By: Julia Aidan
Submitted: 2009-06-24 00:23:28 | Word Count: 543
Robots are used extensively for industrial purposes and people are wondering if these innovations will truly ever be accessible to the public. Service robots actually date back to the 1960s when Unimation, a robotics company was established.
Even with such a long history, there seems to be a lack of service robots that are geared specifically to the consumer market. While there are challenges that face the service robot industry, experts believe that it won't be too far before we see robots in our daily lives.
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Challenges
There are two major issues that service robotics faces today and these are costs and automation innovations. In order for service robotics to effectively penetrate the consumer market, it is important for these robots to be affordable. There has actually been some degree of success on this point with the Roomba. The Roomba is an automated vacuum cleaner that cleans homes on its own. As long as its sensors detect dirt, it will keep moving around to clean.
Perhaps a bigger issue is the automation of service robots. The reasoning is, people will most likely purchase service robots if they perform tasks as efficiently as humans do, and with little supervision or none at all. Robotics developers therefore need to design robots that are near-human in capacity and currently, there isn't a system that is capable of doing that. Even the most sophisticated robotics system requires some human intervention at some point.
Still, many are optimistic about the future prospects of service robots. After all, a few years ago, nobody ever really believed that robots would take over human tasks and yet now, numerous industries rely on robotics systems on most of their operations.
Daily Life
There are a lot of robotics systems being developed to help people in their daily lives. One of the primary concerns for robotics companies is how to bring down expenses so that service robots can be made readily available to the consumer market.
These companies are also making sure the products they develop are designed to be compatible with existing equipment in the home. Service robots are being developed so that they are able to "communicate" with devices such as computers and other electronic equipment. Besides this having an impact on the performance of the robots, it all boils down to costs. It would simply be costly to purchase supplementary devices just to get the robots to function in home and service environments.
Service Robots in Other Areas
There are actually many service robots currently in use today. In health care alone, advancements in elderly care involve the creation of robots that can accomplish care giving functions such as giving patients baths.
Automatic pill dispensing is also utilized in some pharmacies and hospitals. Some are stand-alone booths that can take orders and fill up prescriptions accordingly. Service robots are also used in pharmaceutical stores, albeit on a "smaller" scale. Robots are utilized to help pharmacists dispense drugs - the pharmacist inputs the data into a computer and the robot automatically fills the prescription. The pharmacist is then free to do other things while the robot is busy dispensing.
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