Thursday, March 14, 2013

Robots can now collaborate over their very own Internet

One of the more serious limitations facing the robotics industry today is that each bot it produces is an island unto itself. Worse, robots' primitive AI doesn’t allow for intuitive thinking or problem solving — what’s known as artificial general intelligence. Looking to overcome this problem, researchers from several different European universities have developed a cloud-computing platform for robots that will allow them to collaborate — and make each other smarter — over the Internet.

Essentially, the new system, called Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine, is an open source repository of accumulated information for robots. Its name is taken from the movie Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki, in which Rapyuta is the castle inhabited by robots. The name is quite perfect, actually.

In terms of the technology required, the developers implemented a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework designed specifically for robotics applications. Each robot can kickstart its own computational environment or launch any node that has already been set up in advance (typically by another developer). It can also communicate with other nodes using the WebSockets protocol.

Data stored in the cloud will include software components, maps for navigation (including the location of objects and world models), task knowledge (like action scripts and manipulation strategies), processing human voice commands, and object recognition models.

By allowing robots to collaborate and share information in this way, each bot will essentially offload its “brain” into the cloud. Moreover, each unit can be considerably “lighter” in terms of its processing and software requirements; when in doubt, it just needs to hit the cloud. Ultimately, this will make robots cheaper, more efficient — and more intelligent.

The platform will allow robots who are connected to the Internet to directly access powerful computational, storage, and communications technologies, including those of modern data centers.

"The RoboEarth Cloud Engine is particularly useful for mobile robots, such as drones or autonomous cars, which require lots of computation for navigation,” noted Mohanarajah Gajamohan through an official statement, and a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and Technical Lead of the project. “It also offers significant benefits for robot co-workers, such as factory robots working alongside humans, which require large knowledge databases, and for the deployment of robot teams."

As exciting as this appears, the concept is not without its problems. Two things conern me in particular.

First, anything that’s connected to the Internet is inherently hackable. This system will need to be crazy secure, otherwise the robots could be controlled by a malicious source (either individually, or collectively).

And second, the query response-and-match algorithms will need to be very strict to prevent a robot from getting the wrong instructions. For example, a robot could ask the cloud for instructions on how to perform task x, but the cloud-engine could misunderstand and provide it with instructions for task y. The robot, because it’s stupid, will then execute task y. This could be dangerous, and even potentially catastrophic in some contexts.

To learn more about RoboEarth, check out their official website. Their study can be read here.

Image: agsandrew/Shutterstock, RoboEarth.

OCTOBER 24, 2012, 1:00 PM 5 Comments

In Contest for Rescue Robots, Darpa Offers $2 Million Prize

By JOHN MARKOFF

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The Pentagon’s advanced research agency said on Wednesday that it will offer a prize of $2 million to the winners of a contest testing the performance of robots that could be used in emergencies like the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, which is responsible for helping the nation avoid unpleasant technological surprises, had previously announced its Robotics Challenge, but on Wednesday it added details and announced the selection of teams that will compete in separate “tracks” of the contest.

In one competition the contestants will build their own robots, while in a second they will design software to control a humanoid-style robot supplied by the government and developed by Boston Dynamics, a developer of advanced mobile robots. Boston Dynamics is known for the Big Dog robot it developed for Darpa, which walks on four legs and is able to carry heavy loads on uneven ground. More recently it has gotten Internet attention for a robot named Cheetah. In a video, Cheetah runs on an indoor track at 28.3 miles per hour, faster than Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human. Another video shows a robot designed for Darpa by Boston Dynamics that stands on two legs and avoids obstacles.

Two other contests will take place in a computerized simulation system and are intended to be broadly open to a range of entrants from around the world.

Gill Pratt, the Darpa program manager who is directing the Robotics Challenge, said in a telephone press conference on Monday that the program was not intended to develop futuristic robot war fighters.

Currently the United States military has both airborne and undersea robotic weapons systems, but it has made less progress in ground-based weapons. Thousands of robots are now used in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with land mines, and there are some experimental vehicles that carry equipment being used in war zones. But the military has done little to design robotic soldiers for use on the ground.

“We’re aiming for a challenge on a different technical problem right now,” Dr. Pratt said. One of the missions of the United States military is to respond with humanitarian assistance to events like natural and manmade disasters, and in situations like the Fukushima disaster. In that emergency, robots were sent to the plant but its technical experts had to be trained to use them, which took valuable time. Dr. Pratt said that a generation of robots that were simpler to operate and had the capability to use tools that are often already available at disaster sites would make a big difference in speeding the response to a future crisis.

