Automaton

In this month's issue of Spectrum, Sally Adee describes the Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program, a "Manhattan Project" for prosthetic arms organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here's an interesting excerpt:

But the most power-efficient arm in the world is no good if you canâ''t control it. So APL [Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory] partnered with RIC [Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago] to develop a groundbreaking technique for controlling a mechanical arm with an amputeeâ''s own nervous system.

Todd Kuiken, director of RICâ''s neural engineering center, created a portal to the nervous system by rewiring the shoulder. The procedure, called targeted muscle reinnervation surgery, redirects the residual nerve bundles that once connected the spinal cord to the 70 000 nerve fibers in the arm. After an amputation, these nerves remain in place, and they continue to workâ''they just arenâ''t connected to anything functional. The pectoral muscles also remain intact, but they too are no longer driving an arm. So Kuiken surgically threaded the residual nerves from their original locations into the chest, where they innervated, or grew into, an area of pectoral muscle slightly smaller than a compact disc.

Next, Kuiken taped electrodes over the chest patch, where they could pick up the electromagnetic signals from muscles and send them to paired electrodes inside the prosthesis. There, signal-processing algorithms could translate the signals into the userâ''s intended movements. With Kuikenâ''s surgery, amputees were able to control the DARPA prototype with their own muscles, as if it were an extension of their own flesh.

Then came an unexpected and very lucky break: the researchers found that the redirected nerves restored not only muscle function but also sensation. The skin on that patch had been rewired with the nerves from the arm and hand; therefore, the patients sensed a touch on their chests as if someone were touching their missing handsâ''even if it was just a tap. The Hopkins team exploited this discovery with a device called a tactor, built at Northwestern University. By placing the tactor on the chest next to the electrodes, they created a complete feedback loop. In the end, the combination of Kuikenâ''s complex rewiring scheme and the brainâ''s natural plasticity simulated a real armâ''s ability to sense touch, heat, and cold.

Read the full article here.

With the EU's focus on renewable energy, giant wind wheels, at times arranged in huge windfarms, other times in isolation, have been sprouting across the continent. With their enormous size (individual blades reach lengths of up to 60m!), airy heights, and typically remote (offshore) locations, regular inspection of the blades is a major headache.

Following a two and a half year research project researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF have now unveiled a rope climbing robot which can independently inspect blades on all types of wind energy converters. The 16 DOF robot platform autonomously maneuvers up and down ropes lowered next to the blades. Its inspection system uses an infrared radiator to heat rotor blades in combination with a high-resolution thermal camera as well as an ultrasonic system to regularly monitor the rotor bladesâ'' condition and detect any external or internal signs of damage.

Unfortunately the press release does not mention projected costs for the robot nor when you can expect to see one on a wind turbine near you. Some technical information is available in a short project description (PDF).

iRobot has put up their own YouTube channel, which they are calling iTube -- which I think is a sadly generic Web2.0 name, but oh well. The implementation is much better: the channel is going to have both amusing videos of iRobot products in action and videos of iRobot employees making announcements and answering questions about their designs. (Though I must point out a disturbing lack of Roomba Cat on that channel) On the "amusing" side, I've been giggling for a while over the flying PackBot.

I'm imagining one of those engineers going back to HQ insisting, "As God as my witness, I thought PackBots could fly..."

I'll have my iRobot fangirl hat on this week, since iRobot is supposed to be launching (in the non-flying sense) a new home robots product at CES that starts tomorrow in Las Vegas. Stay tuned!

Thanks, Rod!

In a recent blog post we've asked if autonomous battlefield robots can behave more ethically than humans. But today's weaponized robots are not the only ones that raise ethical concerns. The development of miniature robots will soon allow surveillance to move out of the cyberspace, bringing privacy concerns to a new level.

A video released by the Air Force Research Laboratory and published via the Chicago Tribune now shows how the military envisions the future use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) for both, surveillance and direct attack missions using chemical or explosive payloads.

The video shows a swarm of MAVs being dropped out of a high flying airplane and then goes on to explain how the MAVs could be hidden in plain sight, for example disguised as flies or doves. It envisions MAVs forming sensor networks to enhance their sensing and operating capabilities, and harvesting their energy from the environment including power lines to extend their mission time indefinitely.

As we've reported previously these MAVs are well on their way to becoming a reality. Let's hope we will find some less controversial uses as well!

More and more colleges and universities are jumping on the robotics bandwagon, and Olin College of Engineering is doing its best to fight its way to the front. Olin, my alma mater, is a small undergraduate-only, innovative, young engineering school focused on project-based engineeering education, located near Boston, Massachusetts. And as several of the professors have realized, robotics projects are one of the best ways to provide hands-on design opportunities for mechanical, electrical, and software engineers alike. Olin has started up a thriving undergraduate research program in field and biomimetic robotics and some enterprising students have designed a robotics engineering curriculum to strengthen their education as roboticists. Read on after the jump for more information on the cool robots to be found in Olin's halls.

