Plenty of room at the bottom

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2010), "Plenty of room at the bottom", Industrial Robot, Vol. 37 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2010.04937daa.001

Plenty of room at the bottom

Article Type: Editorial From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 37, Issue 4

If the late Richard Feynman was today presenting his 1959 lecture “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” his description of the potential for nanotechnology would almost certainly include a section on robotics.

Although there are still many improvements to be made at the “man-sized” end of the robot market these are likely to be incremental improvements as opposed to major new developments. There is only so much “g” force that a chocolate can take on its brief flight from the conveyor belt to box. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that robot manufacturers are well advised to concentrate on intelligent sensing and even more price reductions, rather than control dynamics.

The theme of this issue is “micro robotics” and we also include a selection of papers from the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications held in Singapore, 16-18 December 2009. I am delighted to have Dr Honghai Liu of Portsmouth University as our Guest Specialist. His Viewpoint discusses the very challenging task of applying mathematical and technological rigour to the very tricky and grey area of ethics and biomedical robotics.

In the briefcased-size middle market we have vaccum cleaning and lawn mowing robots and a growing number of occasionally useful and frequently entertaining robot pets. In these areas the benefits are easy to understand – who for example would choose to mow their lawn or vaccuum their house if viable and hassle reducing automation was available at an attractive price?

On the hassle side we need to consider the complete task in question. For example, a window cleaning robot is unlikely to appeal if a person needs to be on hand to transfer it from one window to another and fill and empty the clean/dirty water container. Similarly a lawn mower that needs to be retrieved from the rose bushes at regular intervals is unlikely to be worth the solar energy. If the hassle factor benefits are clear then price enters the equation. If the hassle factor benefit does not stack up then only gimmick value has a chance of making a sale.

At the micro and nano end of the market a whole new set of considerations comes to the fore. Large factory robots are relatively straightforward to justify in terms of the work they can do and how it compares with human alternatives – the decision is motivated by the needs and aspirations of corporations. For the medium-sized domestic robots the decision is more personal – we can each decide if the contribution that a robot will make to our daily lives is worth the expense or if it is even worth any expense at all.

For factory and personal robots the decision largely involves a more or less direct comparison with human alternatives – but what of the robots at the micro and nano end of the market?

Robert Bogue’s review of micro and nano robotics in this issue makes fascinating reading and it is clear that while some very impressive feats of micro robot engineering have already been achieved, we also have a very very long way to go before micro robots become a mature product like their man-sized ancestors.

Although the journey set out on is undoubtedly very long and challenging there can equally be no doubt that it will be fascinating and rewarding at many levels. By going small we venture beyond the world that we inhabit into an alien environment where even gravity itself is hostage to electrostatic forces and interactions at an atomic level.

The tip of an iceberg is but a fraction of a much larger whole, but in robotics the mass of future applications that are currently unseen lies with the very small.

Clive Loughlin