Walking away from the crowds
Walking away from the crowds
Our theme for this issue is Climbing and Walking Robots and we include a selection of papers from the CLAWAR 2004 conference which was held last September in Madrid (refer CLAWAR highlights research progress on climbing and walking robots, pp. 112). This conference also hosted the presentation of the second “Industrial Robot Innovation Award” (see News).
This year the award went to the RobTank Inspec project which is a multi-partner European funded project to develop a robot that can be deployed to inspect the insides of petrochemical storage tanks while they are full.
The award is intended to “encourage and reward practical innovation in the field of robotics” and this year's winner qualifies with ease.
In the course of my duties as Editor of this journal I get to see a large number of papers on a wide variety of robotic topics. It can be frustrating to see obviously very intelligent people spending several years working on systems and problems for which solutions are already well known. This is almost, but not quite as frustrating as seeing no work at all being done in areas that offer both technological challenge and clear humanitarian benefits.
The blame for this must surely land at the feet of those in charge of directing student research who frequently (and understandably) steer their researchers to follow the same paths that they trod years before. At least then they do not run the danger of having to learn anything new.
International conferences and learned journals should take their share of the blame as well. If you want to get a paper published the easiest way is to write one in a popular area where you can quote a long string of references for similar papers – then when it gets reviewed the reviewers can see that it is a good paper because chances are their own work is referenced by it.
Oh alright – perhaps I am getting a bit cynical! But I really would like to encourage people to research new areas of technology and also, equally importantly, to work on applications for which there is some clear practical purpose.
It is better to fail trying to do something useful, than succeed at something that isn't.
The RobTank project still has a long way to go, and the project partners will be well aware of the technological and financial risks involved. I believe it will succeed, and expect that it will have to accept a number of failures and design iterations before it does, but it certainly has clearly defined and worthwhile goals.
Clive Loughlin
