This is an article I wrote for an Northamerican journal after I returned from South Korea:
Robot World 2009
The South Korean Robotics exhibition
In 2003 South
Korea, a country located between China and Japan, identified the intelligent
robot industry as one of its new growth industries. Since then the efforts of
this country has made possible to include Korea in the list of the ten most
advanced countries in the area of intelligent robotics. In fact, the objective
of this country is to be the most important developer of intelligent robots in
the world by next decade.
The exhibition
This year
we attended the fourth edition of Robot World, one of the most important
robotics exhibition events in Asia, where more than 100.000 visitors came to
the city of Busan at South Korea to see the most advanced developments of this
country. More than 60 companies and
research organizations participated in this event, than combined an expo area,
a robot competition and a conference congress.
The
interesting thing of this exhibition was the presence of robots for very
different applications, from industrial robots, to educational robots, not
forgetting other applications like military, social, disability, civil,
entertainment or medical. Also the presence of Universities, R&D
institutions and companies gave a wide offer between the state of the art robotics
and more commercial solutions.
The robots
One of the
robots that most surprised us was the quadruped from Kitech (Korea Institute of
Industrial Technology), that seemed to be a version of the BigDog from Boston Dynamics.
This four legged robot was designed to walk on rough terrain mainly for payload
transport.
 |
| quadruped from Kitech |
Kitech also
showed their Korean singer woman robot and other wheeled robots for home
duties.
 |
| Korean singer woman |
In the same
way as the quadruped from Kitech was the development of the quadruped from the
Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics called PQ1-PIRO for research purpose
in dynamic walking. Previous researches on dynamic walking of quadruped robots
have used only walking pattern called central pattern generator (CPG). In this
research, different from walking generation with only CPG, a instinctive
stability measure called landing accordance ratio, is used for increasing
dynamic stability. In addition, dynamic balance control and control to adjust
walking trajectory for increasing dynamic stability measure is also used in
this robot.
 |
| PQ1-PIRO |
The Pohang
institute also showed their research in underwater autonomous cleaning robots
(Piro-U2), capable of working at 10m depth and able to clean 100 tons of dust
per hour. This 300 kg robot use underwater cameras for the autonomous
navigation.
 |
| Piro-U2 |
Another
development of the Pohang Institute was Popo, a wheeled humanoid with a cat
like face for museums, and other public events where the robot could be a point
of information for the visitors. With its interactive screen, the visitors
could see where they are, what to visit and get more information of any
activities in the venue.
 |
| Popo |
The Center
for Cognitive Robotics Research (an area of KIST, Korea Institute of Science
and Technology) showed their humanoid Mahru III, a walking robot that is an
evolution of other previous versions. Every hour there was a demonstration of
the robot walking and interacting with people.
 |
| Mahru III |
Also we saw
demonstrations of the Mahru-M, that is a wheeled version able to prepare the
breakfast for its human pals. Very interesting when we wake up lazy on a Sunday
morning.
 |
| humanoid Mahru-M from KIST |
KETI (Korea
Electronics Technology Institute) showed several of their developments, like
the humanoid Kebox still in development, the service robot Kebo, or a
wheelchair able of climbing stairs.
 |
| Kebox from Keti |
 |
| Kebo from Keti |
 |
| wheelchair from Keti |
Other
interesting wheelchair was the one from Ntrex company, that used
omnidirectional wheels. This kind of wheels allowed the driver to move in any
direction by the use of a unique joystick.
 |
| wheelchair from Ntrex |
Robotech
company showed their small Life Care robot Hali and the human sized PGR-4, an
information service robot that we found also in a museum at South Korea. The
main difference we found in this robot was the possibility of using two
screens: One at the chest and another optional one over the head. This last was
more or less in front of the eyes of the human user. This 95kg robot uses a PC
Core 2 Duo platform with windows XP. Like the roomba cleaning robots, this
robot could find its charge unit and take a breath of electricity when
batteries become exhausted.
 |
| PGR-4 and Hali from Robotech |
We found
many other information service and telepresence robots offered by other Korean
companies in this event. This shows an increasing interest in this area.
In a
professional service area we found some interesting fire fighting remotely
controlled vehicles. Hyundai Rotem company showed a couple of quite large fire
fighting platforms prepared for fires where firemen have difficult access. As well DRBFatec showed some medium size
robots for the same purpose.
 |
| Hyundai Rotem |
 |
| DRBFatec |
Additionally
they were companies developing the more common robots seen everywere, like
educational and entertainment robots, floor cleaning robots, and parts, like
motors, sensors and all this stuff.
In summary
they were more than 60 Korean companies and other research institutions showing
their last researches and products. A window to the state of the art in that
country.
The contest
We also attended
the IRC 2009, the international robot contest organized by Kitech as part of
the same event.
It was a
four days contest where 3.000 teams with 6.000 participants demonstrated their
abilities in the eight competitions:
·
Grand
Challenge (Performing missions),
·
Robotpiad
(cleaning robot competition),
·
Humanoid
(Fighting, Dance, Survival, Basketball, Skill Performance, Curling, Obstacle,
Relay),
·
Intelligent
SoC Robot War (SoC Tank Robot: A game in which tank robots attack enemies
through an image recognition system with laser cannons, SoC Taekwon Robot:
Two-legged humanoids attack each other using Taekwondo moves through an image
recognition system),
·
FIRA
challenge Cup (Football game of robots made in same form),
·
Robot
festival (Line-tracer and other competitions for collegian),
·
Robot
Olympiad and
·
Busan
Robot Contest (Exhibiting and evaluating family-made robots)
It was
really incredible to see the amount of small children participating in this
kind of contests with very advanced robots. This is due to the education at
schools in Korea, where they learn robotics as part of their ordinary
education.
Conclusions
South
Korea, a country that used to be far away from the technology is becoming one
of the most advanced countries as technology producer, mainly in the area of
robotics. This country is betting for the technology as a top priority driver
for their future. They take care of the education, the research institutions,
the technology transfer between universities and companies and the relationship
between companies. Korea is preparing a very fast growth in this area that will
undoubtedly surprise us sooner than we expect. Stay tuned.
Alejandro
Alonso-Puig
Quark Robotics
www.quarkrobotics.com
