That police officer is ... a robot?

Police in suburban Minneapolis recently received a call about a suicidal man who had fired a
handgun inside his residence. Plymouth police officers surrounded the house, but "weren't sure if he
was alive, dead, sleeping, passed out or waiting to ambush us," recalled Sgt. Chris Kuklok, SWAT
team leader.

Rather than face the potentially fatal consequences of sending SWAT officers bursting through the
front door, they deployed their game changer: the Throwbot XT, a 1-pound, 8.2-inch-long robot.
After chucking it through the garage service door, police were able to see everything within 100 feet.
The officers steered the machine remotely through the rooms and hallways. After a little while, the
SWAT team could stand down: The monitor that connects to the Throwbot via its antennae showed
the man was dead.


It was another job well done by the Throwbot, and by passing along surveillance intelligence that
before its existence would have required an intricately planned SWAT operation, the $14,000
machine not only spared lives, it saved taxpayers thousands of dollars in manpower and clean-up
costs.

"It costs a lot of money to have tactical teams deployed for hours," said Kuklok, who has been using
the Throwbot almost since its inception in 2007. "We probably would have done more property
damagebroken windows, door breaching; opening a door and tossing a robot in saves time and
money."

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Resembling a tiny black dumbbell with a narrow tail, the Throwbot doesn't induce the fear evoked
by its Hollywood cousin, the Terminator. But like the menacing machines that science fiction has
long predicted will take over the planet, the Throwbot grows smarter over time, gaining a little more
autonomy with each iteration.

It also makes a good amount of money for its manufacturer, ReconRobotics, a $22 million, 50-
employee firm based in Edina, Minn. ReconRoboticswhich has sold more than 4,000 of its quiet,
rugged spybots to SWAT teams, the military and special ops groups around the globehas tapped a
roughly $2.5 billion niche in one of the world's most lucrative industries: robotics.

Since the first industrial robot was installed at a Trenton, N.J., GM GM plant in 1961, scores of bots
power the manufacturing world, performing work that's too dangerous, mundane or exacting for
humans. These machines glide through the labyrinthine warehouses of Staples SPLS and
Amazon.com AMZN and tower over assembly lines, many working within cages to minimize the
maiming of their human counterparts.

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According to the International Federation of Robotics, 2012 was a banner year for sales. About
160,000 units were sold for $12 billion, the second highest number ever recorded. "All expectations
are that the industrial robots market will continue to expand at around 9 percent to 14 percent per
year for the rest of this decade," said Frank Tobe, owner and publisher of The Robot Report, which
tracks the industry.

Targeting big buyersnamely automakers, but any sector demanding automationdozens of
startups in the U.S., Europe and Japan are capitalizing on new enablers like open source software
and the cloud to develop code and hardware to make industrial bots safer and more efficient.
Industrial Perception and Universal Robotics, young companies in Silicon Valley and Nashville, Tenn.,
are working on vision systems that will allow bots to recognize shapes in 3-D. Such an ability could
be used to help unload delivery trucks.

Indeed, in the grand vision of the entrepreneurs of the machine rise era, robots won't only enter our
home when thrown through a window or door by police. "For service robots, consumer products is
where the growth will be the greatest in numbers: robotic floor cleaners, lawnmowers, etc.," said
Tobe. They're also creeping into kids' playrooms: Romotive, a two-year old startup in San Francisco,
is targeting kindergartners with technology that turns iPhones and iPods into a kid-programmable
robot named Romo.

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"We're very motivated by the idea of building something that science fiction always promises but
hasn't yet come to fruition," said Keller Rinaudo, Romotive's co-founder and CEO. Romoessentially
a docking station with wheelscan be trained to detect its owner's face, perform a series of dance
moves and even fall in love. Getting kids excited about computer science via robotics is one
underlying motive for Romo, but priced at $150, he also has the potential to reach a big new
demographic. "Why not leverage the hardware that people already have at home and build a robot
around that platform at a cost that is totally disruptive?" said Rinaudo, who has 18 employees.

Romotive, which completed two rounds of Kickstarter funding and is buoyed by angel and venture
capital backing, is hoping to turn profitable this year. It just landed a deal with a national retailer to
start selling its botswhich cost less than $50 to makethis fall.

Romo may not exemplify the Jetsonian ideals we hold when it comes to servile botshe can't fetch
anything but songs from your iTunes librarybut billions of dollars are being spent on service robots
toiling away in places undesirable for people: war zones, space and natural disaster sites.

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Unsurprisingly, the government is a big supporter, namely through the DoD's research arm, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). "A perfect application for robots is a case
where you've got an environment where you really can't send in a person, but you need to have
some kind of stand-in," said Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. The
nonprofit group provided the simulation software for DARPA's Virtual Robotics Challenge, where
engineers are vying to build robots capable of dealing with disasters like the Fukushima nuclear
meltdown.

"The technology doesn't currently exist to address what turns out to be an infrequent but very high
impact problem," Gerkey said.

While first-responder robots in this sense haven't yet arrivediRobot IRBT, the $436 million
company best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaner, sent its Packbots to Fukushima to survey the
insides of the damaged nuclear plantother service droids that started out as DARPA-funded
research are already at work, mostly via university technology transfer programs.

Take ReconRobotics' Throwbot, whose underlying tech was first developed by engineers at the
University of Minnesota. The researchers were trying to address tactical problems that arose in the
aftermath of the Black Hawk Down incident of 1993, when members of the Somali militia shot down
two American helicopters in Mogadishu, leaving a group of soldiers stranded.

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"These soldiers, stranded in an urban area, had no way of finding anything out about their
surroundings," said Alan Bignall, ReconRobotics' founder and CEO. When Bignall, a serial
entrepreneur looking for his next gig, found the students' prototype in 2006, the funding ties with
DARPA had ceased. "I spoke with the Army who had been testing it at the time and decided it was
something we should bring to market," said Bignall. "But no one was waking up and saying 'I need to
buy a 1-pound robot today.' We had to create the market as we were growing the product."

Rather than continue testing with the Army, Bignall began speaking with SWAT commanders around
the nation and, with his crew, hand-built 30, then another 70, robots. "I wanted to get a hundred of
these into 100 different hands," he said. "I knew we didn't have a business if we didn't get the SWAT
guys to buy it."

Word spread about the two-wheeled, tube-and-tail bot that could be dropped 30 feet down or
thrown 120 feet laterally and not sustain much damage. Companies like iRobot had been selling
situational surveillance robots for years, but they were the stuff of bomb squadsheavy, complex to
operate, and designed to navigate rugged, outdoor terrain. The Throwbot fits inside tactical vests.

After the first generation sold out, ReconRobotics raised a series of angel equity so it could equip its
products with infrared capabilitySWAT customers' most urgent requestand eventually, hired a
local contract manufacturer to ramp up production.