Automaton

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!

Continuing the theme of year-end robot roundups, Scientific American has a nice long article highlighting the big stories in robotics for 2007. Their thoughts on some of the technology for the upcoming year:

This sampling merely scratches the surface of the past year's advances in robotics that whet the appetite for what's to come: Early next year, for instance, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder will benchmark robotic devices to precisely mix and measure medications used in treatments such as chemotherapy. The robotic Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit are currently hunkering down in anticipation of the harsh Martian winter season but will soon resume their exploration of the Red Planet. And Scandanavian research firm Sintef is developing artificially intelligent equipment to help offshore oil and gas drilling platforms run more safely and efficiently.

Christmas has come and gone, and the New Year is almost upon us. Time for a look at the past yearâ''s new robots and to pick some winners!

Candidates include, among many others, WowWee's Dragonfly, Roboquad and Elvis robots, the iRobot Create, the Sony Rolly only available in Japan, Ijspeert's salamander robot locomoting in and out of water, Dean Kamen's prosthetic robotic arm, the SARCOS exoskeleton doubling as a remote controlled android, Honda's Asimo with its latest skill of serving tea as well as countless humanoid toys like the i-SOBOT.

The Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has already gone ahead and named their robot of the year 2007: A handling system by FANUC Ltd with M-430iA robot arms and visual tracking (check out a video clip). Their runner-ups include a host of industrial and service robots.

I've decided to give naming a "Top 3 of 2007" a shot and held a long debate - mostly with myself as I will admit - to pick my personal favorites. My kinds of robots are not those on the factory floors, but those you and I can see and interact with out on the streets, in offices or in our homes. And after some consideration, all the new humanoids didn't make my list - they may have the greatest potential, but I think they are still very far from being useful beyond amusement and are simply way too expensive. Here are the 3 that did make my list of favorite robots in 2007:

3. BeatBot's Keepon

The toy robot Keepon developed by the BeatBots project, Keepon dances to music (make sure to check out the video). Similar to last year's hilarious Tickle Me Elmo robot, Keepon is based on a simple idea, a simple design, but is fantastically well done. Somebody please tell me why they won't sell it!

2. Ugobe's Pleo

Another toy â'' but hey, thatâ''s where consumer robotics stands in 2007. But the Pleo is an exceptionally cool toy: The baby dino uses an impressive sensor suite in combination with an AI that allows it to develop distinct personalities according to user interactions. Pleo performs a large range of actions, including trembling in fear, wagging its tail and dancing with happiness, playing dead and sneezing - and you can train it! With the long awaited Pleo, the people at Ugobe have reached a new level of user interaction and - as some people claim - intelligence for a robot toy.

1. The DARPA Urban Challenge Robots

For me the title for robot of the year 2007 goes to the winners of the Urban Challenge. Winners, because three robots performed exceptionally well: Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing robot Boss, Stanford racing team's Junior and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango. Although their times in the race differed, all three robots far exceeded expectations. And thinking back to the first Grand Challenge in 2004, it is truly unbelievable how far robot technology has advanced in this field.

Miss a robot in the list? Disagree with my judgment? Or ready to compile your own top 3, 4, 5, ... 10? Feel free to post your comments!

The United States Department of Defense has released its roadmap through 2032 (link to actual report at the bottom of the page; large PDF warning) for unmanned systems in the military. For this first time, this report includes not only unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) but also unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned underwater and surface vehicles (UUVs and USVs); previous reports had focused primarily on UGVs.

This is a very long but pretty fascinating read, particularly the president's budget through 2013 for funding in the three areas (section 2.4). It's really interesting to see that the UGVs like PackBots and Talons seem to be way ahead of other unmanned systems, with the R&D budget drastically decreasing over the next several years as the procurement budget skyrockets. The UAVs and UUVs, on the other hand, will still have a lot of R&D money pumped into them over the next several years. UAVs seem to be most popular with the highest overall procurement budget.

The report also goes into a nice explanation of the Dull/Dirty/Dangerous mantra that is so popular with American robotics development:

• For the dull, allows the ability to give operators normal mission cycles and crew rest.

• For the dirty, increases the probability of a successful mission and minimizes human

  exposure.

