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.

Hexapod robots have long fascinated roboticists, and now you can find the six-legged creatures swimming in the Caribbean or harvesting timber in Finland. There's also a legion of do-it-yourselfers creating their own hexapods just because it's fun.

One of them is J. de Vries, a 42-year-old webdesigner from Neustrelitz, Germany. When he's not taking care of his daughters (15-month twins), de Vries works on Marvin, the hexapod in the image below.

Marvin uses nine Atmel microcontrollers (ATmega16, 32, and 64) and 20 servomotors. It's only 30 to 40 percent finished, de Vries says, adding that he plans to include some onboard sensors after perfecting Marvin's locomotion.

"I don't have any degree in engineering and I never saw an university from inside," de Vries says. "But since I was 12 years old, my dream was to build a robot. ... Last year I learned a lot about microcontrollers, servomotors and the required electronics while building a quadcopter with brushless motors. And that was the beginning of realizing my old robot dream."

De Vries has a web page with videos, images, and technical details on Marvin (in German).

Having attended a wonderful wine tasting last night at a former professor's house, I've been feeling particularly oenophilic. During the tasting the professor told us about a lot of the technology vineyard owners have started using to track their crops. Since vines produce different fruit depending on shade, temperature, amount of water, type of soil, and so on, a good vineyard owner needs to know all about the different conditions all over his or her vineyard -- and small, cheap sensor technology only makes that easier. This of course led me to the natural conclusion: my wine could only be better if a robot is involved!

So what can robots do for a wine geek like me? I could purchase my very own "Robo-sommelier" to see if I'm actually getting what I'm buying -- using infrared light, it can tell what the type of the wine is without even opening it -- or it could learn my tastes and be able to recommend a wine to pair with my dinner.

Before the wine gets to my table, a vineyard owner might use an automated tractor to care for the vines. It can navigate using the wires that the vines grow on and can tow a sprayer or other equipment, preventing a human from having to do the long, dull task of driving the tractor through a huge vineyard. A 5-DOF robotic hand combined with a vision system might be doing some of the harvesting or care for the bunches of grapes on the vine. A friend at the wine tasting with me mentioned having seen one vineyard in which a robotic system rotated and tipped bottles slightly each day as they aged.

The agriculture industry is really embracing robotics and automation (Rocona is one example; John Deere and others are following suit), but it will be interesting to see if the wine industry actually adopts the technologies being created for them. Vineyard owners pride themselves on understanding their crops and how climate conditions will affect their output; sommeliers and wine aficionados are proud of their tasting abilities and standards. Will these people really want to hand over their art to machines?

Although some people claim their mouths operate independently of their brains, that's not usually the case. The brain sends neurological signals to the larynx, which converts them into sound. Now, what if we could use those larynx nerve signals to control things?

That's exactly what a company called Ambient is doing. Its Audeo technology basically converts "unspoken speech" (neurological signals flowing through larynx nerves when a person thinks about speaking) into control commands that can be used to guide a motorized wheelchair (video above) or synthesize speech. Pretty amazing!

The company apparently stole the show this month at National Instrument's NI Week in Austin. Ambient's founder and CEO, Michael Callahan, gave a demonstration of the company's "thought-controlled" wheelchair and "thought-to-speech" translation system. (You can see the demo at the NI Week video page; it's the last segment, called "Algorithm Engineering," on the August 7 list.)

To use the system, a person wears a lightweight sensor band around the neck. The band picks up the larynx nerve signals and transmits them wirelessly to a remote computer (don't worry about "mind wiretapping" -- the transmission is encrypted.) The remote computer uses NI LabVIEW and signal processing algorithms to interpret the nerve-impulse patterns and translate them into the right commands.

The system is not plug-and-play. It does require some training until its algorithms learn to "read your mind" (accuracy is above 70 percent). But at least it doesn't require Matrix-style brain interfaces or a tangle of EEG electrodes wrapped around your head.

Callahan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hopes to commercialize the technology to improve the lives of severely disable people with spinal cord injuries or such neurological disorders as ALS and cerebral palsy. (The company is backed by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.)

OK -- not exactly related to robotics, but very cybernetic nonetheless. I wonder what things we might control with this technology one day. Any guesses?

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.