American Robots Face Spirited Competition Abroad
From: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 09/19/2005
By: Byron Spice

A six-member panel led by University of Southern California roboticist George
Bekey summed up a two-year initiative from NASA, the National Science
Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health to assess the state of
robot technology around the world at an NSF workshop last week. Bekey
acknowledged US superiority in surgical, biological, and space robotics,
while Asian robotics programs are yielding superior humanoid and caregiver
machines. Such overseas efforts are characterized by a coordinated, long-term
developmental strategy, which Matt Mason of Carnegie Mellon University's
Robotics Institute said runs counter to the US research community's culture
of independent thought. Asian and European robotics research is more
commercial-oriented, while American research has been chiefly fueled by the
military; Bekey noted, however, that NASA and the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency have scaled back R&D spending in recent years. He said major
companies have avoided robotic technology investment out of concern for
short-term returns, in contrast to the long view held by Asian firms. Bekey
also pointed to the underfunding of US startup firms stemming from the desire
for faster profits. Mason cited the commercial applications of speech
recognition and motion planning and simulation technology as examples of
robotic technologies' "spectacular success," and argued that the panel's
evaluation of the worldwide robotics field is too narrowly focused. The NSF
workshop featured demonstrations of robots developed by US groups, such as
the six-legged RHex and the RiSE climbing machine.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05262/573956.stm

Links:
George Bekey
http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~bekey/

Matt Mason
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mason/

Robotics Institute
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/

RHex
http://www.rhex.net/