The robot supplied by the government and developed by Boston Dynamics.

Darpa has sponsored a number of similar challenges. The highest-profile contests focused on autonomous vehicles in 2004, 2005 and 2007. They are widely seen to have served as a catalyst that has jump-started commercial development of self-driving cars. A number of automobile manufacturers as well as Google are now nearing commercialization of self-driving technologies.

In one of the new Robotics Challenge tracks, the agency has chosen Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, Drexel University, Raytheon, Schaft, Virginia Tech, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design their own systems. The robots are not required to be humanoid forms, and several of the competitors are creating machines that look anything but human. For example, a prototype from JPL has three legs and one arm.

Teams from these organizations will be supplied with an advanced robot from Boston Dynamics and will be required to program it in the contest: Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories, RE2, University of Kansas, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TRAC Labs, University of Washington, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Ben-Gurion University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and TORC Robotics.

The robots will be required to do things like drive vehicles, climb over debris, operate power tools and control machines and valves.

The agency is also organizing a separate contest inside an online virtual world that will allow a wider range of contestants to design software avatars to perform rescue missions, Dr. Pratt said.

“There has been tremendous work in the gaming field, and we believe that a lot of the talent in that field can be brought in to play here,” he said.

In the real-world version of the challenge, it will not be mandatory for the robots to be autonomous, but systems that are designed to operate without direct human control will be scored higher, Dr. Pratt said. The agency will adjust the wireless bandwidth available to control the robots in an effort to simulate real world conditions. For example, in the Fukushima disaster, thick walls made it difficult to control robots that were designed to communicate wirelessly with human operators.

The issue of autonomous weapons systems has been controversial because of the Pentagon’s use of airborne drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year a report issued by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board said the military had been slow in deploying technologies that would allow weapons more autonomy. It noted that in some cases, it requires teams of several hundred weapons operators to support a single airborne drone mission.

A version of this article appeared in print on 10/29/2012, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Pentagon Offers A Robotics Prize.

A Google Competition, With a Robotic Moon Landing as a Goal

Team Italia

A concept of a Team Italia rover expected to compete for the Lunar X Prize, a contest Google hopes will spur exploration.

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By BRAD STONE

Published: February 22, 2008

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — More than three decades after the last Apollo astronauts roamed the lunar surface, disparate universities, open-source engineers and quixotic aerospace start-ups are planning to start their own robotic missions to the Earth’s barren cousin.
The return to the moon is part of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition sponsored by Google with $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.
At Google’s headquarters here on Thursday, 10 teams from five countries announced their intention to participate in the competition. They include a team led by William L. Whitaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and renowned roboticist; an affiliation of four universities and two major aerospace companies in Italy; and one group that is a loose association of engineers coordinating their efforts online.
At the event, the new lunar explorers shared some high-minded goals, like reigniting moon exploration and jump-starting an age of space commerce.
“This is about developing a new generation of technology that is cheaper, can be used more often and will enable a new wave of explorers,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.
Addressing the X Prize teams and journalists, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, compared his company’s support of the competition with other companies’ sponsorship of yacht races. “The idea we can help spur the return to the moon and maybe even do it more quickly than some of the national plans is really exciting to me,” Mr. Brin said.
Google will pay $20 million to the first team that lands on the moon, sends a package of data back to Earth, then travels at least 500 meters and sends another data package. The second team to accomplish the goals will win $5 million. Bonuses are offered for feats like visiting a historic landing site and finding and detecting lunar ice, but the prize money starts to shrink if the mission is not accomplished by 2012.
Dr. Whitaker of Carnegie Mellon is leading a team that includes the University of Arizonaand Raytheon, the military contractor. He said he planned to use kerosene and oxygen to fuel his rocket, and once it is on the moon, to send a rover to the site of the first moon landing in the Sea of Tranquillity. “Our extravaganza will be at Apollo 11,” he said.
The overall effort could cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, easily exceeding the size of the prize purse.
Fred J. Bourgeois, the head of Frednet, the group of engineers who are collaborating online in the manner of open-source software developers, said that his team was building a toaster-size lunar lander that, once on the moon, would unleash a cellphone-size rover. “We think it’s a lot cheaper to put a cellphone on the moon than an S.U.V.,” Mr. Bourgeois said.
NASA has announced plans to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2020. Though robotic missions are easier to achieve, the X Prize competitors still face formidable challenges, not to mention extravagant costs. Generating the rocket thrust to escape Earth’s gravity is expensive and risky. Once on the moon, robotic rovers may have to survive temperatures that can drop to 250 degrees below zero.
There was some discord at the event. A video produced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting reasons to revisit the moon, described the mining of silicon, which is abundant in the lunar soil. The video claimed that the material could be used in space to construct solar-powered satellites that would transmit cheap and abundant energy to Earth.
In a question-and-answer session, Dr. Harold A. Rosen, an inventor of the geostationary satellite who is heading his own X Prize team, called that claim “one of the most outrageous ideas I’ve ever heard.” He added: “I can think of about a hundred thousand more efficient ways of getting energy on Earth than that.”
The X Prize Foundation is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that also managed the Ansari X Prize, a race between teams to send a manned rocket craft into suborbital space.
A team led by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan won that competition in 2004.

