Olin College's Barrett touts robotics at NIWeek

Austin, TX. Dr. David Barrett, Director of SCOPE at Olin College, delivered the keynote at NIWeek day 3, noting he has two of the greatest jobs on earth—he is a teacher and gets to build robots, adding, "Robots rock!"

He described robotics as a disruptive technology that will fundamentally change the earth. One of the first disruptive events, he said, was the invention of fire. Before that, he said, furry creatures would eat you at night. Around 2000 BC, the alphabet was created, enabling all the technology we have now. The discovery of oil was another disruptive technology, for good or for worse, he added. Timelines of the past, he said, can help predict the future, and disruptive events are happening at an increasing rate. Now we have biotech that might allow people in the audience to live beyond a hundred years, he added.

As for robotics, it will be a $470 billion industry in 2020, performing surgery, mining, military missions, and other tasks. He presented several examples: Hollywood robots (which can be fully functional and interact with children), military air robotic airplanes (which are being adopted at an exponential rate), military sea robots, and Olin robotics, including a LabView-powered flying robot. Now, he said, a few students can do things in a few weeks that NASA had a hard time doing at all many years ago. He described future combat systems—half of which are unmanned, presenting technical and ethical challenges.

Barrett also described consumer robots, including walking and talking ones. Medical robots are transformative, he said, citing work with Boston Scientific on surgical robots. (He refrained from showing videos of robotic surgery, anticipating squeamishness among audience members.) He also described industrial, construction, and agricultural robots (such as autonomous tractors). He described an autonomous robot built in eight weeks by five students.

The snapshot of systems he presented, he said, is not science fiction. But the industry needs three things: better batteries, better actuators, and an industrial-grade, hardened, richly supported software development system. He said he may have found the last one in LabView for Robotics, which can deal with webs of sensors, multiple actuators, and complex dynamic control algorithms that must be implemented in real-time. He concluded by encouraging audience members to become involved in the robotic community.