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Products like the Cell processor will provide the exponential processing growth needed to bring robots to a mass market, said Colin Angle, chief executive officer of iRobot. The Cell processor was developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, and will hit the commercial marketplace in Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console. IRobot makes products like Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner, and PackBot, a military robot that disables booby-traps and land mines.
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Another way to spark growth in robotics design may be open-source development. IRobot shares the interface for its Roomba and PackBot robots, allowing partner companies or university researchers to modify them.
That approach has already born fruit, when researchers at Boston University won a U.S. Department of Defense grant to design a sniper detection system to mount on the PackBot. The result is called REDOWL, the robot enhanced detection outpost with lasers.
"Building robots is very hard, and if every university robotics department had to create their own robot to begin research, the industry would never move forward," Angle said.
Commercial computer hardware the key to robots