• For the dangerous, lowers the political and human cost if the mission is lost.

Lower downside risk and higher confidence in mission success are two strong motivators for continued expansion of unmanned systems across a broad spectrum of warfighting and peacetime missions.

There's also some good stuff on standardization and interoperability within the industries, including things like message format and processor speed. This will be good reading for the CTOs and budding entrepreneurs out there.

For your viewing pleasure, here are some very strange Japanese robots doing some sort of Santa fan dance.

I found out just recently about Vision Robotics, a company in California with a pretty broad range of products (or eventual products), but all of them are based on computer vision and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) navigation technology.

Their agricultural products look pretty interesting; they're looking at developing a robot that can go through an orchard and pick ripe oranges off of trees, as well as one that can prune grape vines. The concept appears to be that one robot will scan the trees in each orchard row with its vision system, mapping out where each fruit is, while a second robot (I can't tell from the renderings if it's attached to the first one or not -- though they do like like two discrete modules) with the picking arms follows it and picks the fruit it has identified. I have to say, if anyone else is familiar with the Boomers from the anime Bubblegum Crisis, this thing looks terrifying.

I found out about Vision Robotics through a student at Olin College (my alma mater), where the company is sponsoring a senior project to develop an end-effector that can gently grasp and pick an orange off a tree without breaking the skin. The student also compared apples to oranges, pointing out that oranges contrast with the tree, while apples tend to blend in with the green leaves, making oranges an easier target for a vision system. Still, Vision Robotics does appear to be designing an apple picker as well.

On the home robots side, they've got patents on a vacuuming and mopping robot. Even though iRobot beat them to the punch on the concepts, Vision Robotics patented a design that uses a remote cleaning head that is much smaller and more mobile than the Roomba body; a module carrying power and other large, heavy components can stay out of the way while the connected cleaning head does its work. Unlike the Roomba, this robot (as conceived) also maps the room before vacuuming.

They also list an elder care "personal service" robot, though as with all of these elder care concepts developed in the US and Japan, their feasibility remains to be seen. The floor cleaning model is much better proven.

For anyone interested in moving to San Diego (or anyone already there), they list an open development position on their Careers page (linked at the bottom of their site).

Image source: www.visionrobotics.com

In this month's issue of Spectrum magazine, Erico covered the dispute between iRobot and Robotic FX bidding on the US Army xBot contract. Though the lawsuit is still in court, the Army has already moved: iRobot issued a press release this morning announcing that they had been awarded the contract. While iRobot's press release doesn't mention Robotic FX, they do acknowledge that they weren't just the lowest bidder:

"iRobot was selected to fulfill the contract as the lowest priced, technically qualified bidder deemed able to deliver as a responsible contractor."

This is a huge contract for iRobot. To date they've delivered about 1200 PackBots, and this contract could mean an order of up to 3000 over the next few years.

The folks at Kiva Systems pointed us to this little video they put together for the holiday season. Watch the 24 Kiva warehouse-automation bots dance to the tune of "March" from Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker."

The robotic ballet, choreographed by Kiva's Ryan Gariepy and Rob Stevens, took place at the company's headquarters in Woburn, Mass. "We didn't really choreograph it," Stevens told us, "it was more free-form dance!"

This New York Times article describes how Mars Rover Spirit's wheel, which hasn't worked since March 2006, ended up scraping Martian dust off a patch of silica -- and when silica is found naturally on Earth, it is in one of two environments that "teem with microbial life." Scientists are still investigating the silica patch it found to see what we can learn from it.

Also of note, this January will mark the rovers' fourth birthday on Mars, well in excess of their original 90 day mission.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to The Sharper Image, holiday shoppers can now find all their robots conveniently assembled on four pages (technically, lightsabers and scooters are not robots, but the majority of the products listed certainly are). A big "Shop for Bots" banner on the home page leads you there. This is an interesting indication of how popular robots are becoming for the average consumer -- of all the products they sell, the robots get to share the front page with highly popular GPS units and audio gadgets.

It's also interesting that they're only selling "finished products" like Wowwee's toys and the Pleo rather than DIY kits like Mindstorms or Vex. These robots are going to reach a very different audience.