Watershed

Although robots have been the subject of popular interest and enthusiasm for over 50 years, real robots have not yet lived up to these hopes and expectations.

However, there have been dramatic improvements over the past decade in some of the supporting technologies, removing some of the impediments to developing advanced mobile robots.

Drive Systems

The electromechanical technology to produce mobile robots that can move effectively in many environments has been available for many years.

Fine manipulation, climbing, and movement across irregular terrain still require ongoing development work.

Some inexpensive drive systems are becoming available, although robotics platforms have yet to benefit from the economics of mass production.

Sensors

Inexpensive visual and audio sensors are widely available.

A variety of other sensors, such as position encoders, rangefinders, accelerometers, thermal sensors, and GPS are also commercially available.

Compute Bandwidth

The pervasive laptop provides a small, lightweight, inexpensive, portable, powerful computing solution with very large memory capacities.

Faster processors are becoming available every day.

Excellent compilers and software development tools for these computer systems are readily available at very low cost.