I am starting to feel that one of the business niches for my company is to venture into the crosshairs of how Robots can automate geospatial information collection to be displayed in a GIS. Geospatial information collection seems to be custom-made for robotic applications.
I attended the Air Force's GeoBase Compass Conference in June and Ben Yetman from Penobscot Bay Media was sharing out booth with us. Ben had a GIS enabled Robot called SARA (Spatially Aware Robotic Assistant) with him and he was demonstrating the interior mapping capability of SARA . He could map the inside of the Exhibit Hall and produce a 3D map of the room in about 20 minutes. It was pretty incredible! I noticed that earlier this month Ben wrote an article for Directions Magazine called "GIS and Robotics: Robotic Platforms as Tools for Spatial Data Collection and Consumption". It is a good article and is located here. Link. He even mentions my good friend Terry Martin of ESRI as a "visionary geospatial icon". I know that had to make Terry feel good! Since that time I have noticed a couple of more articles being written that both comment on Ben's article and continue to convince me that we need to be headed into the GIS Robot field. I believe that Robots can collect information more cheaply and accurately than humans. The field will probably go the way of the automotive industry as data collection is much cheaper and, even more importantly, much more accurately collected by robots.. Might as well climb on board at the beginning.
Here is another article in the Emerging Technology Trends Blog called "Don’t be a robot, use one!". Link. It seems to be a wide open field and I intend to be on the bow wave of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment