Military Will Make Robotics Industry a Giant, if Robot Makers Can Keep Up

The U.S. military has been one of the most enthusiastic and lucrative supporters of the robotics industry for decades and will continue to be so, according to Joseph Dyer, a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and current president of iRobot Corp.’s government and industrial robots division. But if the robotics industry is going to keep up with the military’s demands, it has to mature a little—improving its designs to reduce overall cost, beefing up its lifecycle support, and expanding both manufacturing and maintenance networks. Speaking at the RoboBusiness Expo 2009 conference in Boston, today, Dyer said the robotics industry is tremendously successful with companies that are willing to experiment on new forms of automation and new—sometimes unsuccessful—ways of doing things in an effort to find an… View this post