Automaton

Spectrum's current issue has a great article on Microsoft's quiet yet bold robotics initiative. Senior Associate Editor Steven Cherry spent a day in the "Broom Closet," the small office area tucked somewhere in the Redmond campus where a small software development group is trying to do for robotics what Microsoft did for personal computing. Below, a Q&A with Cherry:

Automaton: So Microsoft has set out to dominate the robotics universe with its Robotics Studio, which is not an operating system. So what is it?

Cherry: MSRS, as they call it, has the same goal as an operating system—to create a common platform for developers. And it includes what are in effect libraries of code that let higher-level developers create software without delving much into the physical details of this company’s robotic limbs or that one’s sensors. If you start with one arm and switch to another, for example, the commands for up, down, grasp, release, and so forth will be the same.

Automaton: And who is using it? Or who will use it?

Cherry: The platform is still quite new, but my understanding is there are quite a few companies working with it already, from the German automation giant Kuka to iRobot, which makes the Roomba.

Automaton: You were in the Broom Closet. When did you come out?

Cherry: Very funny.

Automaton: So what's the mood there?

Cherry: Well, for one thing, it’s fun. Imagine you took a regular software group and plunked it down into Willy Wonka's factory. You may see all sorts of things crawling around, but sometimes there are just programmers quietly staring at their screens. The group does believe they're doing something important. That's the atmosphere. They are just 11, actually now 12, people out of 76 000 Microsoft employees. But they are dreaming big.

Photo: David Clugston for IEEE Spectrum

Last year, Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen of the University of Washington’s BioRobotics Lab wrote an article for Spectrum about their surgical robot, Raven, and a field test in the California rangelands, where a surgeon commanded the robot remotely.

Early this year, Raven headed out to another extreme environment: the Aquarius underwater habitat off Key Largo, Florida. In the experiment, part of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project, surgeons teleoperated the two-armed robot all the way from Seattle.

Automaton spoke with Hannaford to get the details.

I finally had time to read Robin Marantz Henig's 8000-word piece on sociable robots in the New York Times Magazine. In the article, Henig, a contributing writer for the magazine, describes what scientists mean when they talk about "sociable robots," how such robots were designed to learn by interacting with their environments, and what are the issues involving robot learning, robot emotion, and robot boyfriends.

Henig does a great job explaining how the robots work, sometimes by "peeking behind the curtain" -- the robots are mostly MIT robots, old and new, including the metal torso Cog, the bushy-eyebrowed Kismet, the talkative head Mertz, the mop-topped Autom, the Gremlinlike Leonardo, the skyscraperish Domo, and the rubbery bulgy-eyed Rodney (OK, joking about this last one).

More interesting, perhaps, Henig describes instances in which the robots misbehave, or work in a somewhat disappointing way, and hey, that's how engineering happens in the real world, so it was neat to see that in the article as well (by the way, I loved the cover headline, which to me captures the essence of this emerging field: "It Understands (Sort Of)." An excerpt:

Today’s humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. . . . They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.

But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. . . . In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.

After reading the article, I wanted to see some of those machines in action, and it's just great you can find so many videos of them (the Times posted a bunch on the article's web page). But as a writer myself I also wanted to know more about Henig's experience writing the article. Having just returned from vacation, she was kind enough to promptly answer my questions -- thanks, Robin! (Follow the link below to read the Q&A.)

"If you don't dress up your Roomba, it's just a naked vacuum," quotes the website of MyRoomBud.com. MyRoomBud is a company run by a group of siblings that makes costumes for your Roomba and Scooba. I met two of the team at an MIT event two weeks ago and got the chance to ask Tyler, the CEO, some questions about their business.

How old are you guys? How long have you been in business?
myRoomBud is a company that my brother, Niles (13) and I (16) started about two and a half years ago, a few weeks before Christmas. We first began to sell the covers on eBay to earn some extra money in order to pay for Christmas gifts, particularly a pair of cowboy boots for our mother. After Christmas, however, we found that we had made so much money that we decided to continue the myRoomBud business. We employed the help of your younger siblings, Isabelle (10 years old) and Griffin (8 years old).

Do you all have different jobs?
Niles and I used to cut the cloth to be sewn by our parents into the RoomBud covers. Isabelle and Griffin helped sorting the cloth that we had cut into different piles so we would always know where everything was. Niles and I were also in charge of shipping the RoomBuds. Nowadays, we all cut and ship. We have also hired students from my high school to do the sewing of our costumes. The longer we continue the company, the less physical work we end up doing. Now, we mainly focus on running our company and finding new ways of lessening the work that needs to be done.

I see you do costumes for both Roomba and Scooba -- do you have any plans to expand to other robots, either that iRobot makes (like the new Looj or ConnectR) or from other companies (the Aibo, Robosapien, etc)?
Although we have considered making costume covers for the iRobot Looj and ConnectR, we have not actually put these ideas into production. We try to stay away from other companies.

What got you interested in dressing up your Roomba?
We originally got the idea of dressing up the Roomba while we were watching my youngest brother, Griffin, follow the Roomba around as it cleaned the floors. At first we just taped paper ears to the vacuum, but soon the paper became felt, and the next thing we knew we were going to Joanne Fabrics to buy cloth that had animal print on it for the sole purpose of making a RoomBud cover.

Why do you think people like to dress up their Roombas and Scoobas, but not their normal vacuums or mops?
Niles and I both agree that what probably causes people to dress up their Roombas, and not their normal vacuums, is the lifelike way that the Roomba feels its way around a room cleaning the floor. It is the same thing that first enthralled Griffin when he first saw the Roomba at work. And of course, there's the obvious answer, our company motto: If you don't dress up your Roomba, it's just a naked vacuum!

Photos courtesy myRoomBud

My friend Chris Murphy is a graduate student in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute joint program. Late last summer his group went on a research cruise to the Arctic Circle, so I asked him to tell me a little bit about the two underwater vehicles they used for their work. Read on for the interview and some of his pictures from the cruise!