Project 2 – Web Searching
Robots
Robots are predicted to be one of the next high tech battlefields. Korea has started building an area similar to Silicon Valley, except for robot production. Japan sees the need for robots expanding as its population ages and decreases. The US concentrates on medical and some industrial robots but doesn’t seem interested in personal robots. Europe has the highest use of industrial robots. All four of these areas are starting to concentrate on providing robots to consumers as well as the industrial and military arenas. But one of the big areas in robotics is the push for educational robots. Getting these robot kits into the hands of kids will provide these industries with a well-educated technical workforce. Recently, I even found several magazines that focus on consumer robotics. The searches below cover the different aspects in the robotic industry.
Web Sites
Google: “Robot City” - http://www.slideshare.net/infonaut/welcome-to-robotland-visions-of-the-next-social-revolution/
This set of web pages consists of 67 slides depicting the state of robotics in US, Europe, Japan and Korea. It provides statistics where each of these four areas are concentrating their developments and investments. The slides present different types of robots that include search, industrial, medical, humanoid, and personal. Each area has its own vision of how robotic development will evolve; for example, Korea sees 2008 as home use and entertainment, 2009 as household tasks, and 2010 – 2013 as high intelligence. It has a slide that shows “Stanley”, Stanford University’s robot car winning the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2005. This web site provides a good visual high-level view of robotics. I rate this web site as a 4.
Google: “educational robots” - http://www.mobilerobots.com/education.html
This is a company’s sales web site. The company does seem to understand the basis of robotics with its sentence – “Roboticists are called upon to work in perception, learning, adapative behaviors, cooperation and other high-level operations.” It does offer a number of different educational robots concentrating on different areas. What it doesn’t present is the range of prices. This is frustrating for educators since most of us do not want to have high-intensity salespeople pushing their products only to find out that the school couldn’t afford them anyways. It does have good links to their products presenting short videos displaying their capabilities. Because of the lack of pricing I rate this web site a 3.
This is a line for seeing if a copy was made.
AskJeeves: medical robotics - http://www.medibotics.com/
This is an informational site that has links to other sites. “ Medibotics” focuses on the application of robotics to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and treatments. There are two major areas – large scale medibot systems that are used externally on the patient; a good example is the use of robotic surgical tools; and the other area is nano size medibots that will work within the human body to either sense conditions or treat them. The use of these robotic surgical systems will eventually lead to tele-surgery. The site does not have a lot of links but the links they do have are very apropos. This is a good clean web site that stays within its focused area and I rate the site as a 4.
Yahoo Directory: Science/Engineering/Mechanical_Engineering/Robtoics/ - http://www.androidworld.com/
This is another site that is a compendium of links to other sources on robots. As an example, it includes links for different android parts (eyes, hands, fingers), entertainment robots, in the movies, competitions, and conferences. It has a large number of links and most are up to date with only a few being misleading. The author of the site includes some of his personal tendencies such as ballroom dancing and global warming. The site provides links for projects and parts for building robots. I would rate the site a 3 since it loses a little focus with the web designer’s non-android web pages and links.
www.dmoz.org (Open Directory Project): Computers: Robotics: Robots -http://www.unibw.de/robotics/robots/hermes/
There are a number of anthropomorphic robots being designed to interact with people in a natural way. The HERMES project attempts to use current off-the-shelf components to provide functionality in a number of areas – exploration, transportation, and manipulation. Rather than being a specialized robot, they are examining ways to make it a versatile service robot. This site lists its short and long term goals in robotics development in this anthropomorphic service robot arena. The history of the project goes up to 2004. I rate this website a 4 since it seems to have inspired a number of current robots hitting the market.
John North112-30-12