Since 1994, Microsoft researchers have maintained an area inside the Executive Briefing Center that is known as the Microsoft Home. This home of the future is updated every few years with the latest in gadgets and smart appliances. Microsoft hopes these devices will be used in most homes within the next 5 to 10 years. The simulated home, which does not include laptops or desktop machines, uses mesh networking and thin LCD screens to interact with users.

Microsoft Home has become a test bed for new technologies within Microsoft. It represents an effort to make the family home more efficient and enjoyable. Products are embedded within the home, such as the digital wallpaper that routinely changes the images displayed on the wall. For more information about Microsoft Home, refer to the following URL: www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/sep06/09-28NewPrototypesPR.mspx.

Microsoft is not the only company investigating the use of smart appliances. Government agencies and private companies have come to recognize the benefits of having devices that are able to react to their environments and make decisions. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy has been testing smart appliances such as thermostats, dryers, and water heaters that communicate with the power company via the Internet. By having the ability to intelligently adjust their power usage, these smart appliances have resulted in lower electricity bills for test participants.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the average life expectancy for people in the United States has risen by more than two years since 1990. This trend has continued across most of the world and has dramatic implications for large populations such as in Japan. Before long, and in some places this is already the case, there will be more elderly people requiring assistance than there are workers able to care for them.

Robots will not replace human care workers, but they can help elderly people function safely within their own homes. For example, Japan has already developed an intelligent wheelchair prototype that can move around on its own and avoid obstacles. Rehabilitation robots that feature mechanical arms can be used to assist people in moving their limbs.

Universities have been working on projects to provide personal service robots to the elderly. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has developed a prototype robot named "Nursebot." The prototype robot the university has built allows care workers to remotely monitor in-home patients. It can also be used to remind patients when they need to take their medicine and directly interact with them to provide some level of companionship.

Private companies, such as PALS Robotics (see www.palsrobotics.com), produce prototype subsystems that can be used by researchers building home-care robots. For example, they have created an active stereo vision platform that can be attached to a mobile robot, allowing the robot to see.

People have quickly realized that robots can be used to replace humans to perform dangerous jobs. For example, robots that disable bombs or explode land mines have been used for several years. These robots might even be suitable for use in uranium-processing plants, where the risk of exposure to radiation is very high. The trick is getting the robots to handle a wide range of possibilities. Although it is easy to have a robot perform a specific task under ideal conditions, it is not so easy to have a robot perform the same task when several dangerous and unexpected variables are at play.

In many cases, the Department of Defense has led efforts toward finding robotic solutions for dangerous jobs. In May 2007, Kansas State University received a $219,140 grant from the Department of Defense for building robots that serve as intelligent, mobile sensors. The robots Kansas State develops may be used to search buildings for weapons of mass destruction.

Also in 2007, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the central research agency for the Department of Defense, sponsored the Urban Challenge (see www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/overview.asp). This successor to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge involved autonomous vehicles operating in a simulated urban environment. The vehicles had to perform several tasks while also obeying traffic rules and avoiding other vehicles.

More than 100 university-based teams entered the challenge, but only 35 teams qualified for the semifinals by passing the rigorous on-site visits performed during the summer of 2007. Princeton University, one of the 35 teams to qualify, used a car powered by MSRS services (refer to the sidebar in Chapter 1). Unfortunately, Princeton University was not one of the 11 teams that made it to the finals. The finals, which were held in November 2007, resulted in only 5 teams crossing the finish line. The team from Carnegie Mellon University took first place, followed by the team from Stanford, and, in third place, the team from Virginia Tech.

The Urban Challenge was important because it represented an opportunity to explore applications for military and civilian uses. The Department of Defense hopes to use autonomous vehicles in dangerous battle situations. The driverless vehicles would be able to deliver needed supplies or rescue stranded troops. Private carmakers are hoping the innovations will lead to the design of intelligent, and thus safer, cars.

