Where Have All the Robots Gone? CES 2011 Analysis

While tablets are on the rise at CES 2011, robotic innovations are thinning. Where are the at-home robot servants we were promised? Contributing editor reports live from the world's largest consumer electronics show.

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Around the world, the robot population is booming, as spy drones become cheap enough for local law enforcement and researchers take the first, tentative steps toward a true nonhuman workforce with models that teach English to Korean schoolkids, or that drive autonomously for thousands of miles, presumably better than many cabbies. Yet, here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the robotic herd is thinning. In the space of five years, the Robotics Techzone, a section of the show floor grouping robotics companies together, has gone from a sad but expansive ghetto of Roomba-clones and toys, to a blink-and-you've-missed-it alley dominated by brochures about world-class bots and bot-making capacities in Japan. Of the handful of robots on display, the most prominent was Paro, the cooing, blinking robotic baby seal that's used for therapy in hospitals and retirement homes. But Paro returns to CES unchanged from the previous year. Except, that is, for a kimono awkwardly draped around its furry rear.

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Techzone used to be a sewing circle of yammering, gesticulating social robots. This year there's just one. The Robovie R3 is a child-size, low-cost platform for researching human-robot interaction. Just how low-cost isn't relevant—it's a tool for labs, not a consumer product. Another bot, the humanoid, 13.5-inch-tall Robovie-X, danced and cartwheeled across the carpet, moving with astonishing grace and precision. Those robo-acrobatics come at a price, namely $1290, which is why this model is destined for science centers and museums, where they'll dance for children for a daily charge.


Luckily, robots are allowed out of their Techzone, and Parrot's iPhone-controlled AR Drone, which debuted at last year's show, drew crowds once again with its impressive autonomous flight algorithms. Unfortunately, aside from a higher-resolution camera and a more colorful airframe, the quadcopter drone itself is nearly identical to the previous iteration and is still being sold as part of a developer's kit, in the hopes that someone will create a killer augmented-reality app for the bot. More unfortunately, it crashed within a few minutes of my showing up, inexplicably breaking out of its flight pattern (a kind of hovering mirror-exercise with another AR Drone) and rocketing into the roof of its netted enclosure. When I left it was still hanging there, immobilized, while the other drone blithely went on with the show.

Other robotic cameos were less accident-prone, but no more substantial. There was the bike-riding Murata Boy, a PR stunt with no real connection to any product, and that's lost its sideshow appeal after years of appearances at various events. There was an intriguing healthcare robot from Moneaul, the Rydis H1004, which is designed to roll around playing therapeutic music, providing internet access through its touchscreen head and purifying the air. At the show, it did nothing, and there were no plans for pricing or availability.

There was hope for nonhumans, though, at iRobot's booth. Along with a fully redesigned Scooba floor-cleaning bot—it's a fraction of the size of the original, allowing it to better scrub around toilets, for example—the company was showing off a 5-foot-tall robotic technology demonstrator, code-named AVA, that's designed to physically interact with people in intuitive ways. While the Roomba and Scooba slam into furniture and feet, AVA is more nimble, using standard laser-rangefinders as well as sonar and 3D-imaging cameras (the same used in Microsoft's Kinect) to steer around its environment. It also responds well to shoves and taps, with strategically positioned pressure sensors and an impressive ability to yield—it stands taller when you pull its telescoping body upwards, or simply backs up, gliding on its three mecanum wheels (essentially wheels embedded with smaller wheels) when nudged. Although its head appears to be an iPad, the tablet is effectively a cosmetic feature, mounted in place with no cables or wireless connection tethering it to the bot itself. In the future a tablet could easily act as a control interface for the bot, a deft move that sidesteps the need to build the kind of integrated screen found in current telepresence bots. IRobot isn't offering the robot as a research platform, a healthcare or eldercare appliance, or anything, just yet. It's simply a technology demonstrator. But it's also packed with innovation, and it works. At the current rate of robot flight from CES, we'll take all the tech demos we can get.

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