Automaton

...and dirty dishes, house cleaning, and other domestic chores. That's the goal of Anybots, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Trevor Blackwell. The company has been in the news before, but the whole thing is so intriguing we dispatched Automaton correspondent Anders Frick to get more details on the technology. Here's his report:

Economists like to say that the one kind of work you can’t move offshore is personal service, but what if remote-controlled robots become practical?

Trevor Blackwell loves robots, the humanoid kind that populate old sci-fi movies, and like many other roboticists, he thinks there may be a role for them to play around the house. He differs from most, however, in the economic rationale he offers.

Blackwell sees a future in which a low-paid worker from India might remotely control a robot in your kitchen, taking on tasks that today might be assigned to a servant. Blackwell believes that this is the Next Big Thing, and that thousands of homes will be using his robots to clean, cook, and serve meals. This scheme would effectively allow rich countries to import labor -- without the laborer.

To realize that vision, Blackwell founded Anybots in Mountain View, Calif., in 2001, after his last company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo for US $45 million in 1998. Blackwell is also a partner in the startup funding firm Y Combinator, which has invested in nearly 60 different startups during the last three years.

He is currently testing both a legged robot, named Dexter, and a wheeled one, named Monty. They now perform only a few, limited tasks, such as serving coffee and operating a hammer drill. It turns out Monty’s the nimbler of the two. “Robots with wheels are both faster and more stable,” Blackwell says.

Each robot has a built-in gyroscope in the torso, position- and force-sensors in the joints and fingers, and magnetic motion sensors in the arms. Their moving parts are actuated by pneumatic plungers and valves, powered by electricity from carbon aerogel ultra capacitors that can go half an hour on a charge.

The 16 cameras carried on different parts of the robots’ bodies supply video to 10 remotely placed monitors. In the beginning, Blackwell says, engineers and technicians will use the robots to steer in particularly dangerous environments -- say, the site of a nuclear or chemical accident. Such work should get the kinks out. That way, when robots go into mass-production for the consumer market, they will be sufficiently reliable, and perhaps also toxic waste-proof, which might come in handy when dealing with some people's dirty socks.

On July 26th, the MIT Museum here in Cambridge, Mass was full of some of the best and brightest roboticists in the area. The Boston chapter of TiE partnered with Robotics Trends to bring together experts to talk about the robotics industry and where it was headed.

Neena Buck, an industry analyst at MIT, and Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, introduced the robotics industry to the audience of mostly software entrepreneurs. Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot, gave a keynote about her company and the lessons learned over the last fifteen years. Finally, a panel spent some time answering questions from moderator Dan Kara and the audience. The panel was comprised of a Media Lab PhD candidate named Cory Kidd, also the founder of company Intuitive Automata; Joe Jones, CTO and Co-Founder of Q Robotics and also one of the inventors of the Roomba; Rory MacKean, R&D Manager at Mobile Robots (formerly ActivMedia); and Chris Wallsmith, CKO at Bluefin Robotics (he also has the dubious honor of being my boss).

The panel was fascinating, not just in terms of the answers they gave to the questions, but also to see what sorts of questions were asked by the not-necessarily-roboticist audience. A few interesting points and observations:

• Asia vs the US: there's a well known split in the attitudes toward robots in the US versus in Japan and South Korea. In Asia, it goes, robots are often humanoid (or canine-oid, in the case of Aibo), are meant to interact directly with people, and are thought of --and designed to be -- as pets or companions. In the US, robots are for "dull/dirty/dangerous" tasks like manufacturing or defense and are generally thought of as tools. This may be changing in the US, though. Helen Greiner had stories of Roomba customers asking for *their* Roomba to be repaired, not a replacement unit. Military PackBot operators give awards to the robots as though they are part of the human team and, like the Roomba owners, want their own robot repaired, not to have a new one sent to them. It will be interesting to see how these attitudes drive designs of the next generation of US robots, and whether the US and Asia begin to converge on their designs.
• The "killer app": there were many questions from the audience about what the panelists thought the "killer app" was for the robotics industry -- not a surprising question from those who work in software. What was surprising was the panel's almost unanimous response: there is none, because robots will literally be everywhere. Chris Wallsmith pointed out that robots are much like computers; that is, computers are everywhere -- your laptop, your cell phone, your car, your calculator -- but people don't call them computers. Similarly, he said, your car will be robotic, your kitchen will be robotic, your personal fitness trainer will be robotic... but they'll be called cars, kitchens, and trainers. Not robots.
• Training for robotics: a hypothetical investor in the audience asked what one should look for in evaluating the experience of people proposing a new robotic technology to VCs. The panelists all had different answers -- a background in psychology may help with the design of interfaces and interactions; a broad engineering base is needed to build up the electrical, mechanical, and software systems of a robot; membership in the target customer base lends credibility to the design. The only agreement seemed to be that a broadly experienced group is necessary for success.

