Just came back from an exciting day at the first RoboDevelopment Conference in San Jose. From their website:
Join the international robotics community at RoboDevelopment Conference and Exposition, the first robotics industry event focused on the design and development of commercially viable personal, service and intelligent mobile robotics products - products that are to be used outside of laboratory environments and sold at a profit.
Ok, so if there are ever going to be robots interacting with us in our daily lives, then the first place to see these would be at this conference. It wasn’t about industrial robotics but about how we can bring robots into the homes and interact with them. Not only that, but how we can do this for under $200. I saw a lot of cool stuff. I took a lot of video and in general, came away with a lot of hope for the future.
Up until now there hasn’t been a conference of this kind. The location of the conference is telling to the goals of the organizer, Dana Kara, the president of Robotics Trends. In the past, most robotics conferences have been held in cities such as Boston or Pittsburgh because they are close to certain universities or military research in the field. But now, Robotics Trends is hoping to bring the field of robotics development for commercial products closure to venture capitalists looking for new entrepreneurial fields to invest in.
I will be presenting video in the upcoming weeks but for now, here are some highlights.
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Evolution Robotics announced a new partnership with WowWee.
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Anybots came out of stealth mode and made their first public appearance, presenting Dexter and Monty.
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Hanson Robotics presented Zeno. The coolest toy robot yet.
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RoMeLa was on hand to show off DARwIn which runs on LabVIEW Real-Time.
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Willow Garage was there to announce their plan for a new personal robotics platform.
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Microsoft was there presenting information on their Robotics Studio platform. University of Massachusetts Amherst was sharing a booth with them and was giving a cool demo of Ubot-5.
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Ray Almgren from National Instruments presented at the keynote and gave an overview of his company’s involvement in the robotics industry. One example was the partnership with Lego in helping develop the Mindstorms NXT product.
As you can appreciate. There is a lot of stuff to see. Unfortunately I only had time for one day (out of a 2-day conference), plus I had to do all the video interviews so I didn’t get a chance to see any of the presentations. There were several tracks with many in-depth sessions where the technology experts were presenting the tools of the trade to allow more companies to develop lower cost robots.
In the end, If it ever happened again, I would definitely be back. This time with more time to spare.
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