By Ann Roosevelt
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.–Disruptive technologies can be fielded to soldiers more quickly, a top robotics official said.
Procurement of disruptive technologies can be accelerated, said Helen Greiner, CEO of CyPhy Works, a new company that focuses on research, invention and product development.
That’s an observation Greiner makes from her work with the Defense Department on robotics–she’s the co-founder of iRobot [IRBT].
There’s a “gap” between developing near-term technology and getting it into the system, she said.
It is hard to accelerate that procurement, in part because military funding runs on a two-year cycle and it could be four years by the time a product is on contract, much too long when technology is changing every 18 months or so at a very rapid rate.
“The system, with a capital S, continues to increase funding for projects that are behind…rather than accelerating projects that are ahead,” which the commercial world does, she said.
Greiner defined disruptive technology, or innovations that improve products or services the market doesn’t expect, from Wikipedia, itself disruptive to encyclopedia sales, she said speaking at the Association of the United States Army Winter Symposium here. For example, Wikipedia is free if there’s an internet connection.
Disruptive technologies “fight against what is,” she said–anything from armored tanks disrupting the horse cavalry, to night vision.
“The difficult part is not the technology; the difficult part is getting it into service,” she said.
Such technologies get adopted in very niche markets first, she said. “Then there’s a snowball effect that happens, whereby in many cases–not all–they take it all [the market].”
iRobot, founded in 1990, is an example. It began its interaction with DoD world in 1995 with a very early robot that would become the PackBot, Greiner said. It didn’t fit soldier needs then. For example, it couldn’t climb a curb, or peer under a vehicle. In 1997, the company won a study contract. In 2002, there were about five PackBots, and eventaully the small robot became the first piece of equipment the Rapid Equipping Force (REF) deployed. The REF trained soldiers who were unsure about the utility of robots.
Then came what Greiner called “the mouth of the cave epiphany.” The robot could enter caves so a soldier didn’t have to do it and risk wounding or worse.
Robots took on the risk keeping soldiers safer.
Once in the field, the possible uses of robots expanded.
“Putting the innovation of soldiers with innovation of techno-geeks is a really powerful combination,” Greiner said.
For iRobot, that translates into more than 3,000 Packbots in the field, and a number of competitors in the field. The company also has sold some five million Roomba vacuum cleaners in the commercial world.
Unmanned aerial systems like Predator are a technology that is disruptive to pilots and the infrastructure, so the systems needed a new customer base, she said. The intelligence community jumped in. It focused on the information that UAVs could provide, not the platform.
Small UAVs at company levels brought technology to those who never had it before and became a new customer base.
In this way, disruptive technologies frequently come from new entrants to the market–who heard of iRobot, AAI Corp. [TXT], or General Atomics before their products became bywords in the past decade, she said. iRobot’ produces PackBot, AAI Corp. produces Shadow UAV, and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems produces UAVs from Raven to Predator.
Greiner is working on government-industrial partnerships that can address some of the issues. “Industry teaming can move the ball forward,” she said.
Greiner works with several associations including the National Defense Industrial Association and the Association For Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
As the first elected president of the Robotics Technology Consortium, Greiner is trying to help the gap to get innovative research into the field, encouraging teaming allowing the government to work directly with robotics companies that have not done significant business with DoD.
The consortium won a $175 million Other Transactions Contract that will go to small research programs by competitive bids to get contracting cycle down.
It has taken 12 to 18 months to get a small research contract, even though technology moves faster than that. The consortium can get out a contract in just over 100 days, she said.
The consortium now has 190 members, all robotics companies or those interested in them, to include large defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing [BA].
In December, CyPhy Works was one of 20 companies to win a National Institute of Standards and Technology Innovation program award to develop technologies to help civil infrastructure inspection. CyPhy Works, with the Georgia Institute of Technology Research Corporation, is attempting to develop a novel and potentially revolutionary inspection system based on small, unmanned, hovering robots fitted with video cameras and other sensors.