What Prominent Roboticists Think Google Should Do with Its Robots

> If I were a large company with deep pockets, I would accept that robotics is what is called a ‘formative’ market and just like shopping on the web, it will take a decade or so to ramp up. Robots are innovations that do not directly replace people and thus it is hard for people to imagine how to use them—thus the market is formative. The theory of diffusion of innovation indicates that potential end-users, not developers, need to experiment with applications to see what works (and not just physically but human-robot interaction as well).

> However, robots have to be extremely reliable and the software customizable enough to allow the end-users to tinker and adapt the robots, so that the end-user can find the ‘killer app.’ Essentially, you can crowdsource the task of finding the best, most profitable uses of robots, but only if you have good enough robots that can be reconfigure easily and the software is open enough. I would concentrate on creating generic ground, aerial, and marine robots with customizable software and user interfaces in order to enable their regular employees (and customers) to figure out the best uses.

> In order to make sure the development was pushing towards the most reliable, reconfigurable, and open robots possible, I suggest the developers focus on the emergency response domain. Disasters are the most demanding application and come in so many variations that it is a constant test of technology and users. Imagine the wealth of ideas and feedback from fire rescue teams, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross, just to name a few! Focusing on emergency management would also have a positive societal benefit.

"If anyone could crack the indoor social robot market that is seeing such high interest right now in both the consumer and commercial spaces, it would be them"

Why on earth would Google care about the indoor social robot market?

"If I were a large company with deep pockets, ... it will take a decade or so to ramp up"

It's always easy to say how other people should spend their money, and just because a company is one of the few that can do a thing, it doesn't follow that they should do it. A lot of the speculation seems to be of the "if I had a billion dollars, I would..." wish fulfilment sort.

I can see the point of self driving cars. They were doing street view anyway and that's a pretty obvious application for autonomous vehicles. But they're not actually a manufacturing or supply chain company. Their foray into that with Motorola was an expensive mistake. I just don't see that a lot of the other robotics stuff they're doing is relevant to their business. That doesn't mean nobody should be investing in this. Sure there are applications down the line, but are they relevant to Google?

The only one I can think of is data centre build out and maintenance. But Google aren't near the scale to support an entire industrial robot development and manufacturing industry just for a handful of data centres.

The answer seems to be "not very much". Google bought all those robotics companies but didn't get them to work together. All the companies are still in their original locations. Nobody has a product. Even Bot and Dolly, which had a product, no longer seems to be selling it. Boston Dynamics is being sold because they don't play well with others.

The whole robotics exercise seems to have been a hobby of Andy Rubin, and when he left, nobody had a clue what to do. Google/Alphabet, through mismanagement, may have added negative value to the robotics industry. Google's secrecy here seems to be more about hiding management failure than protecting intellectual property.

Martin Buehler, the brains behind BigDog, is now at Disney, and I expect we'll see more mobile robots there. Disney has wanted this for years; around 2000, they hired Danny Hillis to work on theme park robots. They got some improvements to their anamatronics, and a dino robot that pulls a cart but gets its balance from the cart wheels.

The next killer app in robotics is probably really good bin-picking. Kiva's mobile platforms can bring the shelf to the picker, but a human still takes the thing out of one bin and puts it into another. Amazon is working on solutions to that.

Apparently this includes having robots write titles for HN posts?

Couldn't someone build a delivery box (like an american mail box) that could be mounted on your property, close to the curb, within reachable distance from a delivery truck.

The truck could stop, tell the 'amazon delivery box' to unlock and open. Then place items in it. There could be various different sized boxes, from small to large chest freezer type things. The box would have some electronics in it, a solar panel on top, it doesn't matter how expensive they are - you can rent them from Amazon or whoever.

This would then reduce all the complex variables of how to drop packages off at the destination.

Geez, that was the FIRST thing Walt Disney went for. Look up "Project Little Man" with Buddy Ebsen as the model.

http://www.waltdisney.org/blog/early-days-audio-animatronics...

- Pick up anything from mostly anywhere.

- Schedule pickup around the clock.

- Move things/people securely and be able to track the contents through a camera.

- Act as a mobile living space. Not requiring a dashboard frees up a lot of space.