This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Meet the machines that are running, grabbing, organising, swimming and folding their way into our daily lives.
Flying pet drone
Robot-maker Sameer Parekh, 38, is talking <span class="s1">about the time he was interviewed for a post with the CIA. Back in 2000 he sold his internet startup C2Net and took time off to tour central and eastern Europe as a DJ, before returning to the US in 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2007, he applied to join both the FBI and the CIA but was rejected by the latter after failing a polygraph test (he still doesn't know what it detected).
Four years later, Parekh was working at Goldman Sachs when he stumbled across the 3D-printer company MakerBot.
A powerful feeling took hold that he was wasting his life. "I realised I'd been living under a rock, that there was awesome stuff going on out there, while I was working for a bank," says Parekh. He quit his job, eventually launching Falkor Systems, a robotics startup.
It specialises in flying bots because they combine his passions -- robotics and aviation. "There's a lot of hardware involved, but it's not like a walking robot or one that has to grab things," he says. "A quadcopter is basically four to eight props and a gimbal."
Identifying his initial market as extreme-sports photographers, he explains: "Quadcopters are already being used [to film] rallying, skiing and base jumping, but they are all being used in a piloted way, where you've got a guy jumping off a cliff and another guy flying the robot. The goal for this product is to be autonomous and track the athlete [on its own]." Parekh, who works with two interns and "a team of hardware-adviser friends", envisages a $1,000 (£660) device, featuring "a little camera with fewer control systems -- like a GoPro [camera], except it flies."
It will have diverse applications, including security and oil-pipeline management. But it's his long-term vision that has caught the imagination of Grishin Robotics. "I want to build flying robotic pets," Parekh says. "The robot would <span class="s2">follow you everywhere, take pictures of you and your friends, tweet for you, carry your keys and do other stuff for you."
Turtlebot
In a cluttered Brooklyn workshop, Bill Morris is hunched over a mobile robotic platform. With a swipe of a tablet screen, the platform -- a TurtleBot with a Baccus open-source robotic <span class="s1">arm attached -- lurches across the room. Morris flashes a grin. "Do you want to drive it?"
The TurtleBot is from Willow Garage, a California-based R&D lab that focuses on building hardware and open-source software for personal robotics. Morris, a former web entrepreneur in his 30s, launched I Heart <span class="s1">Engineering in October 2010, after Willow Garage sent out an email requesting manufacturing partners. "Willow Garage open-sourced the entire
[TurtleBot] project," he says. "We often joke that we're the world's biggest developer of TurtleBot accessories."
Morris estimates that he and his team of three full-time and six part-time engineers and coders have built hundreds of TurtleBots, which he describes as an academic platform for robot-building projects. He gestures to a prototype for TurtleBot 2. "It has a fixed pattern of holes on the top of the platform, so you can mount things," he says. "It provides wheels, Kinect or a 3D sensor to do navigation, a gyro and accelerometer to help determine position and orientation, and comes with software and a laptop. It gives you a base to start your project. "I want to live in a robot future, where a $2m (£1.3m) robot I bought off eBay for $20,000 (£13,000) can fold my laundry," he says. "In the case of technological singularity, we either have the dystopian robot future that Hollywood dreams about, or the awesome future. Robots folding laundry is how we get to awesome."
The Cheetah
The US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is, with technology company Boston Dynamics, developing the Cheetah -- a set of mechanical legs that flex and unfurl like natural limbs and have attained speeds of 45kph.
Fish
Huosheng Hu at Essex University's School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering heads a team that makes 1.5-metre-long robotic fish, which swim at 25cm per second. The fish can identify different types of pollution -- and their source -- by using tiny chemical sensors.
REEM-B<span class="s2">
This 1.47-metre tall humanoid robot is REEM-B: the second avatar of REEM robots, built by PAL Robotics, a Barcelona-based team of engineers. REEM-B, unveiled in 2008 on Al Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, is capable of face-recognition and memory, dextrous movements, bipedal walking for 1.5km and stair climbing. Embedded sensors allow it to navigate the world independently: a laser range-finder, accelerometer, gyroscope and six axis-force sensors help generate maps of obstacles and building layouts. Weighing 60kg, it can carry loads of up to 25 per cent of its own weight.
RoboFold
Robot arms have traditionally welded, struck and shifted sheet metal to mass-produce cars. Gregory Epps, the founder and CEO of London startup RoboFold, has been developing their suitability for more delicate tasks.
Thanks to a programme run jointly by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, he and RoboFold have produced machines that can fold metal with the fine touch of an origami expert. His machines made ornate steel designs for last year's Venice Biennale and he's adapting the designs into prototype furniture and building materials. Epps hopes to develop applications suitable for both carmakers and artists - including sketching bots that can draw directly on to steel.
Kiva Systems
In May 2012 Amazon paid $775 million (£510 milliom) for Kiva Systems Inc, an automated order-fulfilment company whose robots stack shelves and move crates for companies including Gap. Kiva's squat bots zoom around Manhattan-style grid systems in sprawling buildings, hunting tagged products then carrying tall shelving "pods" to a queuing system where human employees pick out individual items. In Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute is developing swarm intelligence for a similar programme called MultiShuttle.
Net-A-Porter recently introduced robots developed by logistics specialists TGW in its UK warehouses. Its CEO Mark Sebba says the system is 500 percent faster than humans.
Da Vinci
In 2012 the Da Vinci, a surgical robot guided by humans, conducted the UK's first robotic open-heart surgery. The machines -- developed by California's Intuitive Surgical Inc -- cut between a patient's ribs rather than cutting open the breast plate, so reducing recovery time. The prohibitive cost of the bot -- £1.3m, plus regular maintenance - could restrict its use until prices fall.
Bionic<span class="s1">Handling<span class="s1">Assistant
Festo, a supplier and developer of automation technology, modelled this robotic arm on an elephant's trunk. It provides flexible assistance over 11 degrees of freedom. It is sensitive enough to respond to accidental collisions with nearby humans, without interrupting its current task.
Djedi
In Egypt, robots designed to search for earthquake victims are being adapted for archaeological work. A team working on sealed chambers in the Great Pyramid of Giza asked Robert Richardson, of
Leeds University's School of Mechanical Engineering, to adapt a rugged crawler bot to delve into the heart of the ancient structure.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
