Hawaii is in prime position to join robotics revolution

The word "robot" used to evoke the 1920 play "R.U.R.," "Rossum’s Universal Robots," by Karel Capek (from the Slavic "robota" for serf labor) and Isaac Asimov’s 1942 "Three Laws of Robotics" (coining the term "robotics"). Today it evokes toys and high school competitions. Really, it’s time to commercialize what our kids have learned.

Personal robotics is emerging as the next big disruptive technology. This was clear in a recent article by Thomas Friedman in the detailing a sneak peek he had at Rethink Robotics, in Boston’s Innovation District near Logan International Airport. It’s the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics at Stanford and MIT and co-founder of iRobot, inventors of the Roomba vacuum-cleaning robot.

Rethink Robotics is developing a new generation of robots. Brooks wants to build them for the ordinary person. Where industrial robots — the progeny of Joe Engleberger’s "Animate" installed at General Motors in 1961 — are still expensive, fixed and limited to dirty, dangerous and dull jobs, Brooks’ robot will be intuitive, versatile, safe, programmable and inexpensive. And it is coming soon.

The world is watching to see what Brooks rolls out, and Hawaii should be watching, too. After all, Song Choi at the University of Hawaii School of Engineering has been designing autonomous underwater vehicles for years. Jeff Williams of Williams Aerospace has been building and selling reconnaissance drones. And Dan Leuck at Ikayzo has been writing software for robots. We’re not neophytes.

Microsoft offers a Robotics Developer Studio through which it makes robots more accessible by making it easier to program them. With simulation tools that include various environments (apartment, factory, home, outdoor and urban), you don’t need a robot to program one. You also can try the JAUS, ARIA, KARTO and Android development kits. It’s all going to be drag and drop.

The "exponentials," as Brooks calls them, are coming together for a confluence in robotic development, where robotics can "hop" on other advancing technologies, including metallurgy, nanotechnology, electrical and mechanical engineering, sensors, video, audio, smartphone, wireless, artificial intelligence and computer processing. All we have to do is marry them.

These robots could reverse America’s decline in manufacturing, not for mass-market goods like those manufactured in China, but for high-end design and production quality. This will take manufacturing to a new level, where goods are manufactured only when and in such quantities as are ordered.

These robots will be useful in places robots have not been used before. They will make workers smarter and more productive, and will prevent jobs from migrating to low-cost areas. This is really important when our bell curve shows an aging population that doesn’t have enough young people to do the work.

These robots will lead to distributed design and manufacturing around the world. Startups like Rethink Robotics will include teams of the best and brightest connected by chat rooms across the continents. Indeed, notable work on robots is being done in India, Japan, Poland and even Iran. It’s global, but who will be the leader of the pack?

Where Hawaii has not been a likely manufacturing venue, with these new machines to come we can use design robots to do creative manufacturing designs and send them for manufacturing elsewhere. And we can certainly do robotics programming, like Leuck of Ikayzo. As Brooks says, once we "touch" the robots, other functions we can’t think of now will present themselves.

Beyond manufacturing, think of a new generation of programmable robots that can do exploration, teaching, police and firefighters’ work, medical, dental, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, agriculture, fishing and a myriad of routine helpful household tasks. Maybe they also could do art, music, theater, sports, even management and politics. Let your imagination fly. Of course, they could do war and crime, too.

Once we know them better, we’ll find thousands of other things they can do for us. Finding those things and programming them will be competitive but also enormously profitable. Owning such a robot will be a joy. Once you have paid for the robot, its services are free — no wages, no workers’ comp, no sick days and no attitude.

President Barack Obama recently unveiled the National Robotics Initiative, pledging $70 million to accelerate development of "co-robotics" that work beside humans. The state should go beyond school competitions and get serious with robotic startups. An innovation district and tax breaks would be good. Beefing up robotics at UH would be great, including new courses, degrees and institutes, like Carnegie Mellon and so many other schools around the world.

What a glorious opportunity for Hawaii. The coming disruption is low-hanging fruit. It will be the ultimate democratization of technology, and will involve huge benefits for those who participate. Carpe robotics. Carpe Hawaii.

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Jay Fidell, a longtime business lawyer, founded ThinkTech Hawaii, a digital media company that reports on Hawaii’s tech and energy sectors of the economy. Reach him at fidell@lava.net.