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Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

The purpose of this paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned-entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market.

The interviewee is Mitchell Weiss, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Seegrid Corporation, a manufacturer of stereo vision-guided robots and vehicle control systems. As an accomplished executive of automation and robotics companies, Weiss shares his experiences and industry knowledge, including his first full-time job out of college at Unimation, the world’s first robot company.

Weiss received a Bachelor of Science from MIT and a Graduate Certificate in Intellectual Property (IP) from Northeastern University, has taught at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania and has lectured at MIT. He has served as the Chief Operating Officer at Seegrid Corp.; CTO at Brooks Automation; CTO and Vice President of PRI Automation; President of ProgramMation, Inc.; and Chief Engineer and Co-Founder at United States Robots, Inc.

Weiss holds 24 patents, is an expert witness in IP litigation, is Vice Chair of ASTM F45 Driverless Automatic Guided Industrial Vehicles and is a member of ANSI/ITSDF B56.5 Safety Standard for Driverless, Automatic Guided Industrial Vehicles and Automated Functions of Manned Industrial Vehicles. He is also one of the co-authors of the 1986 McGraw-Hill book Industrial Robotics: Technology, Programming, and Applications. Weiss has led his high-technology robotic and automation companies to be successful in the installation of worldwide automation systems in semiconductor manufacturing, electronics manufacturing, automotive and warehousing and distribution. His technical achievements in product design, development and production combined with his business expertise in fund-raising, initial public offering and mergers & acquisitions provide companies with a unique, forward-thinking technology roadmap.

The following paper details a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky, Associate Editor of Industrial Robot Journal, to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to the market while overseeing a company. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr William “Red” Whittaker, Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU); CEO of Astrobotic Technology; and President of Workhorse Technologies. Dr Whittaker provides answers to questions regarding the pioneering experiences of some of his technological wonders in land, sea, air, underwater, underground and space.

As a child, Dr Whittaker built things and made them work and dreamed about space and robots. He has since then turned his dreams, and those of the world, into realities. Dr Whittaker’s formal education includes a BS degree in civil engineering from Princeton and MS and PhD degrees in civil engineering from CMU. In response to designing a robot to cleanup radioactive material at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Dr Whittaker established the Field Robotics Center (FRC) in 1983. He is also the founder of the National Robotics Engineering Center, an operating unit within CMU’s Robotics Institute (RI), the world’s largest robotics research and development organization. Dr Whittaker has developed more than 60 robots, breaking new ground in autonomous vehicles, field robotics, space exploration, mining and agriculture. Dr Whittaker’s research addresses computer architectures for robots, modeling and planning for non-repetitive tasks, complex problems of objective sensing in random and dynamic environments and integration of complete robot systems. His current focus is Astrobotic Technology, a CMU spin-off firm that is developing space robotics technology to support planetary missions. Dr Whittaker is competing for the US$20m Google Lunar XPRIZE for privately landing a robot on the Moon.

Dr Whittaker coined the term “field robotics” to describe his research that centers on robots in unconstrained, uncontrived settings, typically outdoors and in the full range of operational and environmental conditions: robotics in the “natural” world. The Field Robotics Center has been one of the most successful initiatives within the entire robotics industry. As the Father of Field Robotics, Dr Whittaker has pioneered locomotion technologies, navigation and route-planning methods and advanced sensing systems. He has directed over US$100m worth of research programs and spearheaded several world-class robotic explorations and operations with significant outreach, education and technology commercializations. His ground vehicles have driven thousands of autonomous miles. Dr Whittaker won DARPA’s US$2m Urban Challenge. His Humvees finished second and third in the 2005 DARPA’s Grand race Challenge desert race. Other robot projects have included: Dante II, a walking robot that explored an active volcano; Nomad, which searched for meteorites in Antarctica; and Tugbot, which surveyed a 1,800-acre area of Nevada for buried hazards. Dr Whittaker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and served on the National Academy of Sciences Space Studies Board. Dr Whittaker received the Alan Newell Medal for Research Excellence. He received Carnegie Mellon’s Teare Award for Teaching Excellence. He received the Joseph Engelberger Award for Outstanding Achievement in Robotics, the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s inaugural Feigenbaum Prize for his contributions to machine intelligence, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Simon Ramo Medal, the American Society of Civil Engineers Columbia Medal, the Antarctic Service Medal and the American Spirit Honor Medal. Science Digest named Dr Whittaker one of the top 100 US innovators for his work in robotics. He has been recognized by Aviation Week & Space Technology and Design News magazines for outstanding achievement. Fortune named him a “Hero of US Manufacturing”. Dr Whittaker has advised 26 PhD students, has 16 patents and has authored over 200 publications. Dr Whittaker’s vision is to drive nanobiologics technology to fulfillment and create nanorobotic agents for enterprise on Earth and beyond (Figure 1).

