Automaton

Check this out -- Kiva Systems' robots in action in a Staples warehouse. I've seen one of these up close before (carrying a person, actually)... it's pretty neat. The bearings used to keep the payload in the same orientation must be pretty crazy. When I saw one in action, it used little bar-code type labels to follow on the floor, but there's some net intelligence directing them because these guys are all moving in an overall organized fashion -- this article from the video producer, Fast Company, suggests that "blinking blue lights" help coordinate them somehow. At some point in the future we'll talk with the creators and see what we can find out!

Video by Fast Company

* Transformer Optimus Prime prevented a burglary in the U.K. This transformer is made of wood and stands 7 feet tall in the living room of one Michael Clarke, in Gravesend, Kent. The robot has motion sensors that activate a stereo, piercing purple eyes, and it matches the owner's couch.

* More robots from iRobot. The Roomba maker says it is mutating. The company wants to keep expanding its product line. Three years ago, it had only one domestic robot, the Roomba; by the end of this year it wants to have six domestic robots in the market. I wonder if Masseur Bot is on that list.

* Peter Crouch, the elongated (2 meters/6 feet 7 inches) British soccer player who celebrated some of his goals with an ridiculous robot dance, said the moves were because he's been "messing about" with robotics since he was a child. He also said no more robotic celebrations this season. That's a good thing.

iRobot just released their new line of Roombas today. They look awesome -- a lot more like the space-age robots I expect to have in my home. It looks from the new specs that they've added some great new features, too, like onboard scheduling and voice interaction.

Meet Zeno, a humanoid robot built by the founder of Hanson Robotics. Hanson Robotics is famous for their robotic humanoid faces -- among them Albert Einstein -- but many folks (including yours truly) find them pretty darn creepy. Despite the amazing technological achievement of detailed facial expression, Zeno is no exception to the uncanny valley.

Zeno is modeled after AstroBoy and the inventor's goal is to eventually have it on the consumer market to consumers for a few hundred bucks. Zeno has his very own blog here to keep you updated on his progress.

And to add to the creepiness, a fun fact: the inventor named his newborn son after his robot.

Photo: Engadget

Check this out: which is which? I mean, which is Zou Ren Ti, the human, and which is Zou Ren Ti, the android?

Wow, talk about uncanny valley!

The two Zou Ren Tis can be seen at the Wired NextFest in Los Angeles this weekend. Engadget took the photo above and if you want to find out which is which you can get some hints from these other photos by China's Xi'an Chaoren Sculpture Research Institute, from where the two Zou Ren Tis came, or from the video below.

My company is pretty firmly entrenched in the defense industry. In fact, many robotics companies are -- defense contracting is a good way to pay the bills while growing other areas of research and development. But while robots are really amazing things to work on in and of themselves, the technology is slowly advancing toward greater capability and autonomy -- and for those of us working defense contracts, this has some uncomfortable implications.

Bluefin's AUVs aren't weapons (when people I ask, I remind them that there is already a word for an autonomous submarine that explodes -- "torpedo") and most other companies aren't actively weaponizing their robots. To date the bulk of military robotics has been oriented toward surveillance, security, and disposal of mines and IEDs -- situations where most everyone can agree that it's a good idea to keep a human out of the way.

But things are changing. Even if companies aren't putting on guns, they're at least putting on gun mounts. Early last month Wired reported on the newly weaponized ground robots. Other companies are building in weapons payload options: recently a Reaper aerial drone made history as the first Army unmanned military vehicle to kill (thank you for the correction, Kevin); its remote operators used it to locate two men suspected of placing an IED and dropped its "precision munitions" on the targets.

What do the users of these robots think? At the OceanTech Expo in early September, I attended an AUV panel; one of the panelists, Bill Schopfel, is the event manager at the Office of Naval Research. He spoke specifically to the role of robotic vehicles in underwater mine countermeasures -- he says for the forseeable future, the decision to engage and neutralize mines will not be autonomous; even if the vehicle is capable of performing neutralization measures, there will still be a person in the loop who is making the decision to engage. With respect to autonomous vehicles that operate without a human's control, a DoD proposal from last year discusses the idea that humans target humans and machines target machines -- though that proposal has not yet passed legal review.

