Going Virtual at RoboDev 2008

I just got back from the RoboDevelopment Conference in Santa Clara.  It is clear that the “cool factor” of Robots is definitely a winning strategy in getting our kids involved in science and engineering again – based on the number of conversations I had with teachers, administrators, and students this week.  The energy around FRC, Lego, and all the other educational programs around robotics is incredible. (If you want to get involved, see my previous post).  It’s also amazing to see the number of real business opportunities in industry and the military around robotics and autonomy as well that are helping to drive the need for these future engineers.

I have to give a shout out to Jeanne DIetsch, the CEO of Mobile Robots Inc, who gave one of the keynote presentations for the conference.  In a real display of guts and faith in her company’s technology, she shared the keynote presentation with 3-4 robots that helped her present. It went off pretty well, and her company’s basic robotics platform looks quite impressive.

The other thing that was obvious is that we need to ‘go virtual” again if we are to make a bigger splash in robotics.  I am not talking about Virtual Instruments, but this time, its all about simulation.  It seems that robots are complicated and expensive to build.  Combine that with the fact that you may not know exactly what they are going to do when you send them on their way – you really need a way to write your robotics code so that it will run in a simulator first, before the hardware is actually ready.  This would be yet another example where the software is truly the instrument.  We’ve done some pretty cool integration with Solidworks to co-simulate – definitely more of that kind of work is needed.