The purpose of this paper is to provide a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts in bringing a robotic invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Geoff Howe, Senior Vice President of Howe & Howe, Inc., a subsidiary of Textron Systems and a leader in advanced robotic platform solutions and applications built and proven for the most extreme conditions in the world. Geoff and Michael Howe founded Howe & Howe Technologies in 2001 and was acquired by Textron Systems in 2018. In 2010, Howe and Howe developed one of the world’s first robotic fire-fighting solutions. Geoff Howe describes the evolution of the Thermite robotic firefighter’s commercial development, along with the challenges of breaking ground in this new industry.

Geoff and his identical twin brother, Michael Howe, are inventors, military contractors, actors and entrepreneurial businessmen famous for their philanthropic drive to give back to their community. When Geoff and Mike were just six years old, they were known as “Howe and Howe Construction.” At the age of eight, Mike and Geoff built their own one room log cabin with the power tools their mom had given them for their birthday. At 16 years old, they started tinkering with vehicles before they even had their drivers’ licenses. They both graduated from Maine high school and colleges with honors. The company’s portfolio includes the RIPSAW® , Thermite, the Badger, Subterranean Rover and other extreme vehicles used for numerous applications. In 2010, Howe and Howe completed three new vehicles. First was the Thermite™ which entered the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) market as the USA’s first firefighting UGV. The second vehicle was Ripchair™, the development of an off-road wheelchair for those that have become disabled and are unable to walk. The third vehicle was Riptide, the amphibious version of the RIPSAW. Year 2015 saw the commercial development of the Big Dog Extreme 4x4 fire truck and the Thermite RS1 and RS3 firefighting robots. The Big Dog is an off-road truck and also serves as an all-terrain multi-use firetruck. The Thermite provides firefighters and first responders immediate eyes inside the fire as well the ability to safely attack industrial, chemical and HAZMAT fires from their core. The Thermite robot provides safety and inside access on containing and defeating fires of any magnitude.

Howe & Howe Technologies first gained notoriety in 2001, with the development of the world’s fastest tank, the RIPSAW. Successful demonstrations soon followed, which eventually allowed the Howes, at the age of 31, to be named among the youngest in history to ever receive a multi-million dollar military contract from the USA. Soon after, in 2010, Howe & Howe received a Guinness World Record for developing the world’s smallest armored vehicle, the Badger. By the time the Howes were 36, they had one world record, multiple patents pending for their product developments, as well as military contracts. The Howes also had their own reality television show on a major US network. In 2010, they completed the Thermite, Fire Fighting Unmanned Ground Vehicle. In 2012, the Howes founded “Outdoors Again,” a nonprofit 501c3 organization that holds outdoor events and social activities for those who require the use of a wheelchair.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the specification language TML for adaptive mission plans that the authors designed and implemented for the open-source framework Aerostack for aerial robotics.

The TML language combines a task-based hierarchical approach together with a more flexible representation, rule-based reactive planning, to facilitate adaptability. This approach includes additional notions that abstract programming details. The authors built an interpreter integrated in the software framework Aerostack. The interpreter was validated with flight experiments for multi-robot missions in dynamic environments.

The experiments proved that the TML language is easy to use and expressive enough to formulate adaptive missions in dynamic environments. The experiments also showed that the TML interpreter is efficient to execute multi-robot aerial missions and reusable for different platforms. The TML interpreter is able to verify the mission plan before its execution, which increases robustness and safety, avoiding the execution of certain plans that are not feasible.

