DARPA Grand Challenge – For Humanoid Robots

Well, this is definitely interesting! In the spirit of the DARPA Grand Challenges for driverless vehicles, DARPA has apparently decided that those vehicles, do, indeed need drivers. The next challenge is to create humanoid robots that can drive cars. The fun begins on Oct. 1, 2012, the final demonstrations are due to be by the end of 2014.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47008018/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/#.T4Y2kNmMx8F

Interestingly, Boston Dynamics – the company that has created agile 4-legged robots mules and a faster robot (admittedly running on bent metal knees)

This follows on the move by the US Navy to create humanoid robots which can fight fires, drawing on the Virginia Tech robots:

http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/939-navy-humanoid-robot-firefighter.html

Once again, DARPA seems to have see where robots can go. In the 2005 challenge which I participated in (until semi-finals, at least) they had a lot of interest in innovate robotics that didn’t follow standard artificial intelligence engineering guidelines. The winner of the 2005 challenge, Stanley, didn’t used Ai to move -instead it ran stats on multiple, non-camera sensors and was “trained” to react to sensor patterns. DARPA’s willingness to support large numbers of entries indicates a flexibility of thinking that could move humanoid robotics beyond the run it has been stuck in ever since the Asimo debuted back in 2000.

What remains to be seen if the ambitious goals can actually be realized. Part of the DARPA spec is that the humanoid can sit in the car and drive, possibly even turning around to look through the windshield. This is not going to be easy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a robot trying to look behind itself for any reason, much less one that involves grasping a seat, balancing, and swiftly moving vision between the front and back.This implies a highly flexible neck or upper body, again something I haven’t seen much of in humanoids.

That alone might be worth the $2 million grand prize – peanuts, really, considering the amount of money we spend on other things. The cost of a single Space Shuttle launch might sponsor 50 of these kinds of challenges.

So, instead of “robots that jump” we will have “robots that rubberneck”.

How sustainability plug-ins would help web designers

Unlike web designers, physical designers and engineers think about sustainability when they create their products. They also understand that thinking about sustainability is part of the early design process; it’s not something that designers ignore and expect the downstream engineer to fix.

As a good example, several of the tools used for modeling physical products have plug-ins that give rough calculations of the expected environmental footprint of a product. As the designer works with a 3D model, and they plug-in the materials needed to manufacture it, they see an estimate of the greenhouse gas emmisions and waste produced by manufacture. Some of the tools are detailed in the following post:

http://www.good.is/post/new-software-could-help-engineers-create-greener-products/

Here’s an example for Solidworks:

http://www.solidworks.com/sustainability/sustainability-software.htm

 

 

DARPA makes a robot that can run, and sorta jump

Compared to the general robotic community, DARPA seems to get it right. The 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenge, and the subsequent Urban Challenge helped define the capabilities and limitations of driverless cars. Now, with the arival of the new “Cheetah” robot, we can see the capabilities and limitations of running robots. The Cheetah set a new record for speed, running about 18mph for an extended period of time.

If you watch this video, you can see that the robot is, well, less “robotic” than the typical variety. Instead of solving positions in a momentum-free world, the programming has created something that is clearly juggling its heavy weight quite nicely.

Equally, we see the limitations. Because the robot has limited senses, it can’t figure out where to place its feet to avoid falling. So, rather than add said sensors, the current robot has long, curved “sleigh runners” that it lands on. This keeps it stable when doing the little jumps necessary to run, but in all probability make it impossible to run on real ground. Recall that a real Cheetah would be able to bound up a very rough slope at speeds higher than this machine. While the robot’s gallop is impressive, there’s no evidence that it is dynamically adjusting – it looks fairly repetitive.

The worst part are the comments on the video, so lame as to defy analysis. One compared the robot to Skynet’s ancestor, strange since Skynet was clearly a mainframe-class, static AI running a defense network. This machine doesn’t look or act at all like that.

The other problem, which will be with robotics for a long time, is power. There’s a heavy electrical cord held by a human hand, and I shudder to think how fast a battery would wear out trying to power that run. It makes me think that anything short of a nuke will fail to create the robots of science fiction. And, if a robot that jumps is tethered to an electric cable, one might wonder why it should try to run at all.

I supposed even the caged (robotic) bird will sing from behind the bars.

Drexel basks in Asia’s glow

This article seemed exciting for a moment – looked like the US was finally doing something in humanoid robots.

Drexel Unveils Seven Humanoid Robotics on National

Engineers Week

http://www.azorobotics.com/news.aspx?newsID=2528

“…The seven identical robots will be sent to Penn, Purdue, Ohio State, South California, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon and MIT universities for research. The researchers of the corresponding universities will be provided adequate training to handle these robots. This step will take humanoid robotics to the next level…”

The catch? Not really, if you don’t notice that the robots were produced in Asia, and they are advanced HUBO robots. Robotic outsourcing? One more thing the US can’t make…It’s not that I think that the US should be first in humanoid robots. It’s more that it implies that we aren’t really thinking about the problems with Robots that Jump at all.