So where is the industry headed? Everywhere, it seems. The good news is that not a single person in the room seemed at all pessimistic about the robotics industry; there's funding for startups, a healthy US defense research funding source, rapid growth of new technologies and new ways for people to interact with machines, and growing acceptance of robots working for and with humans. It's an exciting time.

Not Leonardo the artist. No, not the ninja turtle, either. Leonardo is a gremlin-like robot at the MIT Media Lab who was the main attraction in a series of user studies a couple of weeks ago, one of which I got to participate in.

Leonardo was built for the Personal Robots group (I seem to recall them being called "Robotic Life" at one point), headed by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, to study social interaction with robots. Leonardo can't walk or talk, but he can make a few facial expressions and manipulate a few objects with his eerily lifelike (though not very dextrous) little hands.

The study I was participating in was part of post-doc Andrea Thomaz's research into how humans understand the learning process and how machines can learn from them. She asked me to see if I could teach Leonardo (and if I recognized when I had taught him) to perform a few tasks on a toy box in front of him: pushing a button to change light colors, flipping two switches, and trying to learn the right combinations to open and close the box. Working with Leonardo was a little strange. I'd seen pictures before, but was surprised to find him almost three feet tall (well taller than me when he was standing on a desk). Interacting with him at first felt awkward, but soon I was learning forward on the desk gently urging him to learn what he needed to learn, much in the same way as I might teach a toddler to tie his shoes. He could only respond to a limited set of commands like "Try to flip the switch right, Leo" and to feedback like "Not quite!" or "Good job, Leo!". In the end, I sent him into an infinite loop of switch-flipping (ah, bugs), so my robot-teaching prowess remains unknown. But it was my first time personally interacting with a "humanoid" robot.

And I just noticed now I've been calling him "he" throughout this whole entry. They must have done a good job anthropomorphizing him for me...

At any rate, the study was less about robots than it was about cognition and learning, but I was thrilled to have the chance to check Leonardo out. His command set is limited to whichever program a Lab researcher happens to have loaded on him for the day, so we won't be seeing Leos in our homes pushing buttons and flipping switches for us any time soon. But it was a fascinating glimpse into how I might some day interact with a robot in my house. Hopefully the infinite loops will have been fixed by then.

A report from our correspondent Sally Adee, who earlier this month was at DARPATech, the Pentagon's R&D extravaganza, where she met, among other creatures, a little robotic dog called, well, Little Dog:

This little guy was all the rage at the DARPATech 2007 exhibit hall.

“Can I pet him?” a girl asked the researchers standing next to it. “No,” they told her. “Can I have him?” she insisted. “No, sorry." She thought about it for a minute. “Can I talk to him?” she finally asked. “Well, you could,” the researchers said testily, “but it can't hear you.”

If you’re wondering why the researchers appeared so cranky, it was probably because visitor after visitor, fascinated by the little critter’s attempts to negotiate its obstacle course, only wanted to know how the robot was built, how many actuators it had, what sensors and battery it carried. The perpetually exasperated response: "It’s not about the robot! The important thing here is the software."

Little Dog, developed by Boston Dynamics, is part of DARPA's Learning Locomotion program. DARPA selected six teams, each of which received one Little Dog unit. The teams will have to write locomotion software to make the robot traverse an irregular surface with various obstacles.

