWAR Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines. There was not a big evolution of walking technologies in the last decades. Following the “Big shock” coming from the Honda humanoids and from the Sony dogs, mainly for psychological reasons due to their biological inspiration and not for their usefulness, a lot of researchers are working on walking robots and undoubtedly good results have been reached, but there are not yet real applications in the market.

On the other side, climbing robots are going to be adopted widely in many new service applications. Inspection of power lines, inspection of power turbines, robot, capable of climbing poles, just to name three of the papers published in this issue, are examples of new applications and little by little these strange toys will continue to help us in everyday life and we will continue to research … and to play a little bit.

Giovanni MuscatoUniversity of Catania, Catania, Italy