Helen Greiner tells Scott Kirsner her previously stealthy and bootstrapped startup, The Droid Works, has nabbed almost $100,000 from the NSF to develop “An Indoor/Outdoor Robotic Air Vehicle for Emergency Response.”
The iRobot co-founder’s startup is developing a flying first responder robot for emergency situations — the grant says the main challenges are “indoor flight control and safety around people.”
In five years, we’ll be writing stories like this with a straight face, providing journalism still exists.
The Department of Defense announced today it has cancelled the Army’s Future Combat Systems Brigade Combat Team program, a modernization program started in 2003.
The restructuring eliminates the manned vehicle portion of the program, which didn’t fit with Defense’s focus on fighting counterinsurgencies in close quarters. Ground robotics, unmanned aerial drones, sensors and other modernization technologies will be handled by separate brigades, according to Defense.
Such a move had been expected since Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced military cuts in the spring.
At the RoboBusiness conference in April, retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, president of iRobot Corp.’s government and industrial robots division, said all of iRobot’s military robots under the Future Combat Systems program would be continued.
Helen Greiner
IRobot co-founder, Droid Works CEO and 2007 MHT All-Star Helen Greiner contributes an article to Forbes Magazine’s package on robotics and artificial intelligence, and makes a compelling argument against humanoid robots:
Customers don’t want a Roomba vacuuming robot that argues when you tell it to vacuum the floor. That’s what kids are for. When the company I co-founded, iRobot, first delivered Roomba to customers, they didn’t write to us and say, “I want it to be more humanlike.” They said, “Make it cover the floor better and make it recharge on its own” (we did) …
Likewise, the military doesn’t need robots that question commands or find their assignment boring. Combat robots are built for a mission; they are tools for the soldier.
In the same package, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter argues for a resurgence in AI research’s less practical side:
This facet of AI research has more or less shut down because it ignored an all-important detail: Intelligence isn’t just about problem-solving, but about a whole cognitive spectrum that includes dreaming and other forms of unconscious activity.
Computer model of Boston Engineering's Ghost Swimmer
Boston Engineering has landed a $100,000 Phase 1 SBIR grant from the Department of Homeland Security to develop a version of its tuna-mimicking Ghost Swimmer robot (pictured at right) to inspect the hulls of oil tankers, according to the company.
Under the grant, the company will also develop sensors for performing the inspection. The robot, called the BIOSwimmer, could have applications in harbor protection and inspecting tankers on land, the company said.
Boston Engineering also reports bringing in $70,000 in a Phase 1 SBIR grant from the U.S. Army to work on giving reconnaissance robots the ability to open doors.
MHT’s animal robot coverage is getting to be prolific. There’s robotic tuna and lobster, clams, dogs, humans, and some kind of crazy lamprey-like robot made out of biological material.
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