Like something out of a sci-fi movie, Kelowna was last week inundated with robots crawling through the mountains, flying overhead and plunging to the depths of the lake.
Their collective aim, however, wasn’t as nefarious as that of their fictional counterparts. It was simply science, sans fiction.
“This is a group of industrial partners and universities working together to do all kinds of robotics,” said Gregory Dudek, director of the McGill School of Computer Science and former Director of the McGill Research Center for Intelligent Machines.
Members of NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network have gathered annually for the last three years to test their robots in the air, on land, in the water and under the water. Kelowna is the most open space they’ve met thus far, although in the next couple of years expect to hear about Canada’s best minds in the field of robotics gathering on an iceberg.
“The idea is to get all these people together once a year on a field trial also to share ideas and results,” said Dudek, noting that there were 80 to 100 people in Kelowna for the meeting, and every second one had their own project.
Part of the reason they meet is to help scientists support each other and network, but the meeting also allows researchers to show their industrial partners what they’re working on and suss out any needs that they could eventually. And, if all goes well, meetings such as the one that happened last week, will give Canadian researchers a much needed competitive edge.
“Canada is really good at field robotics —we have a lot of internationally known people,” said Dudek. “But one of my worries working in that field is that robotics is super hot right now. Google is buying robotics companies— they’re doing tons of it — and there’s Amazon, Facebook, you name it, lots of companies are getting into it. But in Canada, we’re good at inventing technology, and not that good supporting it through that phase to exploit it.”
A classic example of this national shortcoming is the Avro arrow airplane. The plane was the crown jewel of Canadian aircraft manufacturer A.V. Roe Canada, better known as Avro, then the third-largest company in Canada. The hypersonic fighter was on the cutting edge of aerospace technology at the time: it could reach a speed nearly three times the speed of sound, travelling at an altitude of 60,000 feet. Yet the plane was scrapped by the federal government just a few months later, in a decision that remains controversial to this day. “We invented the best supersonic airplane ever, but we never exploited it and lost the edge,” said Dudek.
Between inventing a cool idea not yet on the main track and competing to develop it, Canadians lose ground, largely because of a lack of funds.
The good news, however, is that in the next few years some international conferences in robotics will be held in Canada, and the men and women who were field testing in Kelowna last week will likely be there, better equipped to forward their inventions.
