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Hobby Robotics, is it dead?
Submitted by mohawk software on Sat, 2010-09-18 12:06
25 years ago, robotics was all the rage. Everyone in "high tech" was into robotics. MIT had the "Micromouse" contest where you needed to create a small robot that would race other robots through a maze.
These days, almost no one is doing robotics. Where are our R2D2s? Roomba? HA! We need to get the hackers back to robotics. We need people doing wacky things at home.
Robotic dog walker? Lawn mower? Security Guard? Tour Guide?
hobby robotics dead?
Not to be contrarian, but ... well, I have been feeling just the opposite... maybe it's just my perspective. In the late 80's, early 90's, I spent a lot of time dreaming about and thinking about and reading about robotics. It cost a lot, sensors and computing was really primitive, there weren't a lot of stores.
I've now built robots and it's gotten much easier. I'm now affiliated with one robotics club and keep in touch with another here in town, we have micro-controllers with the speed and power of computers from 20 years ago, the variety of sensors has increased as has their capabilities while prices have fallen through the floor.
There's lots of hacking going on, opening exciting new options. Quadrotors have been a fad for the last couple years and are growing in capability. Recently the Kinetic was hacked opening one door to 3d. There's a similar, smaller bounty on the VX11 LIDAR. Robotic vision has been within reach for a few years now with the CMUcams and others. OpenCV and ROS have made standard powerful platforms available. The list goes on. It's an exciting time to be in robotics!
Competitions galore, too. Micromouse has gone wild in Japan. Robomagellan contests abound. There's the Trinity firefighting competition. Robogames with its plethora of contests. Of course there's sumo, line following, ...
You have FIRST robotics competitions with thousands of elementary through high school kids getting in on robotics. VEX competitions. BEST robotics. There's no better time to be in robotics than today!
Michael
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