This message is an appeal to the robotics community to leave at least
for a short moment the
established paths of robotics research and development and to think the
unthinkable.
We would like to invite the robotics
community at large - researchers as well as developers and
engineers, juniors as well as seniors - to anidea
contest on affordable robots.
We cordially invite you to tell us,
what you
consider the most badly needed robot, the robot which
you would buy immediately, if you only saw it in a warehouse and if it would not cost a fortune.
What about
a robotic bookshelf de-duster for 299
EUR/USD, which removes the dust from
your bookshelves, or
a last seen radar for 199 EUR/USD,
which tracks the objects in your house and
can tell you where you left your glasses or your keys, or
a robotic fly swatter for 49 EUR/USD,
which spots the bugs hovering around
your ears at nighttime and gets them before they bite you?
Participants in this idea contest,
should sketch their ideas on a three slide presentation with the
following content and email it tocontest
'at' affordable-robots.orguntil June 15, 2009.
The first slide should be a title
slide naming the idea, the inventors, and their affiliation.
The second slide should contain a
drawing of the robot and describe in form of a bulleted list
the service and functions, which it is supposed to provide.
The third slide should describe
again in form of a bulleted list how the idea could possibly be
implemented, the technology required and how much the robot would eventually cost.
The submissions should meet the
following criteria:
They should describe an idea, which is original.
They should describe an economically meaningful service.
The proposed idea should have a realistic chance of being
implemented
A realistic price estimate of the final product should be in the
order of 1000 EUR or less.
All submissions, which meet the
above criteria, will be published on this web site after June 22, 2009.
The top 10 will be presented during a town hall meeting on "affordable robots" at
ICAR 2009
(www.icar2009.org) in Munich. At
the end of the meeting the
participants will
choose a winner,
who will be awarded a prize
of 1000 EUR.
Think the unthinkable! Erwin Prassler (erwin.prassler 'at'
h-brs.de)
Bonn-Aachen Int. Center for Information Technologies, Autonomous
Systems, 53757 Sankt Augustin, GERMANY