For many years, robots have been used on assembly lines in manufacturing companies to perform dull and repetitive jobs. This is not difficult when the robot is bolted to the floor and asked to perform a very specific task. What is difficult is when the robot is mobile and able to encounter unexpected variables.

Domestic robots are now being used to perform boring household functions such as vacuuming the floors, cleaning the pools, and mowing the lawn. Imagine if the lawn-mowing robot encounters a baby bird or a child’s toy on the lawn. Would it know not to run over the objects? Probably not. The area of robotic vision is one area still under development. It is one thing to recognize movement from Web camera images and another to identify and classify specific objects.

Unfortunately, we are a long way away from seeing a robotic butler, capable of operating in a house and doing our day-to-day chores. However, there are already robots designed to direct traffic or carry signs. As the field of robotics expands, we will see more and more robots performing jobs that humans would rather do without.

In 2004, NASA released the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) to a few museums throughout the United States. Museum visitors can use the Rover to explore an area meant to simulate Mars. The original Rover is still being used by NASA to explore the planet Mars. The Rover offers a relatively cheap and safe means of exploration (see http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html). Rather than send astronauts to Mars, NASA sent two Rovers named Spirit and Opportunity. The Rovers were able to survive the severe dust storms on Mars and perform their missions year after year. Even though the Rovers were only supposed to operate on Mars for 90 days, they have performed so well that NASA continues to extend their missions, which may now last until 2009.

The experience gained from the Rover project is now being used toward a new project named the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) (see http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu/). TeRK extends upon the Rover museum installations and seeks to attract young men and women toward science and technology curricula.

Space is not the only frontier worthy of exploratory robots. Here on Earth, robots have been used to explore extreme temperature areas such as active volcanoes, desert environments, or regions in Antarctica. Carnegie Mellon University has created an army of these exploratory robots (see www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/robots/).

Additionally, autonomous underwater vehicles have been able to explore ocean depths inaccessible to humans. Robots such as the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) from the University of Delaware (see www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2005/mar/trembanis091405.html) include learning capabilities that allow it to react to unexpected obstacles and chart new courses if necessary.

In the health care industry, robots are routinely used for performing surgeries and complex procedures. At this time, they function more as remote-controlled devices, but if significant advancements are made in the software used to control these devices, their uses could dramatically expand.

Since 2005, St. Mary’s NHS Trust and Imperial College in London has used a remote-presence robot named Sister Mary (see www.st-marys.nhs.uk/pressrd.html) to roam the hospital wards. These robodocs are used by remote specialists to do virtual consultations with patients. The doctors can remotely operate the robot and send it from room to room. The patient is able to see an image of the doctor on the robot’s attached computer screen. Sister Mary is not meant to replace doctors but rather to assist them in providing better health care for their patients.

Some robotics researchers predict that robotic companions will provide just as much benefit to people as live pets do. The outer shell for a companion robot can be as welcoming as a soft teddy bear. This is the case for the Huggable Robot (see http://web.media.mit.edu/~wdstiehl/projects.htm), which is currently under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Huggable Robot can be used as an autonomous companion or as an avatar that allows people to remotely connect. MSRS was used for the avatar portion of this project.

Robotic companionship shows the most promise in the area of elderly care. Robotic companions can potentially provide a sense of comfort to an elderly person living alone or with little social contact. This is a concept known as animal-assisted therapy (AAT), and it is being used as a solution to the problems of loneliness and boredom.

These days it is hard to walk into a toy store and not find several robotic toys. You will likely find one of the popular robotic toys from WowWee, such as the original Robosapien, or the new line of robotic dinosaurs. As the cost of mass producing these robotic toys decreases, you will see more and more children owning them.

Of course, robots used for entertainment are not restricted to toys for children (and even some adults). Using multiple robots, researchers and hobbyists have held competitions involving robots. For example, robot soccer is rapidly gaining popularity, along with the sumo-bot competitions, in which one robot tries to push another one out of a circle.