Robots for Nuclear Emergency "Possible" says Joseph Engelberger, Father of Robotics Industry

  A month has passed since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the northeast coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami that devastated communities and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. There were hopes among the Japanese public that robots be put into immediate use to solve the problem at the nuclear power plant. This was followed by the public's disappointment, which has shaken the robotics community in Japan on one level or another. 

  Joseph Engelberger, widely considered as the father of industrial robotics, is highly respected in Japan as a key figure in inspiring the country to implement robots into manufacuturing and enabling its industries to become productive and globally competitive.

 GetRobo was given the honor to talk to Mr. Engelberger to learn about his thoughts on what is happening in Japan right now. This article is written with great hope that his words will once again invigorate the Japanese people so that we can recover from this calamity. (The following is a transcript of a phone interview originally conducted for a robotics column on the Wall Street Journal Japan. The transcript has been shortened and edited for accuracy.) 

Q. I read that you used to develop and manufacture controls for nuclear power plants. What are your thoughts on what’s happening at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant? And how could robots be utilized in this kind of environment?

A. It’s terrible. In this kind of emergency, I think it’ll be very hard to get some kind of attention and money devoted to a robot. The fact that people having to be evacuated from radiation and that there’s going to be food shortages and water shortages  - all kinds of dramatic things are happening that people are going to have to address immediately.

Q. The general public in Japan is disappointed that robots are not being useful to improve the situation at the nuclear power plant.

A. They can’t be, because they were designed for other things. In Japan you have a terrible earthquake and then you have a very costly effort to get people in there (the nuclear power plant) and try to solve the problem. But you didn’t know what the problem was going to be. You couldn’t develop the robot exactly right because the jobs are now occurring since the earthquake.

Q. Once we know what job is needed, is it possible for people to get together and rapidly develop a robot that can perform that task?

A. I would say on the basis of Japan’s experience, it is possible. You can write a specification for that robot deciding on how to react to any one of the elements and develop a robot based upon it. I would love to be the one in charge in putting the team together. But since people think I’m too old, there would be someone else.

Q. What is a good business model for disaster relief robots? When you don’t know when the disaster is coming, there is no market to support the development.

A. I think if you build a robot that is useful in a house and just say it’s radiation insensitive, it can do your household chores in normal situations and it would be useful in a nuclear emergency. So you develop a household one and then you make a few changes in that just to make it useful in an emergency. The technology is available today. It just takes smart engineering to design it into one package that could be priced right. Of course for the nuclear emergency the pricing could be a lot higher than it is just for household robots.

So I would say that today the challenge is to make a robot that can be a household robot. I have been successful in making robots for the factories but I haven’t been successful in getting started in a true household robot which has to have a lot of functions.

Q. You’ve been a proponent for multi-functional robots for the home.  

A. In fact I wanted to start another company called RoboCare so you would have a robot in the house that would cook, clean, answer the telephone and put things away so that it knows where everything is, but we never got around to it. The technology is there but it’s not there for 50,000 dollars. It’s there for 3 million dollars of development money and I’ve been unable to raise that money largely because I’m too old.

Q. I read your book “ROBOTICS IN SERVICE (1989).” You write in this book that “robots are ready to shed that limiting adjective “industrial” and after listing various robot applications, you mention that it is “quite conceivable that one or more of the applications described will generate larger sales volume than all industrial applications.” Many people have been trying to generate this new market but so far it has not happened. What has prevented this from becoming a reality? 

A. That’s right, it hasn’t happened. One thing is that it’s hard to get the startup money. And it’s because no one has it. It’s hard to be first. I was successful. I won the Japan Prize, you know. I’ve been honored every place I go. Honors are fine but I haven’t been able to get anybody to come up with what I thought was necessary to develop the first one which was 3 million dollars.

Q. This is a chicken and egg problem. People will not invest if there is no precedent. How are we going to get out of this dilemma?

A. I was designing aerospace components for a big manufacturer in Connecticut. And then I had the idea about the robot. I used R&D money from the business I was running to develop the first one. Then when I had the first one I was able to get on television shows and go everywhere with it.

So any major company could do it without spending a lot of money. There also could be a rich individual who wants to look at this. For example Bill Gates has enough money to play this game just for fun. Or Warren Buffett.

Q. Some military robots have been sent to the afflicted area in Japan. What are your current thoughts on military use of robots?

A. You should recognize that today there’s a very murky line between robots and teleoperators. So what you can do is you build a robot physically two armed, mobile, and with vision and sound detection and then it would be useful in a nuclear emergency, as long as you also take the trouble to make it radiation insensitive.

Many times military robots are teleoperators - like surgical robots. What happens is that human beings are in the loop. It’s not a robot, it’s a teleoperated machine.

(Many thanks to Eimei Onaga, CEO of Innovation Matrix, who used to work under Mr. Engelberger at Unimation, Inc.,  for making this interview possible. Also I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Gay Engelberger for providing her father's photograph.)