Who are the top 20 academic roboticists?

2012/06/14 by 1 Comment

In trying to compare the clusters, one of the most important and difficult to measure factors is the quality of the academic pipeline in each of the three clusters.  I thought about looking at patent filings, but that seems too hard and not truly indicative enough of what we are trying to measure.

A single lab, without a single patent could potentially blow the doors off company formation and economic impact in robotics.  I’d like to propose a different measure, the top 20 (or some other number) roboticists in academia… then lets see where they are and where their knowledge is creating value.  On the Pareto principle, we expect most of the useful output to be from the top researchers.  Also, I’d like to call attention to the fact that I don’t have criteria for what makes a researcher “top.”  I promise it is less trying to curry influence than the RB50, but I fully admit to not having the full insight especially into Boston, Japan, and Switzerland.

So here’s the start of my list in no particular order with blatant bias towards CMU:

Sebastian Thrun; Stanford; http://robots.stanford.edu/ Corporate Work and Spinouts: Google Car, Google Glass, Udacity

Red Whittaker; CMU; http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=339 Spinouts: Red Zone Robotics, Astrobotics

Rodney Brooks; MIT; http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/index.html Spinouts: iRobot, Heartland Robotics

Henrik Christensen; Georgia Tech; http://www.hichristensen.net/ Non-spinout: National Robotics Initiative

Homayoon Kazerooni;  UC Berkeley; http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/kazerooni/ Spinouts: Ekso Bionics (Formerly Berkeley Bionics)

Rich Mahoney; SRI; http://www.sri.com/news/expertsources/mahoney.html License Arrangements: Intuitive Surgical, others

Sanjiv Singh; CMU; http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=290; Spinouts: Sensible Machines

Hagen Schempf; CMU; http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=267; Spinouts: Automatika (Acquired by QinetiQ-North America)

Howie Choset; CMU; http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=47; Spinouts: Medorobotics

Behrokh Khoshnevis; USC; http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/; Spinouts: Contour Crafting

Filed under Clusters Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Robotics Coverage is Fluff

2012/06/07 by Leave a comment

So I just discovered this military and aerospace electronics report that gives what is actually a pretty good run down on the recent contracts signed in the UUV space by the Navy in the last year.

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2012/06/uuv-video.html

Unfortunately, it appears to be written entirely from the press releases that the Navy puts out.  It fails to mention that most Navy unmanned maritime programs are struggling and the ONR research efforts on long endurance UUVs actually represent a Navy retreat from acquisition UUV programs like the cancelled BPAUV and LMRS.

I’ve got a forthcoming article that I hope to publish in Proceedings with a professor at CMU the talks about how the Navy could re-energize its unmanned systems programs.  The real problem is that the Navy is spending its research money on stuff that I’m willing to bet it won’t actually want.

Not that defense coverage is alone in being fluff.  I mean… really?  “Rather than get locked into a single niche where we’d actually have to build a business–you know like find paying customers and stuff–we’ll just put out fluff press releases.”  Who are these guys?

Filed under Commentary, Policy, Public Companies Tagged with , , , , ,

Needless Deaths

2012/06/06 by 1 Comment

Fire season has just begun this year and already there have been two needless deaths that can be attributed to the FAA and Forest Service’s failure to embrace unmanned and robotic technology.  There is absolutely nothing about the fire reconnaissance mission or the tanker mission that cannot be done better, cheaper, and more safely by an unmanned aircraft.  These men did not need to be in that plane.

The crazy thing about it is that the Forest Service/BLM incident commanders are some of the few people in North America that can actually tell the FAA to go pound sand.  They get to put up a TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) over their fire and they control all air traffic in the TFR.  Wildfire response crews do not do any night operations because it is considered too dangerous for them to fly at night.  Still, the powers that be have not allowed unmanned aircraft to play a substantial role in firefighting despite successful demonstrations in 2008.

My most sincere condolences to the families of these men.   They are exactly the kind of people that we need more of in society–people that will take risks to protect us all.  We–as a country and a society–are literally killing these people with our failure to embrace unmanned and robotic technologies.  I don’t want to be unsympathetic to the difficulties of change in government organizations and the good work that I’m sure the employees at Forest Service and BLM are doing, but when we’re making widows and orphans with our crappy policy, we all need to step up to the plate to take action to change it.

