The Types of Service Robotics

Service robotics is define as those robotic systems that assist people in their daily lives at work, in their houses, for leisure, and as part of assistance to elderly and handicapped. In industrial robotics the task is typically to automate the tasks to achieve a homogeneous quality of production or a high speed of execution. In contrast, service robotics tasks are performed in spaces occupied by humans and typically in collaboration with people directly. Service robotics is normally divided into personal and professional services.

Personal service robots on the other hand are deployed for assistance to people in their daily lives in their hones or as assistants to them for compensation for physical or mental limitations. The by far largest personal service robots group consists of domestic vacuum cleaner, over 3 millions iRobot Roomba’s alone have been sold worldwide and the market is growing 60%+/year. A large number of robots have been deployed for leisure applications such as artificial pets (AIBO), dolls, etc. With more than 2 millions units sold over that last 5 years, the market for such leisure robots is experiencing exponential growth and is expected to remain one of the most promising in robotics.

Professional service robotics is including emergency response, agriculture, pipelines and the national infrastructure, forestry, transportation, professional cleaning, and various other disciplines. These systems typically augment people for execution tasks in the workplace. According to the AFR/VDMA World Robotics more than 38,000 professional robots are in use now and the market is growing every year.

There was general agreement among those present at the meeting that we are still 10 to 15 years away from a wide variety of solutions and applications incorporating full scale, general autonomous functionality. Some of the key technology issues that need to be addressed to reach that point are discussed. There was further agreement among those present that the technology has sufficiently progressed to enable an increasing number of limited scale and/or semi autonomous solutions that are affordable, pragmatic, and provide real value.