Robin the Robot Walks In Where Men Can’t Tread
It has six spindly legs and a long, jointed arm, and its new owners call it Robin, short for Robot Insect.
But at Odetics Inc., a small Anaheim firm positioning itself to become the IBM of the intelligent robotics industry, they call it a major breakthrough and a beginning.
Robin is a prototype of a mobile robot for use in nuclear power plants. It is unique because it combines a walking robot--the first model was unveiled by Odetics in 1983 and now is on display in the Smithsonian Institution--with a “work package,” or a working arm with a set of tools.
The combination enables the robot to go to a particular site to perform a few specific tasks, in contrast with the typical industrial robot, which is fixed in place--meaning the work has to be brought to it.
And even as Odetics prepares to deliver the prototype to its new owner, the company is working under contract with another customer to deliver, in two years’ time, a commercial version--able to perform multiple tasks and withstand high levels of radiation.
And the company is working on a variety of other robotics projects, including wheeled and tracked mobile models, for use in military and space exploration applications. Also being developed in Odetics’ lab, said Thomas Bartholet, general manager of the company’s newly formed Advanced Intelligent Machines division, is a robot with two arm-and-hand units that would work in coordination with one another, much like a human’s.
The robot unveiled for the media Tuesday morning at Odetics’ headquarters was developed at a cost of about $1.5 million over the last 18 months for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Laboratory nuclear facility in South Carolina.
It is Odetics’ third prototype of a walking robot--or robotic test vehicle, as the company’s linguistically precise engineers have uncolorfully dubbed it.
Savannah River will get Robin in about two weeks, according to Bartholet.
Personnel at the Department of Energy-funded nuclear power research laboratory then will begin to put the robot through its paces, developing specific uses for the 700-pound, matte black machine.
While the Savannah River people are testing their robot, Odetics engineers will be working to fulfill the company’s contract with the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. EPRI expects a working, commercial version of the robot in June of 1988, Bartholet said.
Odetics for years has dominated the highly specialized market for tape recorders used in space exploration and high-quality tape recording heads and timing devices, used mainly by government space and military agencies.
Commitment Made
But the 16-year-old company made a commitment to robotics in 1980, Chairman Joel Slutzky said, and is shoving an ever-increasing proportion of its manpower and resources into the development of intelligent machines.
To date, he said, Odetics receives very little income from robotics, but the company has more than 20 development contracts with customers in the commercial, military, space and energy sectors.
In the past, a company spokesman said, Odetics’ plan was “to dominate a small-niche market. Now we plan to be the dominant force in a large-niche market.” In the first six months of its fiscal 1986, Odetics has booked more than $3.3 million in robotics-related contracts, more than double the total for the previous two years.
And while the product isn’t as exciting as Robin, Odetics even has a robotics product on the market--a four-armed, desk-top unit that automatically feeds videocassettes of commercials into video players at television stations, relieving the station of the need to have an employee start the commercials at their scheduled times.
The first unit was developed in conjunction with RCA and, Slutzky said, Odetics has sold three of them since introducing the machine last month. “The fourth unit,” he said, “will put us over the $1-millionmark in robotics sales revenue.”
Sale Price: $1 Million
When the commercial model of Odetics’ nuclear maintenance robot is ready in 1988, Bartholet said, each sale will represent about $1 million in revenue for the company.
If that sounds like a lot of money for a machine that still needs a human operator, consider, said Bartholet, that the robot will be able to enter radioactive areas to perform tasks that currently require the complete shutdown of a reactor--at an average cost in lost revenue of $500,000 a day.
And while the robot is not designed specifically as a tool for use in squelching major nuclear power plant emergencies, it can be sent where humans cannot go and could be pressed into duty, Bartholet said.
Still, he said, it would not have been much help at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union because of the high temperatures in the damaged reactor. As such robots are used more and more, he said, new and more sophisticated applications will be found for them.
One of the major chores still facing Odetics and others in the robotics field, said Kevin Daly, Odetics’ space systems director, is development of visual recognition systems--methods of making robots “see” and recognize and respond to what they are seeing.
Laser Project Has Priority
One of Odetics’ priority projects, he said, is a laser range-finder system that will send digital information to the on-board computer in a mobile robot, enabling it to form a picture of its surroundings. That way, the robot can “see” a pile of rubble and walk around it because instructions in its memory will tell it that something of those dimensions is too high to walk over.
The robot that Odetics is developing for the nuclear power industry sees by way of its human operator, who sits at a console to direct the machine’s travels and activities.
In Tuesday’s demonstration, the robot walked on its rubber-tipped legs across a large room, made a 90-degree turn and was positioned in front of a table that held a 20-pound dumbbell and a mock-up of a large valve of the type found in power plants.
The operator used a joy stick to direct the robot’s travel, which he monitored on a set of television screens fed by two small robot-mounted cameras, connected to the console by a 275-foot cable.
Two additional joy sticks controlled the robot’s telescoping arm and the pincer-like “hand” that enabled the robot to pick up the dumbbell and open the valve by twisting its wheel-shaped handle.
500-Pound Maximum Load
Among its other vital statistics: the robot can carry a maximum load of 500 pounds, lift 300 pounds using one its six legs as a hoist or 50 pounds with its arm; it can rotate while walking; it can climb stairs and walk on irregular surfaces while remaining perfectly upright; it can reach objects a foot below surface grade, nearly six feet in front of its body or almost 14 feet above the ground; it can stretch itself to 9 feet, 4 inches, shrink to 5 feet, 10 inches, and squeeze through a 24-inch doorway.
Although the prototype being shipped to Savannah River Laboratory has exposed electrical connections and gears, Bartholet said the model being developed for the Electric Power Research Institute will be “radiation hardened,” with all sensitive parts enclosed in aluminum sheathing so that the robot can be washed down when it emerges from a radioactive environment.
“The production version can withstand . . . 1 million rads, while a person can only take a couple of rads (a measure of radiation exposure). It simply won’t care about radiation,” Bartholet said. Radioactivity does degrade electrical systems, but Bartholet said the production robots being planned by Odetics should have a useful life of about 10 years.
