Technology: Obama Pledges $70M for Robotics Research

The US federal government has pledged millions to science and technology research in recent years. Earlier this week it was reported that President Obama himself announced that the government would pledge $70 million to a pool of $500 million donated by universities, research institutions, and private industry to develop new robotics technologies. The President made the announcement at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University.


The project, called the National Robotics Initative, is part of a wider effort by the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership to research breakthrough technologies. The group consists of multiple government agencies, universities and colleges, corporations, and private industry groups. While the government has pledged $70 million to the initiative, other agencies have filled the pot with up to $500 million to fund the research project.

The goal of the National Robotics Initiative is to accelerate the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people. Innovative robotics research and applications emphasizing the realization of such co-robots acting in direct support of and in a symbiotic relationship with human partners is supported by multiple agencies of the federal government including the NSF, NASA, the NIH, and the USDA.


The National Robotics Initiative will leverage resources at NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other government agencies to build robots that will be useful not just in military and defense applications, but civilian ones as well. For example, the National Science Foundation said they hope to use the initiative to build “co-robots” that can work alongside humans in day-to-day activities.

Don't worry, it's peaceful.

While the $70 million the US government has pledged to the $500 million project isn’t a lot of money when compared to other defense projects, the money could make a real difference in civilian research. Time will tell whether the research institutions turn out technologies that will be adopted by the public.

The President joked in his speech at Carnegie Mellon that one of his responsibilities as Commander in Chief is to “keep an eye on robots,” and that he was “pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful.”