Robots! More Robots! And They’re in Your House!

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Robots of the future will look nothing like R2D2 in Star Wars, but resemble computer chips embedded in everyday appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and cell phones, if companies like Evolution Robotics Inc. have anything to do about it.


“Robot applications are not going to look robotic. They will look more like appliances,” said Paolo Pirjanian, the company’s chief executive.


The Pasadena-based company produces vision-based robotic technology. With it, you can point your cell phone at a movie poster, take a picture, and the technology will go out to the Web and download the movie’s trailer to your phone.


That vision-based search engine has been applied to more than a million cell phones already in Japan through the country’s leading mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo. The company also has a similar contract in the works through a top South Korean carrier, SK Telecom.


Launched in 2001, Evolution Robotics announced last week that it has put 2 million robotics products in the market around the world. Most of those products were marketed in Asia and Europe, but the company is poised to break into the domestic market in the near future.


Evolution Robotics also produces locator robots, called NorthStar. One version is embedded in automated vacuum cleaners that have internal locators much like a GPS system. It would work like iRobot Inc.’s popular Roomba, a disc-like vacuum robot that automatically roams and cleans the house, but with added intelligence. That way, it won’t just bump into furniture but it will go right up to the edge of a staircase without tumbling down because it knows exactly where it is. Evolution Robotics said it has secured a contract with a national appliance brand to develop the vacuum cleaner, but declined to identify the company.


NorthStar is already being used in iRobi, a personal assistant robot manufactured by South Korean company Yujin Robotics. It navigates the house and checks to see if the stove is off, the door locked, and your child safely tucked in bed. The user can see what iRobi sees from a cell phone screen at any location.


Japan and South Korea, whose governments invest heavily in robotic technology, turned to the Pasadena company still a part of Idealab Inc., an incubator of sorts for tech start-ups because of the affordability of its technology.


“Japan has a long tradition of research in robotic technology but its programs tend to be more visionary than pragmatic,” said Pirjanian, who developed robotic technology for Mars exploration with NASA before launching Evolution Robotics. “American people are pragmatic and price to value is very important here.”


Navigation for robots traditionally has been a function of a magnetic track on floors or sensors, both of which are expensive and cumbersome to install in homes. Not so for Evolution Robotics’ systems.


“Instead, you stick something the size of an air freshener into an outlet, which creates a micro-GPS zone for your home,” said Michael Dooley, vice president of product and business development for Evolution Robotics.


The tiny device, once plugged into an outlet, emits two invisible infrared spots on the ceiling. NorthStar then navigates the house based upon those points of reference.


Because infrared is so cheap, the company is able to sell each NorthStar system to manufacturers at about $10 a pop, including its profit margins, said Pirjanian.


Evolution Robotics is only one of many emerging technology companies developing robots for military and hospital use, as well as for toys and personal assistance.


Daniel Burrus, a technology forecaster and strategist, said the robotics sector is at the cusp of explosive growth, and that’s due to three recent areas of development. Computer processing power is at its height, data storage has become so efficient that a robot can run off of a memory on something as small as a stick, and bandwidth allows robots to be connected wirelessly to a more powerful server on the Internet.


“Basically, robots can be made very intelligent today at an affordable price,” Burrus said.


But it’s difficult to grasp just how big the market is because it is so young and fragmented, said Dan Kara, president of Robotic Trends, which hosted RoboBusiness Expo & Conference 2007 last month in Boston.


Kara said the world’s market size for robotic technology ranges between $1 billion to $5 billion according to figures from the United Nations Economic Commission, Japan Robot Association and Korea Advanced Intelligent Robot Association.


“It’s a pretty new market place and the figures are sketchy. It’s poised for dramatic growth but someone has to define the market space and apply dollar figures,” Kara said.


Robotic Trends, an online publication of EH Publishing in Natick, Mass., will do just that. Kara plans to produce a market study that will look first at educational robotics in September then consumer robotics in January.


Evolution Robotics’ Pirjanian compared the robotics industry to the personal computers sector in the 1970s. “Robotics will impact everyday life the way PCs have, but more dramatically because what PCs basically do is move bits around, but robots move atoms around,” he said.

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