THE HOUSE
OF THE
FUTURE
How robotics and automation technology may one day shape the place we live By Danielle Lucey
A
The University of Florida’s Gator-Tech Smart Home appears like any other house from the outside — save a campus sign — but on the inside monitors its dwellers’ habits. Photo courtesy Sumi Helal.
robot in every home.
Much like his now-modest vision for person-
The rosy future of in-home robotics isn’t
ted a home with monitoring devices aimed
al computing, Microsoft founder Bill Gates
purely reliant on a personal fleet of Rosie
at researching inhabitant behavior, though
predicted in a 2006 Scientific American
the robots, though. Homes themselves are
they’d never know it.
article that, one day, robotics would be as
slowly gaining intelligence in their own
prolific as the technology for which he is
right and are just another example of how
known.
the aging Baby Boomer population will
Unpredictable to Gates — and everyone else — at the time was the 2008 housing slump and financial upheaval that most of the world still struggles with; however, as holds true with most robotics, it seems, an industry of little helpers-that-could keep vacuuming, laundering and cooking along. According to a 2010 International Federation of Robotics study, the latest year for statistics, service robotics is a $13.2 billion industry. For 2009, 5.6 million robots for domestic use and 3.1 million robots for entertainment or leisure were sold. IFR estimates the projected sales of all types of do-
not go quietly into assisted living facilities. Scores of universities around the world are pouring research dollars, yen and euros into in-home sensors, cameras and aware
“In our case the demographics are good because Florida is the retirement capital of the world,” says Sumi Helal, director and principal investigator of UF’s Gator-Tech Smart Home. “We have the perfect subjects to ask them to help us.”
appliances that could extend the indepen-
Aimed at monitoring the elderly and peo-
dence of aging or disabled people.
ple with certain diseases or disabilities, re-
And once these robotic-based technologies converge with at-home information technology-equipped houses, having robotics and automation in the home — or perhaps even
searchers have kept the technology largely invisible so it’s not intrusive, but they are still able to track a person’s habits and determine if there are any behavioral changes.
a part of the home — could seem as neces-
“Part of the success is to make the technol-
sary as owning a laptop, smartphone and
ogy disappear and be invisible and out of
tablet all at once.
the way,” he says. “The house was fitted with sensors and actuators and other de-
mestic robots could reach 6.7 million units
Researching the smart home
from 2010 to 2013, with entertainment
Tucked away in a retirement community
and leisure bots up 4.6 million.
eight miles off the University of Florida cam-
It has a smart floor that allows the home to
pus in Gainesville, researchers have outfit-
track the location of people inside and can
vices, basically to do some tasks, such as monitoring what the user is doing.”
Mission Critical
•
Fall 2011
9