Next Year's Debut Expected to Bring Access to All Households Information-Communication Minister Chin Dae-je, right, tests out network-enabled robots at the ministry headquarters in downtown Seoul. /Korea Times Koreans will be able to purchase feature- rich robots at reasonable prices -- between $1,000 and $2,000 --beginning late next year. The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) Wednesday announced it plans to market three types of network-based robots next October at prices they say won't scare off customers. "The robots can be that cheap because most of their software and programs are not incorporated into the machines," Information-Communication Minister Chin Dae-je said. "Instead, they come from outside -- the super computers that will provide software and programs to network robots through a high-speed Internet pipeline," he added. The wheeled robots will offer such various applications as cleaning rooms, healthcare programs, Internet connections, home monitoring or reading books while kids are sleeping. The always-on mechanical servants, some of which have the ability to re-charge electricity automatically, can also order Chinese food and pizza by connecting to the local information network. The robots will be operated under the mobile Internet connection. Subscribers of the fixed-line highspeed Internet services can sign up for the wireless Web offerings for 10,000 won a month after installing an access point, which will cost 10,000 won. Chin said the price of network robots would further go down, as companies crank out robots en masse in the not-so-distant future, even below the $1,000 price tag. "On the back of the network robots, we are jockeying to become one of the world's top three robot producers by 2010. In 2020, every Korean household will have a robot," Chin said. Chin expected that up to 3 million network robots will be sold through 2011 in Korea alone, creating added values worth 1.47 trillion won. The minister also projected the newconcept robots will evolve into a mainstream model in the global robot market, of which size will be as big as $300 billion a year in around 2015. Robot Inside Korea has focused on the networked robots over the past several years under a ubiquitous robotic companion (URC) project to catch up with the global powerhouses. As a latecomer in the worldwide competition to develop robots, the country adopted a unique strategy of building network- enabled machines instead of pouring funds and energy into an all-in-one approach. Smart robots need three basic capabilities _ sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single machine, causing its price to soar. By contrast, Korea underwent a paradigm shift on the back of the country's state-of-the-art Internet infrastructure by outsourcing sensing and processing functions through connecting to the Web. Korea boasts of the world's highest percapita Internet penetration rate, with more than 12 million of the nation's total 15.5 million homes being hooked-up to the broadband Internet. "Like downloading a variety of software to personal computers via the broadband pipeline, most sensing and processing programs will be downloaded to URC robots," said Oh Sang-rok, MIC project manager who is in charge of the URC scheme. In a sense, the URC robots are similar to home networking. But the model retains the outstanding advantage of mobility, a feature that home networking lacks. "In a nutshell, the mobile robot provides a hardware platform for sophisticated functions provided through the wireless Internet," Oh said. The MIC already took the wraps off prototype URC models earlier this year and are now carrying out feasibility tests by deploying five kinds of products to 64 households and two post offices in Seoul and the surrounding Kyonggi Province.