If I were the U.S. Congress I would:

1)   Call in the FAA, Forest Service, and BLM and tear them all a new one for their foot dragging on unmanned aircraft.

2)  Mandate the conversion of the whole tanker and most of the fire reconnaissance fleet to unmanned aircraft within 5 years.

3)  Direct the Forest Service and BLM to provide unmanned aircraft support at night in the TFRs to incident commanders this fire season.

4)  Give the BLM and the Forest Service some money to do this.  One of the main problems with wildfire firefighting is that there is a negligible advance procurement budget, but a nearly unlimited budget for reimbursement of labor to fight fires.  This is not a good deal for the country, spend a little bit in advance and lets save lives and money next fire season and every season thereafter.

Filed under Aircraft, Economics, Policy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Better Coverage for Robotic Stocks

2012/06/05 by Leave a comment

Unfortunately we’re still not a big enough industry that we get good news and analyst coverage on important events.  For instance, Hansen Medical (NASDAQ:HNSN) announced FDA approval of their new surgical device yesterday.  Expected perhaps, but still uncertainty reducing good news for the company, the stock should go up.  It does for a few minutes, then the market goes back to hammering them.   For a company of alumni from Intuitive Surgical, what gives?

I understand they are not growing, but it seems like they have the breathing room to perfect their product and growth does not occur linearly in these kinds of companies.  I’d love to see some good information on what the company should be valued at conditional on success and what the current market discount implies about the probability of success.

Check it out on Google finance:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1338964260514&chddm=1955&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:HNSN&ntsp=0

Q1 2012 Conference Call Transcript:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/553711-hansen-medical-s-ceos-discuss-1q-2012-financial-results-earnings-call-transcript

Filed under Economics, Finance, Public Companies Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

USA #1 & #2

2012/06/05 by Leave a comment

For all the wrangling about the future of U.S. spaceflight, the New York Times had an article to remind us today that the U.S. not only has the largest spaceflight program in the world (NASA), but also the second largest space flight program in the world (DoD).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/science/space/repurposed-telescope-may-explore-secrets-of-dark-energy.html

I think the real consternation comes from the fact that all spaceflight that has a compelling rationale is unmanned.  This rise of the robots in the budget somehow has people confused about what our space programs are capable of.

Filed under Commentary, Economics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Robotics Implementation Manifesto

2012/06/03 by Leave a comment

My prior article in Unmanned Systems, kindly hosted by Deloitte, lays out some of my formative experiences with robotics that give rise to my thoughts about implementation of robotic systems.  I am firmly convinced that we as a robotics community are perpetually tempted to make the same mistakes.  I’d like to propose a draft of an Agile Manifesto style creed for implementing robotics.

My commitment is to help bring about a better world enabled by robotic technology.  From experience using robotic systems, these principles have shown their value.

Redesigning processes and organizations over using the latest technology

Early fielding over continued analysis

Managing risk as a part of operations over engineering out risk

Changing the world and making money  over elegant design

Giving the end customer exactly what they want over maximizing autonomy


Filed under System Development Tagged with , , , , , ,

VC Activity

2012/05/30 by Leave a comment

Travis Deyle at Hizook has some widely cited data about venture capital activity in robotics.  I’ve sorted his data to make a cluster comparison.

https://robocosmist.wordpress.com/robotics-clusters/

Observations:

  • Pittsburgh is further behind in the venture capital race than first appearances would indicate if the $25 M growth round from ABS Capital is not included in venture capital. No other deal in the data would qualify as “late stage growth capital.”
  • According to this data, the rest of the robotics world (not in Western PA, New England, or Silicon Valley) combined got $37.3M in venture capital funding– about 19% of total identified funding–or almost exactly what Boston got.
  • Silcon Valley got 49% of total identified robotics funding …and they have the best weather.  Not fair!

Filed under Clusters Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

about

2012/05/28 by Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.  I’m Robert Morris.  A former Army officer and consultant, I am currently an MBA student at Carnegie Mellon University and a nascent robotics entrepreneur.

I’m engaged in creating the future that I saw when I when I was leading a drone unit in Afghanistan.  The technological swords that makes drones are being beaten into robotic ploughshares of unimaginable promise.  These tools will give our society the security and prosperity to continue our moral progress.  Now a civilian, I am engaged in making business work as the vehicle for this positive transformation of our society.

I hope that this can be  repository for useful ideas and observations about robotics, business, and society.

-Robert

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

Newer posts →