Intel inside redux

Intel missed out on smartphones and tablets, but with its planned release this September of its first version of the $1,600 robot, Jimmy, Intel just may have caught the first bus leaving for the age of smart robots in peoples’ homes.

Consumer robotics now has a robot cheap enough and smart enough — and Web connected! — to be a social companion at home.

Don’t like that Jimmy’s only 18 in. tall? Want to change his skin color? Done; you can make him taller or a “robot of color” through 3D printing. Future versions will teach languages or calculus or how to hack your 3D printer? All it will take is to download an app.

“It’s like a Smartphone with legs,” said Intel futurist Brian David Johnson, who created Jimmy. “Your robot will be completely different from mine; you customize it and program the artificial intelligence, not by having a Ph.D. in robotics, but by downloading apps.”

Jimmy 1.0 — a decade in the making — is setting itself up for adaptation, evolution, and a lot of home companionship with its human owners.

There are two versions of Jimmy:

1. The upscale research edition loaded with developer goodies with a not too consumer-friendly price of $16,000
2. The stripped-down, $1,600 value version for the rest of us.

Developed in conjunction with Trossen Robotics, The two-legged Jimmy will be one in a line of robots built for do-it-yourself enthusiasts.

Here’s a video on the engineering specs for the upscale version:

The consumer robotics marketplace

With a consumer robotics marketplace closing in on $2B and dominated by the task and entertainment segments, ABI Research, is forecasting growth, “to $6.5B by 2017.”

Intel, traditionally a maker of components — Intel inside — now stands to profit from Jimmy’s inner workings as well.

“Application processors and the array of sensors used in smartphones and media tablets have achieved great economies of scale for components that consumer robotics will leverage,” said ABI.

“The market for processors, microcontrollers, sensors, and physical components including actuators, servos, and manipulators was a little over $700 million in 2012 and will grow by five times that amount by 2017,” it said. “The semiconductor portion of that is well over a third and will grow as products become more complex and capable.”

It’s a kit

According to IntoRobotics, Jimmy is a human-like robot kit with “a fully customizable body, easy to build, and designed with attention and focus on open-source hardware and software.”

“Using a 3D printer, a list of software, the manual, a collection of CAD files, and several other components, you can build at home a robot able to walk, dance, talk, move his arms, and even tweeting.”

Conspicuously absent is a pair of working hands.

“The chip maker is equipping robots with its SD card-sized Edison board, which has a low-power Quark chip,” said the IDG News Service. “The inexpensive Edison board is why Jimmy can be sold at $1,600, according to Joe Zawadsky, program manager for the 21st Century Robot Project at Intel.”

“Jimmy uses two cameras to capture and analyze pictures, which can help identify objects,” IDG said. “But it doesn’t have a functional hand, so it can’t pick up items or hand them to a human, which remains the biggest robotics challenge to resolve in developing Jimmy further.”

“The robot is open source, allowing developers to build their own apps and users to download whatever software applications they want to run on their machines,” IDG said.

This method is far more user-friendly. Instead of robotics enthusiasts wasting a lot of time coding the AI for their robots, they can just stand on the shoulders of Intel’s apps-powered 21st Century Robotics platform.

“Building robots is cheaper than ever says,” said Dmitry Grishin, Grishin Robotics. “Let’s assume you wanted to build a robot 20 years ago. You would need to invest several million dollars to build one robot, and it might take three years.”

“Smartphones have made the guts of robots less expensive and more effective than ever,” he said.

“The biggest improvements in robotics have come from companies outside the field, said Grishin. “Right now, because of smartphones, the price of components [useful for robots] is 1 percent of what it was.”

“Most of the components in smartphones are same ones you need in robots’ sensors, cameras, batteries, processors,” he said. “The biggest difference between now and 20 years ago is that the components have become cheap.”

Looks like Jimmy has a lot of thanks to spread around to the smartphone set, without whose help he might never have been.