I have always loved robots, so when the opportunity presented itself to interview an early robotics pioneer, I jumped.
My obsession started with Isaac Asimov”™s “I, Robot” and has now advanced to a Roomba, a 2009 Christmas gift that now zooms around my living room, autonomously sucking up Christmas tree needles and maneuvering around the couch.
Roomba”™s maker, Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot Corp., generated more than $307 million in revenue in 2008.
“I, Robot” also served as an inspiration for the developer of the first industrial robot.
“Asimov speculated that this could be done, and I said, ”˜Why don”™t I go ahead and build it?”™” said Joseph F. Engelberger of Newtown, known as the father of robotics. “I read everything he wrote, and it had an impact on what I was doing.”
Engelberger”™s dye-casting robot, Unimate, joined the assembly line at a General Motors plant in New Jersey in 1961, where it labored for more than 40 years before retiring to The Smithsonian.
Engelberger”™s company, Unimation, was sold for more than $100 million in the early 1980s. Since then, he has been a strong advocate for the development of service robots for the elderly.
“I”™m beginning to get old enough to want one myself,” Engelberger, 84, said when I visited him at his home recently.
Engelberger is retired, but he hasn”™t given up the dream.
“I”™d like to see a robot that could navigate through this house just the way it is,” Engelberger said. “It would be a robot with more human attributes. Not like in the movies where the robot is so human you can”™t tell it”™s a robot. It will be built along robot lines, but it”™s going to communicate, navigate, have tactile and visual sensing and it will have knowledge. You can download knowledge into it so that it can chat with you about any subject you want, because it understands that particular domain. These are things that are not far out; they can be done now.”
