George Bekey, a roboticist at the University of Southern California, says that the time for robots has finally arrived.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette RHex, a hexapod robot, goes through its motions while Alfred Rizzi (left) and Sarjoun Skaff watch. Rizzi is associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute Microdynamic Systems Laboratory; Skaff is a CMU graduate student working on a Ph.D. in robotics. Click photo for larger image.

Of course, as he sheepishly acknowledged Friday at a workshop on U.S. robotics in Washington, D.C., he and other proponents have been saying that for 30 years. "But now," he added, "it really has."

The United States, however, by no means is preeminent in robotics now that the technology is finally coming into its own, said Bekey, who chaired a panel that assessed robotic technologies around the world. The two-year effort was sponsored by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Though still a leader in areas such as health care robotics, the United States faces strong, and in many ways superior, competition from abroad, he added.

Summarizing the report's findings at a workshop hosted by the National Science Foundation, he noted that Japan, Korea and Europe all have mounted concerted, coordinated efforts to develop robots. While U.S. robotic research has been driven primarily by the Defense Department, Asian and European research is much more oriented to commercial products.

The main sponsors of robotic research in the United States, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA, actually have cut back on spending in recent years, he noted.

Though Bekey emphasized that the six-member panel, which included Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania, Brian Wilcox of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Yuan Zheng of Ohio State University, was not charged with making policy recommendations, he expressed some hope that the report might spur U.S. leaders to increase their support for robotics.

But Matt Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, expressed reservations about adopting the models of coordinated research such as those used in Japan and Korea. Though those programs are effective -- both countries are clearly preeminent in the development of walking, humanoid robots and robots to help care for the elderly and infirm -- their uniform approach to problems would not mesh well with U.S. culture.

"I actually value our tradition of independent thought," Mason said. "I think it would be a big mistake for us to seek the kind of unity of purpose that we see there." A diversity of ideas is one of the strength's of the U.S. research community, he argued.

Friday's workshop included a number of demonstrations by robotics groups across the country, including several involving Carnegie Mellon. They included RHex, a six-legged robot that can scamper rapidly over broken ground, and its relative, RiSE, a legged robot that can climb vertical surfaces.

Bekey said the United States continues to lead in the development of surgical robots, as well as biological robots such as DNA sequencers. And it is a leader in space robotics, with the long-running Mars Exploration Robots "a great success story."

But industrial robots, which were invented in the United States, are no longer even produced here. Bekey said Westinghouse, General Electric, Bendix and other leading producers bailed out of the industrial robot business in the 1980s.

Large companies have shied away from investing in robotic technology because of concern about short-term return on investment, while firms such as Honda and Sony have taken the long view in their development of humanoid robots, Bekey said. Likewise, U.S. startup firms that make robots are usually undercapitalized, reflecting the similar preference of venture capital firms for products that can produce profits quicker, such as software.

The Roomba vacuum cleaner made by iRobot is one of the few commercial success stories in the United States, with 2.5 million robotic vacuums sold thus far, he said.

Mason, on the other hand, argues that robotic technologies "are really a spectacular success," contending that the panel took a narrow view of the field. Speech recognition, for instance, is widely used in telephone answering systems. Motion planning and simulation technology -- necessary for robotic navigation -- is now widely used in computer animation and video games.

He contended that the World Technology Evaluation Center review headed by Bekey was an able attempt to evaluate robotic technologies, but was limited because it involved just six people.

"It's going to take a much longer time and a much broader effort to make an assessment of the true state of the technology," Mason said.