RoboNexus attracts more than 10,000 attendees
RoboNexus attracts more than 10,000 attendees
Keywords: Robotics, Conferences
More than 10,000 people attended the inaugural RoboNexus (www.robonexus.com), an international consumer, educational, and business development event for personal, service and mobile robotics, held in Santa Clara, California on 21-23 October 2004.
A wide variety of attendee types were attracted by the conference's business-to-business and consumer components – investment and business development professionals, educators and academics, professional and hobbyist robot developers, representatives of Global 200 organizations, and robotics enthusiasts and consumers, as well as the international media.
According to Dan Kara, conference chairman and president of Robotics Trends,one of the two companies who produced RoboNexus, “The success of the inaugural RoboNexus event is just one more indication that we are witnessing the birth of a completely new technology sector – intelligent, mobile robotics”.
Mobile service robots as a commercial business were the underlying theme of most of the program sessions. Keynote speaker, Helen Greiner, Co-founder and Chairman of the Board of iRobot, the first and possibly only company that has been successful in bringing their research robots to the commercial marketplace,announced at RoboNexus that iRobot had just sold over 1 million of their Roomba robotic floor vacs to date.
Neena Buck, VP of the Emerging Frontiers Practice for Strategy Analytics,presented a 20-page report entitled, “Mobile Service Robots: Entering the Commercial World” in which she stated “the arrival of consumer-based robotic applications in the marketplace signals the dawn of an era that will provide a host of new opportunities for manufacturers to develop many navigation-based mobile robot applications ... Eventually, we will see the emergence of multi-robot systems acting in concert to solve specific problems and to meet multiple goals.”
According to several independent research studies, the emerging personal,service and mobile robotics markets are expected to double that of the industrial robotics market by 2010, and almost 4X its size by 2025, when the personal and service robot industry is expected to exceed more than $50B. Home robots are predicted to comprise more than 60 per cent of that market share.
In addition to the 30 speakers which included industry leaders such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, and Dean Kamen, RoboNexus also featured over 50,000 ft2of robotics products, technologies, competitions and robots from the leading research labs in the world. Kawada Industries debuted for the first time in the United States, its humanoid robot HRP-2. The 5-ft, 127-pound biped bot wowed spectators with its ability to lower itself to the ground, lie down, and then stand back up. It even squatted to brace itself from an unexpected fall backwards. HRP-2, with its 30 motors and two 1.2 GHz Linux PCs, is capable of lifting up to 20 pounds, Kawada Industries leases the robot on a five- year contract to researchers for $700,000.
Attendees were also able to witness the premiere Tetsujin Bionic Weight Lifting Competition. At the Tetsujin, the Japanese word for “iron man”,teams built powered exoskeletons to augment the strength of one human in a weight lifting competition.