Alas, it’s a lot harder to get excited about abstract software. The researchers repeatedly tried to redirect our attention to the big screens above Little Dog showing essentially what was going on in his head. The cameras above the display mapped out the terrain in detail and sent a path to the machine’s processor.

This particular version of Little Dog meticulously plans its every move before it takes its first step. It was a peculiar sight: Little Dog standing transfixed at the start of its obstacle course, staring intently at the road ahead, as the screens flashed and changed and check marks were applied to tasks. It's not everyday you can peek into a dog's brain.

And then Little Dog begins to move. One leg tentatively snakes forward and gingerly tests the ground in front of it before the machine puts its full weight on the foot. This software has a lot to keep track of: it has to distribute the machine’s weight properly to keep Little Dog from losing its balance, all the while locating itself within its physical surroundings. Not all Little Dogs will navigate the obstacle course the same way. UPenn’s Little Dog, for instance, has a different locomotion software than MIT’s Little Dog.

Despite its name, Little Dog's shape was a matter of debate -- a Rorschach test of sorts. When observers compared his movements to those of a cat, cat people immediately came out of the woodwork to point out that his movements much more accurately resembled those of a roach. “His legs aren’t articulated at all like a cat’s,” said Spectrum senior editor Jean Kumagai, herself a cat person.

But everyone agreed that the least of all resembled a dog. At which point the beleaguered researchers would again try to steer the conversation back to the abstract code powering the machine.

Last month, Mexican engineering students gathered in Puebla to participate in the 4th Mexican Cleaning Robot Contest (Torneo Mexicano de Robots Limpiadores). The robots competed in two categories: the “Coke can fetching category” (photo above) and the "mine retrieving category". The goal was to investigate ways to collect garbage dumped in terrestrial and aquatic environments -- a problem that unfortunately is way too common not only in Mexico but in many other places. In fact, if these prototypes become products one day, I'd love to send one to my hometown, Sao Paulo, in Brazil, to help clean the ultrapolluted Pinheiros and Tiete rivers.

Here's a video and also a report from the organizers.

The 13th International Conference on Advanced Robotics took place in South Korea last month. Above, clockwise from top left: opening talk by conference chair Prof. Sukhan Lee; best paper award winners; reception (engineers also need to eat); the Robotis booth and its new URIA humanoid. Below, a short report from Hiyan Min Kim, ICAR 2007 secretariat, and Hadi Moradi, ICAR 2007 publicity chair:

ICAR 2007 took place in Jeju island, South Korea from 21st to the 24th of August, chaired by Prof. Sukhan Lee. The conference theme was “Viable Robotic Service to Human,” with six plenary lectures by Prof. Rüdiger Dillmann, Prof. Henrik I Christensen, Prof. Shigeki Sugano, Dr. Michel R. Parent, Dr. Munsang Kim, and Dr. Antal K. Bejczy.Two hundred and twelve papers were presented in 42 sessions. Prof. Dennis Hong and his co-authors from Virginia Tech won the best paper award, accompanied with US $1000 cash prize, for their paper titled “Novel Tripedal Mobile Robot and Considerations for Gait Learning Strategies Based on Kinematics.” ICAR 2007 also offered an exhibition of service robots, exciting opportunities for business interaction and social networking, as well as cultural experience in a beautiful tropical island surrounding.

Great robotics article this month in Spectrum. Senior editor Jean Kumagai and photo editor Randi Silberman traveled to a cactus-studded ranch in Mexico to find out how a research group is using an underwater robot to explore deep sinkholes.

The researchers, led by Bill Stone [above], best known for his daring cave diving expeditions, were field-testing DEPTHX, a 1.3‑metric-ton autonomous underwater machine that can draw 3D maps of its surroundings and also collect solid and liquid samples. (And as Kumagai notes in the article, the robot, encased in pebbly orange syntactic foam, "looks kind of like a giant tangerine.")

