Why Should We Be Friends?

Japanese and American firms have their eyes on the same prize: the market for home health care, particularly for the elderly. As baby boomers hit retirement age, the need to monitor and assist seniors will create a surge in demand for personal-care robots, experts say. Since 2001, the Japanese government has spent $210 million on research to meet its goal of deploying robots to support its aging workforce. (It's timeline specifies that bots should be able to straighten a room by the end of this year, make beds by 2013, and help with baths and meals by 2025.) The desire to field human-like robots, however, is an impediment. Honda, for instance, decided to keep its Asimo robot bipedal, even though its two feet are impractical in homes with stairs and clutter. The one field in which Japanese robots have a clear lead requires no practical applications: entertainment robots, a $185 million market that is expected to rise to $3 billion by 2014, according to private research firms.

The few Japanese droids that appear viable for the home-care market face one key problem: safety. Riken's Ri-Man, for example, has soft silicone skin, a wheeled base and two paddle-shaped arms strong enough to lift a child from a bed (the company is currently practicing the technology on dolls); its vision, hearing, smelling and touching sensors allow it to locate voices and respond to spoken commands. But at 1.5 meters tall and 99 kilograms large, Ri-Man could easily crush a child or senior if it accidentally tipped over.

Unlike Japan, the U.S. government has shown little interest in leading a national robotics strategy. Instead, private firms are partnering with university research centers and encouraging the development of software to guide home-care robots. The biggest player is Microsoft, followed by Willow Garage, a start-up founded in 2007 by early Google architect Scott Hassan. By 2009, Willow Garage plans to distribute up to 50 models of its PR2 robot (originally developed at Stanford) to university labs around the country, as a hardware-and-open-source software package, which researchers are free to modify. The PR2, lightweight and therefore safe, has wheels and grasping hands that will allow it to push a vacuum, dust cobwebs, hold open a door or perform other tasks.

Similarly, 50 or so research labs and private firms have adapted Microsoft's Robotics Studio software for use on their own bots. MIT's Media Lab is developing the Huggable, a robotic teddy bear that can be controlled remotely to transmit data about vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate, or to virtually embrace and chat with a faraway grandparent or child. The uBot-5, developed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is compact enough to navigate narrow household corridors, and if a human bumps into it, it merely skids across the floor.

All this grass-roots robotics innovation has led tech giants like Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to predict that in the next twenty years, robots could be the biggest technological revolution since PCs and the Internet. Whether these robots are cleaning up homes or serving as co-workers, entertainers and friends depends on which vision wins out.

With Akiko Kashiwagi In Tokyo And B. J. Lee In Seoul.

© 2008