The Army's Future Combat Systems initiative is becoming a reality, but it really demands thought and careful consideration of the ways we're deciding to employ technology -- though our military needs demand immediate technological solutions. How can we make sure ethics and technology develop at the same pace?

And speaking of robots on the battlefield, Wired's Danger Room points to a Defense News story about a U.S. Army $280 million contract to buy 3000 Negotiator robots from Robotic FX. The Negotiator tactical robot [photo above] is a "45-pound bomb detector with infrared cameras used by hundreds of state, local and federal law enforcement agencies around the U.S.," Defense News reports, adding that an "initial delivery order will be for 101 Robotic FX Negotiators, marking their first use with the U.S. military on the battlefield," where they will be used to clear caves and search for explosives.

I've had it in my mind for some time that my grandparents could really benefit from a robotic companion -- someone to let them know when one of the grandkids has emailed, to remind them to take their meds (even to go get the pills for them), to keep an eye on their health and safety, and so on. And I knew Japan, among other Asian countries, has really been at the forefront of this research.

But I wasn't expecting to learn today that robots seem to be less exciting to the elderly than expected. Apparently, the Ifbot in question spent a month entertaining the residents of a nursing home before they got bored with it. What has been successful, however, are lower-tech products like the i-pot send an update to family every time someone makes tea with it, to show that Grandma or Grandpa is up and around. Really interesting reading for anyone considering the elder care market.

Thanks for the tip, Gui!

QinetiQ's Sentry unmanned surveillance craft

Sally Adee over at our neighbor blog Tech Talk discusses the recent wave of war drones:

This Week’s Theme: Unmanned

UAVs are branching out. We now have:

The Robo-Copter (via Danger Room)

The flying robo-ethernet hub

Various Robo-Peppered Moths
“Swarms of mini unmanned aircraft infiltrate ventilation systems, perch somewhere or morph into the scenery and await the opportunity to personally deliver their one-pound explosive.”

and a Robo-jet-ski!
(An unmanned maritime reconnaissance vehicle, from QinetiQ, a "UK defense contractor with poor spelling.”)

But, you may ask yourself, how will I carry all my drones around?
Why, in the UXV Combatant Warship Made for Drone Battles, of course.

And let's not forget the Reaper aerial drone.

Photo: University of Pennsylvania / NSF

Over the past three summers, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have conducted an interesting educational experiment aimed at answering one question: Can robots get high school students interested in science and engineering in college?

The answer, as you probably guessed, is yes.

The researchers, led by professor Vijay Kumar at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, organized a three-week robotics summer camp to teach the students what robots are capable of and how to build them.

The program included lectures, tours, and of course lots of hands-on activities (practice and applications first, teaching of fundamentals later -- a reverse of the traditional approach to engineering education. (Because, yes, engineering schools that tie theory and practice together have happier students.

But still, why use robots?

Paleo-Future, a wonderful blog that offers a "look into the future that never was," unearthed a 1986 article in The Futurist magazine about the future of personal robots. The future as envisioned in 1986, that is.

The Futurist article, which includes a photo of an Omnibot carrying snacks to a smiling couple [right], makes for an entertaining read, saying at one point that "future robots will be complete home-entertainment centers, able to sing and dance and tell jokes..."

Well, unfortunately a future of pervasive snack-fetching, dancing robots roaming around the house is is not quite here yet. It appears that one big obstacle has been making the darned machines autonomous, capable of doing things -- entertaining the kids, loading the dishwasher, or whatever -- all by themselves.

Maybe the way to go is using humans to control the robots? iRobot's new ConnectR "virtual visiting" robot is one example. It's a kind of mobile teleconference device to be remote controlled by that absent parent always on a business trip. Another example are Anybots humanoids, also designed to be operated remotely by a person (in this case an outsourced servant in a faraway country).

Check back in 20 years to see which personal robots made it to the living room.

PS: On a forecasting-the-future related note, Spectrum has its share of brilliant and embarrassing predictions, many of which you can see in the "Write & Wrong" article that appeared in our 40th anniversary special issue.