One of the main contributions of this work is the availability of a reliable solution to specify aerial mission plans, integrated in an active open-source project with periodic releases. To the best knowledge of the authors, there are not solutions similar to this in other active open-source projects. As additional contributions, TML uses an original combination of representations for adaptive mission plans (i.e. task trees with original abstract notions and rule-based reactive planning) together with the demonstration of its adequacy for aerial robotics.

Many people feel the automated guided vehicle business is about to take off in the way that robotics did some years ago. John Mortimer reports

This paper, a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal, aims to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market.

The interviewee is Dr Robert Ambrose, Chief, Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. As a young child, even before he started school, Dr Ambrose knew, after seeing the Apollo 11 moonshot, that he wanted to work for NASA. Dr Ambrose describes his career journey into space robotics and shares his teams’ experiences and the importance of the development of Robonaut, a humanoid robotic project designed to work with humans both on Earth and in space.

Dr Ambrose received his MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, and his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr Ambrose heads the flight spacecraft software, space robotics and system simulations for human spaceflight missions. He oversees on-orbit robotic systems for the International Space Station (ISS), the development of software for the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and future human spaceflight systems, simulations for engineering development and training, hardware in the loop facilities for anomaly resolution and crew training and the technology branch for development of new robotic systems. Dr Ambrose also serves as a Principal Investigator for NASA’s Space Technologies Mission Directorate, overseeing research and formulating new starts in the domains of robotics and autonomous systems. He co-chairs the Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) Robotics, Tele-Robotics and Autonomous Systems roadmap team for the agency’s technology program, and is the robotics lead for the agency’s human spaceflight architecture study teams. Working with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Dr Ambrose is the Technical Point of Contact for NASA’s collaboration in the National Robotics Initiative (NRI).

Dr Ambrose not only realized his own childhood dream by pursuing a career at NASA, but he also fulfilled a 15-year national dream by putting the first humanoid robot into space. After seeking a graduate university that would allow him to do research at NASA, it didn’t take long for Dr Ambrose to foresee that the importance of NASA’s future would be in robots and humans working side-by-side. Through the leadership of Dr Ambrose, NASA formed a strategic partnership with General Motors (GM) and together they built Robonaut, a highly dexterous, anthropomorphic robot. The latest Robonaut version, R2, has nearly 50 patents available for licensing. One of the many technology spinoffs from R2 is the innovative Human Grasp Assist device, or Robo-Glove, designed to increase the strength of a human’s grasp.

The following article is a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Martin Buehler, Executive R & D Imagineer, at Walt Disney Imagineering. Dr Buehler is a global expert in robot manipulation and mobile robots and has led the innovative R & D and product development for some of the world’s top robot organizations. In this interview, Dr Buehler shares some of his personal and business experiences of his 25-year journey.

Dr Buehler studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and received the MSc and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Yale University, and after a PostDoc at MIT’s Leglab in locomotion, he became a professor at McGill University in 1991, with tenure since 1997. His research focused on dynamic grasping, direct drive motor control and legged robots. From 2003 to 2008, Dr Buehler was Director of Robotics at Boston Dynamics, and he was Director of Research at iRobot Corporation from 2008 to 2011. He served as VP and General Manager of Hospital Robots for Vecna Technologies from 2011 to 2013 and Senior Director of R & D and Director, R & D Center Munich for Covidien from 2013-2015.

Dr Buehler is best known in the academic world for his expertise in “intermittent dynamical” robotic tasks, such as dynamic manipulation and dynamically stable legged locomotion. His research led to multiple breakthroughs in legged robot projects like BigDog and RHex. In the corporate world, Buehler’s passion is to translate robotics technologies into successful product solutions. He does this by the implementation of key management strategies including Scrum and rapid and systematic experimental iteration. In addition to holding several patents, Dr Buehler is an Advisory Editorial Board member for the International Journal of Robotics Research and formerly served for ten years as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Field Robotics. Dr Buehler is a bestowed IEEE Fellow and was the recipient of the prestigious Robotics Industry Association’s 2012 Engelberger Award for Technology.