Servo - April 2017

advanced industrial controllers.

One feature that makes these robots such a value is the vast amount of course material available for both the Boe-Bots and Stamps. Their books are well written and are acclaimed by educators around the world. For those who don’t enjoy assembling kits, Parallax offers their latest of the Scribbler series: the very affordable S3 (shown in Figure 5) that assists in teaching students everything from Blockly programming to Spin in a GUI environment. The hacker’s port allows the addition of numerous interconnected devices.

Robots at CES 2017

Outside of huge (and expensive) OLED televisions and various entertainment devices, robots and artificial intelligence seem to have created the most buzz within the show’s thousands of vendor booths this year. Of all the new ‘must have’ gadgets on display, robots and other appliances (touted as robots) drew the most crowds. Many of these products would not have been called robots just a few years ago.

On the CNET site ( www.cnet.com) and their excellent coverage of this year’s CES, they made a very concise opinion of what so many attendees at the show were thinking. “At CES 2017, you have to ask: What makes a robot a robot? An abundance of drones, driverless cars,

and smart home devices equipped with voice assistants have blurred the definition of the word robot.”

I asked that very question in last month’s column when I discussed how robots have changed over the years — from the evil humanoid characters in Karel Capek’s play, RUR, to Unimation’s first industrial robot, to the myriad of all types of today’s robots. It is that wide variety of robots designed for the home and personal use that make a trip to CES so memorable. These types of robots will only continue to grow as inventors and entrepreneurs keep enticing us with new robotic products that each of us just have to own.

Amazon’s Alexa and Robots

The Amazon Echo, Dot, and Tap have been available for two years now, and have made quite a showing with robots. Many of the robot and other technology exhibits at CES touted the use of the Amazon Echo and Alexa for control of their products. Amazon now has over 7,000 third-party integrations or skill sets available as apps.

In the beginning, the Echo and its siblings were a bit baffling to early users and were more of show-off pieces of technology than truly useful devices.

In recent times, the original Dot and its newest version have found themselves attached to mobile robots as control devices, utilizing many of those available apps. My article from last July discussed some of my (and other experimenters) early Alexa robot control attempts.

The Future of Service and Personal Robots

On their website, TechRepublic ( www.techrepublic.com) wrote about “CES 2017: Robots of the Future.” They stated, “By 2018, the International Robotics Foundation predicts that 35 million service robots will be sold.” These are not industrial and military robots sold to manufacturing businesses, hospitals, and governmental groups, but are ‘service’ robots that are intended for home, consumer, and commercial business use. The article continued, “And by 2020, $83 billion will be spent on these robots, according to a report by Intel.” They asked three very important questions in the article: “So, who makes them? What can they do? And when will they be ready?”

Let’s take a look at some of the robots at this year’s CES.

Ewaybot MoRo

The Chinese robotics company, Ewaybot showed off its new flagship robot, MoRo at CES. Founded by three Chinese students from Harvard and Carnegie Mellon University, it was a major draw at the show for many serious robotics experimenters and reporters from robotics journals. At an estimated cost of $30,000, their ‘flagship’ product seems to be more of a robot yacht. Their literature touts the robot being a member of your family, but it is more appropriate in a university or industrial laboratory environment as shown in Figure 6. MoRo stands a bit under four feet Post comments on this article at www.servomagazine.com/index.php/magazine/article/ April2017_ThenandNow_Whats-New-in-Robotics. Advances in robots and robotics over the years.