From the article:

There’s never been an aqueous robot quite like DEPTHX. Most autonomous underwater vehicles look the same, Stone says. “Some have fat midsections, some are more elongated, but they pretty much all look like weird torpedoes.” [...] “Their design is dictated by their mission: traveling in straight lines at relatively high speed to survey the ocean floor or gather bathymetry data,” he continues. But for exploring uncharted territory, that shape can get you in trouble. You can back yourself into a tight spot where you can’t turn around. [...] DEPTHX, by contrast, is designed not for high speed but for complicated maneuvering in unfamiliar environments. Hence its shape: a squashed sphere with no protruding parts to catch on things.

Read the full article, titled "Swimming to Europa," to learn how DEPTHX performed in Mexico. Oh, and don't miss the intrepid Spectrum correspondents' account of their encounter with Toilet Frog.

The previous DARPA Grand Challenge competition -- a trip through the Nevada desert taken by autonomous vehicles-- took two tries to get right; the first year, not a single vehicle made it across the finish line. The second year was a much better showing -- four vehicles finished -- and winner Stanford University took away the $2 million prize.

This year's DARPA Urban Challenge took the robots out of the desert and into a (simulated) city. Teams had to build vehicles capable of "executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles." Since this was the first year of this style of competition, many people wondered if it would have the same problems as the first year in the desert -- lots of failures and no one completing the course.

We needn't have worried. Of the 11 vehicles that were allowed to enter the final round of the competition, six finished the course -- though only three teams, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Virginia Tech, finished under the 6 hour time limit.

The MIT vehicle waits at an intersection as a (human-driven) car makes a turn.
Photo Credit: JOHN VOELCKER

So what drives these vehicles (since it's not humans)? The short answer: lots of sensors and lots of computing power. Nearly all the vehicles had some sort of array of laser range scanners arranged on the front -- though while MIT used more than 10, the UPenn entry got away with just 2. A key player in that technology was Velodyne, developers of a high-def LIDAR unit based on their work in the first two DARPA Challenges -- they stayed out of this year's event in order to continue developing their LIDAR technology. Additionally, LIDAR units designed by IBEO and SICK (an old favorite of DARPA teams) were other popular additions to the sensor suite. Stereo vision complimented the laser sensors, and of course, differential GPS receivers and inertial measurement units (IMUs) were must-haves.

While hardware integration is no easy task, software was just as daunting. A layer of hardware interface ("What does the LIDAR say?") under a layer of navigation and control ("Where am I, where do I have to go, how far do I turn the steering wheel, and how fast do I have to go?) under a layer of behavior ("Hm, a stopped car. Wait behind it, or drive around it?") makes for some intense coding. Take the Carnegie Mellon vehicle, which required over 300,000 lines of code to run the 2007 vehicle. Some COTS tools made this easier for teams such as Virginia Tech, who used LabView to "provide the major functions of the vehicle including image acquisition and processing, systems communication, vehicle health monitoring, and vehicle control. A NI Compact RIO system [provided] steering, throttle, and braking control, as well as reading CAN-bus sensors," said NI representative Trisha McDonell.

With the impressive success of the vehicles on Saturday, is my human-driven car suddenly old fashioned? Not so, say the experts. Forbes had a nice article on the competition, and specifically quoted Stanford team leader Sebastian Thrun:

In the eyes of Stanford's team leader, Sebastian Thrun ... the world is still years away from driverless autos. "I'm positively enthused that this race has a winner," he said. "But we’re witnessing the painful birth of a new technology, and this is the first of many hours of labor."

Fair enough, Dr. Thrun. I'll settle for a car that can park itself for the time being.

Special thanks to John Voelcker for insight and photos from the field

Researchers made Qrio giggle after kids touch it on the head. The result: endless giggling. Source: University of California, San Diego

You know that toddlers love to giggle. But did you know they love to giggle at robots that giggle?

In this Spectrum story, Morgen E. Peck reports that entertainment robots can charm toddlers for weeks, even months, and could be useful to teachers as educational assistants. Maybe these giggly robots could also become the babysitters of the future?

From the article:

Qrio, the dancing, bouncing, giggling robot spawn of Sony Corp., tried out its social skills on a group of children between 10 months and 24 months old at the Early Childhood Education Center at the University of California, San Diego, as part of a study on how children socialize with robots. The researchers found that the key to Qrio’s popularity was its ability to move and respond to the children in a way that was closely timed to the activity around it.