The Curriculum

Olin College has three majors: electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and general engineering. While both ECE and ME majors can be a path to the robotics industry -- I'm an ECE myself -- students can choose to concentrate within the general engineering degree. There are tracks for Engineering with a Computing concentration (similar to software engineering), Engineering with a Systems concentration (systems engineers are often well-suited to building robots), and lately, Engineering with a Robotics concentration. The Robotics concentration blends coursework in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering, along with an upper-level elective designed to get students an in-depth look at robotics. In the course, outside speakers are occasionally invited in to inform students of the latest happenings in industry and academia that are driving robotics research and development. The students spend two weeks at each of various modules -- computer vision, for example, and control systems -- then move on to a large final project throughout the second half of the semester. Later, throughout their senior year at Olin, students can choose one of the industry-sponsored capstone (SCOPE) projects that focuses on engineering; in the past, robotics projects have been sponsored by Draper Laboratory, John Deere, ROCONA, Vision Robotics, SAIC, and Boston Engineering. One SCOPE project was also a part of an entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge.

The Intelligent Vehicles Laboratory

The IVL is focused on field robotics. These robots are usually big, powerful, and sponsored by industry. Olin students and professors have been working on underwater robots, ocean surface robots, apple-picking robots, crop-spraying robots, tractor vision systems, and autonomous cars. The crop-spraying robot, for a company called ROCONA in California, is already in active use. Olin students built the electromechanical systems on MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle, which placed fourth in the final competition.

This shows a test of one of the early robotic snakes built to study the "gaits" that snakes use to move.

The Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory

Biomimetic: imitating nature. I'm pretty confident that the Biomimetic lab exists solely because professor Gill Pratt wanted a place to house his python (named Monty, of course). Regardless of how it was started, though, Monty inspired several models of robotic snakes, and the bio-inspired research has now expanded to bluefin tuna fish. Professor Pratt has also built a pair of robotic legs -- called M2 -- as part of a research project that spun out of MIT's Leg Lab.

Olin is a purely undergraduate institution, not a research university, so the amount of research (and number of grad students) is drastically different from what you might find at MIT or Stanford. However, every student working on robots and interacting with professors at Olin is an undergraduate, which is a truly unique opportunity you don't find at many schools. I'm personally impressed with the success and variety of research programs the professors have gotten running in just a few short years -- Olin has only been open since 2002, and when I graduated in 2006 there were only a handful of mostly non-working robots sitting and standing in a single classroom.

You can find information on the state of industrial robotics, but no one has before been able to quantitatively determine the size, demographics, or trends of the hobbyist side of robotics. With industry you can sample the major players and then extend those trends for a good estimate. However with hobbyists these traditional litmus test methods will not work. There are tens of thousands of us scattered around the world with no major players, so getting a statistically valid sample becomes a challenge.

As a robotics hobbyist I always search the web to research the project I am working on. If I were looking for a microcontroller, I'd browse the web on information about microcontrollers. If I were confused about a circuit, I'd browse around for schematics. Because robotics hobbyists use the web as support for anything they are working on, I reasoned the simplest way to measure them was to datamine the server logs.

I began my fairly popular robotics website around mid-2005, and currently get about 420K pageviews a month. My robotics YouTube channel has been around just as long, and has over 600K total views of all my videos.

Given these large numbers of visitors, my data collected should accurately represent the demographics of robotics hobbyists across the world.

Not only did I use Google Analytics and YouTube Insight, I also used Google Trends which tracks search rates of specific keywords. What I found definitely surprised me. Here is the executive summary of a robotics hobbyist:

- 17% are female

- most are aged below 20 or over 40

- those who are retired do not build robots

- India, Indonesia, and Thailand dominate robotics related searches, not the US

- 50% of robotics web traffic begins with a Google search

- 90% use Windows, 4% use Linux, 4.5% use Mac

- there are at least 50,000 robotics hobbyists worldwide

- media attention for robotics has increased every year

- Google searches on robotics terms have dropped more than ~40% in four years

That very last result was very surprising for me. It appears that people are simply searching Google less and less year on year about robotics and most robotics related terms. For example here is a graph of Google searches on microcontrollers:

Photo: www.societyofrobots.com

What does this very disturbing trend mean? Is the robotics field shrinking and becoming ever less popular?! I only have one theory . . .

I have provided my processed data and a deeper analysis of my findings on my Robot Hobbyist Trends 2008 report.