TED 2013: 4D printed objects 'make themselves'

By Jane WakefieldTechnology reporter

Video of cube self-folding strand courtesy Self-Assembly Lab, MIT/Stratasys

Many are only just getting their heads around the idea of 3D printing but scientists at MIT are already working on an upgrade: 4D printing.

At the TED conference in Los Angeles, architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits showed how the process allows objects to self-assemble.

It could be used to install objects in hard-to-reach places such as underground water pipes, he suggested.

It might also herald an age of self-assembling furniture, said experts.

Smart materials

TED fellow Mr Tibbits, from the MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) self-assembly lab, explained what the extra dimension involved.

"We're proposing that the fourth dimension is time and that over time static objects will transform and adapt," he told the BBC.

The process uses a specialised 3D printer made by Stratasys that can create multi-layered materials.

It combines a strand of standard plastic with a layer made from a "smart" material that can absorb water.

The water acts as an energy source for the material to expand once it is printed.

"The rigid material becomes a structure and the other layer is the force that can start bending and twisting it," said Mr Tibbits.

"Essentially the printing is nothing new, it is about what happens after," he added.

Such a process could in future be used to build furniture, bikes, cars and even buildings, he thinks.

For the time being he is seeking a manufacturing partner to explore the innovation.

"We are looking for applications and products that wouldn't be possible without these materials," he added.

"Imagine water pipes that can expand to cope with different capacities or flows and save digging up the street."

Nature's inspiration

Engineering software developer Autodesk, which collaborated on the project, is looking even further into the future.

"Imagine a scenario where you go to Ikea and buy a chair, put it in your room and it self-assembles," said Carlo Olguin, principal research scientist at the software firm.

The 4D printing concept draws inspiration from nature which already has the ability to self-replicate.

"We already have 3D printers that can be injected with stem cells, printing micro slices of liver," Mr Olguin added.

"The idea behind 4D printing is to use the sheer power of biology and modify it. But it is still an elusive goal."

The next stage for the research is to move from printing single strands to sheets and eventually whole structures. And water need not be the process's only energy source.

"We could also have heat, vibration and sound," said Mr Tibbits.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Robots and Robber Barons

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 9, 2012 1301 Comments

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The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, whilewages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought; for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers, either on the gap between more- and less-educated workers or on the soaring incomes of a handful of superstars in finance and other fields. But that may be yesterday’s story.

More specifically, while it’s true that the finance guys are still making out like bandits — in part because, as we now know, some of them actually are bandits — the wage gapbetween workers with a college education and those without, which grew a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s,hasn’t changed much since then. Indeed, recent college graduates had stagnant incomes even before the financial crisis struck. Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.

Why is this happening? As best as I can tell, there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.

About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology manufacturing has lately been moving back to the United States is that these days the most valuable piece of a computer, the motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no longer a reason to produce them abroad.

In a recent book, “Race Against the Machine,” M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that similar stories are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers.

Still, can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.

What about robber barons? We don’t talk much about monopoly power these days; antitrust enforcement largely collapsed during the Reagan years and has never really recovered. Yet Barry Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation argue, persuasively in my view, that increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.

I don’t know how much of the devaluation of labor either technology or monopoly explains, in part because there has been so little discussion of what’s going on. I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse.

Yet that shift is happening — and it has major implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make it even easier to inherit wealth?

As I said, this is a discussion that has barely begun — but it’s time to get started, before the robots and the robber barons turn our society into something unrecognizable.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 10, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Robots And Robber Barons.

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