The question is not if you'll have a robot in your future, but how many you will have. Remember AIBO, the robotic dog from Sony? Well, it went on sale last week, and almost instantly sold out of it's 3,000 unit allotment in Japan. Sony won't say how many of the 2,000 allotted to the US have been sold, but after three days, they still weren't sold out.
But AIBO's a toy. Yes, Robots do make good toys, but what they're really great at is removing drudgery and danger from our lives. They do great housework, for instance.
Everyone's image of a great robotic housekeeper has to be either Rosie, the robotic maid from The Jetsons, or Irona, the robotic maid from the Ritchie Rich comic books.
But the all-in-one ideal of the robotic maid simply isn't going to happen. Instead of one large, multi-faceted robot crafted in our image, soon we're going to have a whole fleet of specialized, single-purpose robots, quietly and invisibly going about our lives, performing the mundane tasks we'd prefer not to do.
Take vacuuming. Couple the second law of thermodynamics (everything tends towards its most random state) with our natural human ability to continuously exfoliate, and you get a situation where our houses and offices must be vacuumed at least once a week. But vacuuming is tedious and boring.
Well, the dust-sucking experts at Electrolux's Eureka division have devised a robotic answer. Last week I had a chance to play with Trilobyte, and believe me, housework will never be the same again.
As its name suggests, Trilobyte is a bottom feeder. It's round, 15 inches in diameter, and about 6 inches tall -- about the size of a stack of LP records. The exterior plastic comes in either a stylized ruby/dark red plastic, or turquoise blue, and inside you'll find the basic vacuum parts, including the sucking hardware and the refuse bag. Also inside are a couple of motors and wheels, which let Trilobyte roam around your house, and a microprocessor and some rudimentary programming.
Trilobyte works on a single room at a time. When you release it, the robot first sidles up to an exterior wall, and then slowly maps out the perimeter of the room. It does this by using sonar along the leading edge to detect walls, furniture, people and animals. It also has a physical servo-connection that detects when Trilobyte has bumped into an object.
After mapping out the room's boundary, Trilobyte uses a random pattern to roll itself around the room, sucking up dirt as it goes. We tested it in one of our conference rooms, by dropping white dots from the three-hole punch machine around the floor. Over about 10 minutes, Trilobyte had sucked all of our mistakes right into its maw. It was also easy to see why the round shape was a brilliant breakthrough -- Trilobyte can't get caught in corners or other weird angles in your house.
Trilobyte will only work on low-pile rugs, area rugs and wood floors. It's intelligent enough to climb over small creases in the flooring -- like where a rug meets a wood floor. But it doesn't work well on shag carpets and it has no concept of stairs. Thus you can't let it roam at will about your house.
The internal batteries last about an hour, and Eureka recommends you simply charge up the robot, put it in a room, shut the door, and let it roam about until the battery dies. By then, your room will be clean.
Watching the little creature roam about our conference room, sucking up white paper dots, was amazing. 10 years from now, when these devices are commonplace, we'll think nothing of it, but the behavior was simply stunning and very lifelike. I was mesmerized, and couldn't stop watching it. I wanted name it, and treat it like a pet.
Eureka says they're targeting a price of under US$1,000 when the robotic vacuum hits the market. Trilobyte was still a prototype -- there are only two in the world. Eureka still needs to figure out how to make the device more battle-hardened so it can survive the average household. But the fundamentals work just great, and the user interface is a snap: It's all off a single on-off button on the bottom of the unit.
Electrolux is already selling a robotic lawn mower in Europe, and many more household robots are on the drawing board. As Moore's Law drives us inexorably up the power curve, these robots will become more and more possible. We'll have vacuuming robots and window-washing robots and weed-cutting robots and car-washing robots and the list goes on and on. Just as the PC begat specialized single-purpose computing devices like Playstation and Palm PDA, Rosie and Irona will morph into a million mechanized devices that just do one thing, but do it really well. We may get to R2D2 and C3P0 eventually, but probably not for 30 years. For more information, see: www.eureka.com/whatsnew/robotvac.htm.