Automaton correspondent Marcel Bergerman, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, sent us this nice report about his mentoring experience with the FIRST Lego League (FLL) robotics competition -- after which he became, as he puts it, "FLL-oholic."

I just came back from the FIRST Lego League (FLL) competition in Pittsburgh and I thought Iâ''d send you a note. FLL is the official FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) event for kids ages 9 to 13.

In 2006 and 2007 I was a research and software judge, and this year I was one of the mentors for a local school (Providence Heights Alpha).

I donâ''t want to exaggerate, but attending an FLL event should be in all the formal IEEE list of the â''100 things to do before you die.â''

Itâ''s 70 teams, some 700 children, who have to build and program a Lego NXT-based robot to solve an 18-mission game. Some missions are easier than others (e.g., pushing things around) but some are really challenging (e.g., turning a wheel that opens a houseâ''s window).

Robots can use a maximum of three motors plus a combination of touch, light, and ultrasound sensors. Itâ''s amazing what some teams are capable of creating, not only in terms of locomotion but mostly manipulation. You should see some of the powered appendices in some robots â''- itâ''s like graduate school-level robotics!

The programming environment, based on National Instruments's LabView, is amazingly simple to learn -â'' kids are writing programs within minutes of being introduced to it for the first time.

All of us in the robotics field should be indebted to FIRST and the people who organize FLL events, as they are fostering the next generation of roboticists. Our local guys are the never-tiring Robin Shoop and Norman Kerman, plus an amazing team of tens of volunteers. They ran the show like a clockwork, rotating teams in and out of competition pits some 200 times over the course of 6 hours. Congratulations Robin and Norman!

Now the real reason I am writing to you is this: If you ever considered mentoring an FLL team but are afraid that itâ''s too hard or you donâ''t have the knowledge necessary or you wonâ''t have time to put on a decent performance in 10 weeks (the time between the official release of the game and competition day) -â'' then you are roundly mistaken.

I know this sounds rude, but thatâ''s what happened to me. Ten weeks ago Robin invited us to join the competition, and I said no -â'' because I thought it was too hard and I didnâ''t have the knowledge and time to put on a decent performance. He insisted, and I am sooo glad he did.

The team (children and parents) decided to go for the challenge, met every Saturday for 3 hours, and guess what? The AlphaBots went home with two trophies in hand, second place in Software and fifth place overall.

The kids solved nine of the eighteen missions, and got a maximum score of 165 (out of some 380 possible points). At the end of their third (and last) round at the competition table the AlphaBots were screaming their lungs out, cheering for their robot and the two kids who play the game on behalf of the team. The sense of teamwork alone was worth all the effort.

And, of course, the two trophies will go nice on the shelves of a small private school in Western Pennsylvania. So pardon my redundancy, but I owe this to Robin â''- even if youâ''ve never seen or programmed an NXT, you can build a successful team in less than three months.

PS: I put a video of the AlphaBots in action at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mbergerm/public. Sorry that I donâ''t have videos of the other teams in action as well. The noisy adult screaming in the background is yours truly.

Photos: Carnegie Mellon University/The National Robotics Engineering Center/Robotics Academy

It's that time of year for cookies, lights, trees, gifts, and holiday cheer. What better way to celebrate than with robots?

Gifts

Last year we had our robot kit gift guide, and this year Spectrum's gift guide includes a few more robots. I've also become more familiar with MAKE Magazine's products this year (I'm currently using the MAKE controller for a project, and it's very easy to use) so I suggest poking around the MAKE robot kits store to see what they've got. And don't forget to wrap these goodies in robot wrapping paper.

Food

Decorate cookies made with these robot cookie cutters or make your own. I think I'd also enjoy gingerbread made in a Wall-E cake pan. (I suppose you could use it for fruitcake, too, if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat)

Decorations

I love this robot ornament, and of course you can find your favorite sci-fi robots in ornament form, and this robot menorah (found here) is kind of awesome.

What are your suggestions for making robots part of your holiday season?

PHOTO: Adriana M. Groisman/FIRST

In a Spectrum online article, Ray Almgren and Mark Walters, two execs at National Instruments, write about FIRST's new 32-bit PowerPC-based controller, which promises to make the competition even more ... competitive! From the article:

For the 2009 high school FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition beginning in January, a 32-bit PowerPCâ''based embedded controller is replacing the 8-bit microcontroller thatâ''s been used to run the robots for the past eight years. The event organizers expect that the technology will let more than 43 000 participating high school students tackle tougher challenges than those of previous years. The specific task the robots must perform while working against other robots will be announced on 3 January. Previous challenges included throwing balls into goals (Aim High), placing rings onto racks (Rack â''Nâ'' Roll), and stacking pyramids onto goals (Triple Play).

[...]

