Here Come the Robots

By Philip Faflick.

Home automatons are rolling to market, but will they sell?

With its round head, beady eyes and red-buttoned pot belly, it looks like an armless, three-foot-high plastic snowman. Rolling across the floor on big black wheels, it embodies one of man's most enduring dreams: the personal robot, programmed to do its master's bidding. Inside its molded skull a kind of sassy intelligence seems to be at work. "What strange-looking creatures," it intones nasally in the direction of some gawking visitors at its home base, Androbot, Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Where are your wheels?"

The robot's name is BOB (Brains On Board). At present it cannot even fetch a beer from the refrigerator, but its buoyant creator, High-Tech Millionaire Nolan Bushnell, 40, forsees an almost boundless future for the $2,500 machine. Concerned about crime in your neighborhood? Not to worry, "Home security," says Bushnell, "is just moments away." With the proper software, he claims, BOB could patrol a house and call the police when its heat sensor sniffs an intruder. When BOB isn't watching the house, he could be cleaning it. "As soon as we get an arm on him, vacuuming will be easy," says Bushnell. Eventually, he hopes, "BOB will be programmed to fetch things--get the paper, pick up after its master, put loose socks in the hamper and stray shoes in the closet."

Bushnell, who started the successful Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater fast-food chain, is no stranger to the merchandising of fantasy: he created Pong, the first commercial video game, and founded Atari. He has invested more than $1 million in Androbot and packed BOB with three times the calculating power of an IBM Personal Computer. This provides the robot with an enormous potential for processing information, storing it in its memory and performing preprogrammed tasks. Some observers think Bushnell's entrepreneurial instincts are on target again. "Personal robots are the next hot thing in technology," predicts Portia Isaacson, president of the Texas-based research firm Future Computing. "By 1990 the market could reach $2 billion a year."

A robot, by definition, is a mechanical device that can be taught to do a variety of complex jobs. Clockwork automatons, like the showpieces on display at Disney World, are not true robots: they are built to do one routine over and over. The robot-like characters that hang around shopping malls and buttonhole passers-by also are shams, unable to operate without a human remote-controller near by. Industrial robots, which look like giant dentist drills, can be programmed to do extremely complex tasks; they also average $1 million apiece.

The technical know-how for manufacturing robots like BOB has been available since the mid-'70s; thanks to the plummeting costs of silicon chips, they have suddenly become affordable. As a result, other entrepreneurs are joining Bushnell's rush to the market. Cambridge-based Terrapin Inc. has sold hundreds of hemispherical Turtles, $600 robots with retractable pens that can be plugged into Apple computers and programmed to sketch an infinite variety of geometric shapes. In Golden, Colo., a firm called RB Robot Corp. makes a $1,500 device that will teach itself to maneuver around a room: it will cheerfully bounce off the walls and furniture on its first few tries, but eventually learn how to avoid fixed obstacles. Last December the Heath Co. of Benton Harbor, Mich., began offering a $1,500 robot kit ($2,500 assembled) called HERO 1 (for Heath Educational Robot) that has already sold out its first two production runs, more than 1,000 units in all. HERO has a gripper arm attached to its turret-like head, and with patient instruction can be taught to lift and carry light objects. Next April, BOB will go into production, and by September, BOBs should be marching off Androbot's assembly line by the thousands. Retail outlets like New York City's Macy's are already taking orders for a $1,000 rolling Androbot called Topo that can be radio-controlled by a home computer. "The question is not whether the technology is available," says Androbot Engineer Frank Jones, "but rather, do the people want it?"

Says Laura Conigliaro, robot specialist for the brokerage house of Prudential-Bache: "What we're seeing is the seeds of a potentially important industry, although the real market for personal robots is ten years away." Carl Helmers, a founding editor of the computer journal Byte and publisher of the bimonthly Robotics Age, believes there are already 100,000 computer fanatics ready to make the leap to personal robots.

One of the earliest customers of the Heathkit HERO was Bud Pfeifle, a 62-year-old banker from Troy, Mich. Pfeifle, who had built his own television set, stereo sound system, oscilloscope and home computer from kits, assembled the home robot in eight days. He is programming his HERO to announce when dinner is ready. Roaming from room to room, it will use sonar sensors to locate Pfeifle and his son and its voice synthesizer to summon them to the table.

Despite the flurry of commercial activity, many experts remain skeptical about the near-term prospects for personal robots. Bertram Raphael, a Hewlitt-Packard engineer who in the 1960s helped build Shakey, the first artificially intelligent mobile robot, for the Stanford Research Institute, says that robots can be as exasperating and recalcitrant as small children. "When we said, 'Shakey, move forward three feet,' " he recalls, "the only thing we could be absolutely sure of was that he would not move exactly three feet." Adds M.I.T. Computer Expert Marvin Minsky: "It's easy to program robots to do isolated tasks, but very difficult to write a balanced program that can switch from one function to another."

Until sophisticated programming is developed, robots like BOB and HERO will probably be bought as surrogate household pets. "These robots will be perceived as companions, like dogs or cats," says the trend-watching Helmers. Still, the image of the apron-clad, broom-toting automaton is by now well established in myth, movies and popular literature. As Bushnell optimistically puts it: "Can anyone really envision the year 2000 without robots running around the home?"--By Philip Faflick. Reported by Robert T. Grieves/New York and Dick Thompson/San Francisco

With reporting by Robert T. Grieves, Dick Thompson This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.