Thanks, SKM!

NASA today announced the recipients of their SBIR ("Small Business Innovation Research") grants, among which were quite a few robotics projects. Lots of them have to do with power sources or sensors, but one I found particularly interesting is the DC brushless motor that can withstand the harsh atmosphere of Venus. From the proposal:

Honeybee Robotics proposes development of high temperature scoop and joint; and continued development of an extreme temperature brushless DC motor and a resolver. All hardware will be demonstrated in simulated Venus surface conditions. During Phase I, a first-generation prototype BLDC motor and resolver were designed, built and tested in Venus-like conditions (460oC temperature, mostly CO2 gas environment). The Phase I tests demonstrated the feasibility of the design through verification that the motor and the resolver can operate at 460oC for an extended period of time. A further developed and optimized version of this motor and resolver could be used to actuate sample acquisition systems, robotic arms, and other devices outside of an environment-controlled landed platform on the surface of Venus.

460 deg C? For the non-metric among us, that's 860 deg F. Wow.

The rest of the robotics-related SBIR grants can be found here and here.

It always seems to surprise inventors when robot owners find themselves unusually attached to their 'bots. Here's a quick roundup of links on the subject...

Roombas fill an emotional vacuum for owners -- groan. The article talks about Roomba owners' relationships to their robots and how fond they become of them, a trend that "suggests there's a measure of public readiness to accept robots in the house" -- good news for any budding consumer roboticists out there.

PackBot on the front lines -- I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, and it is an older aticle, but I was reminded again at an event where Helen Greiner spoke earlier this week ... soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are considering their robots members of their teams, giving them names and wanting them fixed (even when obliterated by IEDs) instead of replaced.

And of course, Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050 -- this somewhat overplayed article is based on someone's PhD thesis, so take it with a grain of salt. I love the line that "the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," though as a resident of that fine state, I would like to believe that has less to do with our politics than it does with the incredibly high density of robotics companies and research institutions just in the area.

An article in PC magazine last week called "Robot Consumers, Grow Up!" explains why US consumers just aren't ready for the kinds of robots that Asia will be producing. The conclusion is that the consumer robotics market will not take off with things like Roomba or Aibo. Instead, robotic technology will be embedded into everything we use every day and the consumers will never notice that "the robots have won." I think the article is overall a little pessimistic, but here are a few interesting comparisons:

Part of the problem is the Western world's relatively short history with robots. Most people point to Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a science-fiction play that premiered in 1921, as the first use of the term and America's introduction to robots. We should take a cue from the Japanese. In the book Loving the Machine, author Timothy N. Hornyak explains that robots (or at least automatons) have been part of the Japanese culture for hundreds of years. They're seen as friends, helpers, entertainers, and companions. They've always resembled their creators.

American consumers fixate on anthropomorphism and generally find androids and even android pets grotesque. You won't find a lifelike robot receptionist in the U.S., but there are already many at work in Japan.

If iRobot had made a 4-foot-tall Roomba with a face and a hand to hold a vacuum hose, the company wouldn't have sold more than ten units. Instead, it sold more than two million Frisbee-shaped, personality-free bots.

There's also an interesting statement later in the article that "American robot consumers have yet to comprehend the cost of the programming and mechanical complexity necessary to create effective, realistic, interactive robots." So that's something to think about, especially when, as a robotics geek, I'm always so involved with how cool the thing I'm making is that I don't stop to think whether others appreciate how it came to be. And it also leads me into another article...

Network World talks today about a robot "amusement park" opening in South Korea. From the article:

"[O]fficials said they consider robotics to be one of South Korea's key growth industries, emphasizing "service robots" that can clean homes and offer up entertainment. The robotics industry has grown about 40% a year since 2003, officials said. ... The parks will feature a number of attractions that let visitors interact with robots and test new products."

So the first question is whether or not this would be successful in South Korea -- obviously, the government and a group of investors think it will be no problem. But if we step back and consider the first article about American robot consumers, would something like this ever fly in the US (or in the Western world, for that matter)?

In response to yesterday's article about Raytheon's acquisition of Sarcos, a friend sent me this video:

That, my friends, is pretty crazy.