The new flexibility and processing power means that robots should be better able to handle the complex control and signal-processing algorithms required to operate autonomouslyâ''that is, without being â''drivenâ'' from the sidelines by handlers; in previous competitions, robots were required to spend 15 seconds operating autonomously, but one-third of the teams didnâ''t attempt to score during this period. The souped-up processing power also means that the robots will be able to handle more complex image data in real time, identifying shapes or doing optical character recognitionâ''they will be robots that can read.

Competitors will be able to program the CompactRIO controller using standard C++ language or a custom version of National Instruments Corp.â''s LabView graphical programming software, adapted specifically for the competition. The FIRST organization will in either case start the students out with built-in libraries of example codes and preprogrammed sequences. These resources will let teams get started developing the robots quickly, easing the learning curve. To exploit the full potential of the robots and win competitions, however, team members will have to come up with code of their own.

Read the rest of the storyhere.

The SGR-A1 sentry robot, developed by Samsung Techwin Co. for the South Korean government, uses a low-light ­camera and pattern recognition software to distinguish humans from animals or other objects and, if necessary, can fire its builtâ''in machine gun. (Read more.)

PHOTO: Kim Dong-Joo/AFP/Getty Images

In today's New York Times, Cornelia Dean writes about ethical concerns that the eventual arrival of autonomous robots to the battlefield raise. Can we design robots with killing capabilities that behave ethically -- perhaps even more ethically than humans -- and so never violate the Geneva Conventions or battlefield rules of engagement?

Some may think it's preposterous to debate robot ethics in the battlefield when human ethics in the battlefield is a much bigger problem these days. That's a fair point, but it doesn't mean we can't address both issues. After all, the weaponized robots are coming.

As my blog colleague Mikell noted in an early post, "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, she added, "things are changing." In addition to missile-equipped drones, companies are now adding weapons payload options to ground robots. There's still a human at the trigger, but that could change soon. In the military robotics world, "autonomous" is a word you hear often.

Times' Dean interviewed a range of roboticists, philosophers, and other experts, and I thought it'd be a good idea to summarize their positions -- below, snippets from the Times story:

* â''My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can,â'' said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, who is designing software for battlefield robots under contract with the Army.

* Randy Zachery, who directs the Information Science Directorate of the Army Research Office, which is financing Dr. Arkinâ''s work, said the Army hoped this â''basic scienceâ'' would show how human soldiers might use and interact with autonomous systems and how software might be developed to â''allow autonomous systems to operate within the bounds imposed by the warfighter.â'' ... â''It doesnâ''t have a particular product or application in mind,â'' said Dr. Zachery, an electrical engineer. â''It is basically to answer questions that can stimulate further research or illuminate things we did not know about before.â''

* [Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield in Britain] said he would ban lethal autonomous robots until they demonstrate they will act ethically, a standard he said he believes they are unlikely to meet. Meanwhile, he said, he worries that advocates of the technology will exploit the ethics research â''to allay political opposition.â''

* â''We donâ''t want to get to the point where we should have had this discussion 20 years ago,â'' said Colin Allen, a philosopher at Indiana University and a co-author of â''Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong,â'' published this month by Oxford University Press. ... In their book, Dr. Allen and his coauthor, Wendell Wallach, a computer scientist at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, note that an engineering approach â''meant to cover the range of challengesâ'' will probably seem inadequate to an ethicist. And from the engineerâ''s perspective, they write, making robots â''sensitive to moral considerations will add further difficulties to the already challenging task of building reliable, efficient and safe systems.â'' But, Dr. Allen added in an interview, â''Is it possible to build systems that pay attention to things that matter ethically? Yes.â''

* Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, agrees. â''If we talk about training a robot to make distinctions that track moral relevance, thatâ''s not beyond the pale at all,â'' he said. But, he added, letting machines make ethical judgments is â''a moral issue that people should think about.â''

So they all appear to agree that battlefield robots can be designed to behave ethically, or at least they agree that we have to have this discussion now, which is a good thing. Still, most of the discussion is based on theoretical considerations or computer simulations. We're still a long way from being able to claim that a completely autonomous gun-totting robot, with lots of subsystems, loaded with thousands of lines of code, subject to unexpected, untested conditions, won't shoot the wrong thing, or person. Or worse, that it won't go completely rogue. That said, I'm an optimist when it comes to our engineering capabilities. We'll get there.

PS: And if we don't ... there might be other means of stopping the 'bots. Over at our neighbor blog Risk Factor, Bob Charette wrote about WAR Defence, a London startup developing "weapons systems against robots, detection and monitoring of robotic entities, and 'robo-viruses.' " As Charette noted, "I never thought of fighting future robots as an emerging career opportunity, but with the military involvement in robots, the singularity supposedly approaching, maybe ..."