PS: As Spectrum reported a while ago, Qrio has done other impressive things in addition to entertaining toddlers. It "has played golf at a pro tournament in Hawaii, acted in the Japanese TV show 'Astro Boy,' danced and sung on stages from Las Vegas to Hong Kong, and even conducted the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a rousing rendition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony."

Saturday morning I attended the official kickoff of the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition season. The big reveal of the 2008 game in Manchester, NH marks the beginning of 6.5 weeks of stress, sleep deprivation, and a lot of Mountain Dew for high school students all over the US and in countries like Israel, the UK, and Brazil.

FIRST is the brainchild of iBot and Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and started as a high school competition in a New Hampshire gymnasium. It has now grown to encompass not only tens of thousands of high school students but also middle school and elementary school students around the world through FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST LEGO League, and Junior FIRST LEGO League. Each division has a separate season, regional competitions, and championships.

The game this year is called Overdrive. Six teams (three teams on each of two alliances) are on the field at once with their roughly 34" x 34" x 72", 120 lb robots, and must complete laps around a small track while herding a 40" diameter, 10 lb inflated "Trackball" across a finish line. Points are scored for laps completed, times the Trackball crosses a team's finish line on the ground, times it crosses the line by being "hurdled" over a 6' high overpass, and for teams who manage to balance their Trackballs on the overpass before the two minutes of the round times out. Each year the game is different, and each year a new technical challenge comes up: this year, instead of the standard 15 seconds of completely autonomous operation and subsequent 120 seconds of teleoperation, the 15 second autonomous round may be replaced by a hybrid supervisory control mode, where the robots are largely autonomous but may be retasked by a human player using an infrared remote control on the side of the field. A short animation explaining the game can be found on the NASA robotics website.

Teams receive their kit of parts today, which they can augment further using a limited budget. In late February the robots will be shipped off to regional competitions around the country (as well as in Israel and Brazil) where they will meet in competition with other teams' creations. Winners of the regionals and of several important team awards will go on to the Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia.

FIRST is a great way to show high school students how cool robots can be, but it does a fantastic job of achieving its real mission: inspiring students to get excited about and pursue science and engineering. FIRST has academic and industry partners who offer a combined $9M in scholarships every year to the more than 35,000 students who participate in the program and a study from Brandeis University has shown how effective FIRST is in increasing graduation rates, increasing college attendance rates, and increasing the number of students pursuing science and engineering at schools that have formed teams. As the various politicians who attended Saturday's kickoff noted, programs like FIRST are critical to maintaining US competitiveness in the global market for science and innovation.

While it's too late to start a new team for the year -- team registration usually happens in September or October -- it's not too late to get involved as a mentor for these students or as a volunteer at one of the competitions. Find out what's going on in your area!

This is my first time at CES, and all I can say is, wow. This is the most overwhelming event I've ever been to. It's like being at Disney World but with more booth babes than princesses. Gadgets are everywhere, the audio systems' bass demonstrations are headache-inducing, and anything that could possibly move is doing so in booths, in the aisles, and sometimes even illicitly overhead.

Robotics Trends organized most of the attending robotics companies into one "Tech Zone" at the Venetian Sands expo hall. This area is right next to the Sandbox zone, an area full of companies that develop high-tech toys, and there's actually a lot of overlap. In addition to this area a handful of automation systems are sprinkled throughout the rest of the show and Bumblebee made an appearance at the Dolby booth in the Convention Center.

I've been spending a lot of time with the robotics companies and there is some seriously exciting stuff here. Stay tuned!

I've long been a little skeptical of Wowwee, makers of the Robosapien. Their black and white toys seemed rather basic and the little dog I have didn't appear to be much advanced beyond the walking and mooing cow I had when I was a toddler (my first robot. It annoyed my parents so much they removed the batteries and told me it died. I've never gotten over it). Frankly, they just seemed boring.

I am very pleased to report that I have been proven wrong. Wowwee's next generation of robot toys on display here at CES are, in a word, awesome.

My favorite is Robosapien's newly developed girlfriend, the Femisapien.