Everyone pretends not to shake hands with themselves

Here’s a post on NASA’s Robonaut 2, an update of the tele-operated space robot designed to facilitate work on the (defunct) Shuttle and International Space Station:

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/300727/20120217/nasa-robonaut-video-handshake.htm

Link to Robonaut 2 Site:

http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp

In itself, Robonaut 2 is quite interesting. They still care about its looks – it is more like the Rockteer than Boba Fett now. It moves faster and demonstrates greater dexterity than the earlier model. Robonaut has some ability to move on its own, but to date, it has been used in a remote-control fashion. The near-term goal – send Robonaut out in a tele-operation fashion to work outside on the Space Station – is close. The long-term goal – have an autonomous Robonaut repair the Space Station – is decades away at least.

Here’s the video:

http://t.co/swnFPvtt

In the video, you can see Robonaut 2 extend its arm. It doesn’t go for the outstretched hand – it moves  down and possibly to the left. However, the human is willing to take its hand and shake. That’s a good sign – the problem with robot arms for decades has been that they are dangerous, even deadly to be around. One small miscalculation by the program or arm sensors and you have been thrown across the room.

But once again, the real show is not the slow progress no Robonaut, but how people react. NASA is in serious touble in early 2012, with the proposed budget zapping it even more. The exploration of space is hard to sell. So, let’s see NASA Space Station crew communicate with an Ai! Maybe the public will like the agency better if they look a little like Science Fiction Channel.

Everyone seems convinced, both journalists and Internet riff-raff commenting on the video, that this device is a real robot that wanted to shake hands.  If the press and public were told what’s actually going on, they would assume that (1) intelligent Robonaut is just around the corner, or (2) there’s a conspiracy to hide the real robot overlords which the goverment is cooking up to mate with us, Cylon-style.

The NASA site certainly doesn’t try to enlighten anyone – it’s a good practice for an agency worried about having its funding cut to make the public think you have a true Ai – rather than a humanoid tele-operated system that might be extremely useful in some environments. Apparently, it’s good practice to say that this device is just a tiny hop away from “machine overlord” status, just so long as it isn’t actually overlording yet. We really want it to have a mind of its own, properly docile and servicing the International Space Station, but a friendly pet that will extend its steely hand in a soft glove of friendship.

People like seeing The Prophecies coming true!

Seeing this, I can’t help but think how little we’ve progressed from Roman “temple tricks”. Back in the Roman city of Alexandria, temples could have automatic doors, and mechanical gods inside ratcheted on gears to wow the mob. This kind of thing already had a long history then – lots of older Egyptian statues had channels to let hidden priests “tele-operate” the god by speaking in a divine voice of overlord-ery.

We have to differentiate what Robonaut can do (useful tele-operation work) from what we want it to do.

The reality is that our current “machine overlords” are sensor packs, monitors and dashboards that feed back information to us on ourselves. The Quantified Self movement has a better sense of reality. Computers have failed massively at being intelligent, but they have worked well as Lickleider’s “Intelligence Amplifiers” – adding a punch to intelligent behavior. Now, quantified self lets us guide our own behavior more rationally.

A “robot” that monitors my body temperature, then acts by sending messages about my health to Facebook is the goal of Quantitfied Self.

http://www.quantifiedself.com

At present, the most intelligence is seen in how Internet apps augment our social communication. Rather than shaking hands with a supposed intelligent robot, it makes more sens to shake hands with our friends, or, in the case of Quantified Self, ourselves. Of course, it has its own Doomer prophecy, and a little too much trust that “goodness” is the same as “optimization” (computer operation invading ordinary life and thought, again).

A little too optimistic at TED:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OrAo8oBBFIo

Reality bites:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/02/psychology-human-biology

But then, Robonaut 2 in its hand-shake cameo is nothing of the sort. It is a temple-trick. It is a big metal puppet that doesn’t even augment our own actions. We are content to see this as a future god.

But what if the future of robotics is in an advanced form of the Quantified Self? We’ll be communicating to ourselves, via our robot puppets, that we are our own gods. It’s lonely.

Is there an app for that robot? No.

I read with some amusement (tinged with irritation) the following report on “robots that can bring you a beer”, probably in response to the upcoming Superbowl:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/gadgets/6362970/Robots-bring-beer-but-Rosie-still-takes-cake

The article considers a few robots that might be able to “bring you a beer”. First, it highlights the Asimo open a screw-top bottle – pretty cool, if it can actually do this for real, instead of in an industrial-robot style pattern.

The last part is more interesting. The article tells you how your smartphone can be even more useful than ever, if you stick it into a little robot body. What’s extraordinary is that the benefits of having a small, hobby-sized robot motoring around aren’t explained. There’s also no discussion of whether a cellphone is smart enough to create intelligent behavior.

But the last part goes right to the center of Robots That Jump. Part of my beef with the delusions of robotics – that we are about to create superhuman creatures that will revolt and enslave us – is the misunderstanding of computer power. There is also a misunderstanding of the power of individual programs. According to the article, to make your robot better in the future, you will just “download an app”.

Eeech.

The first reason web apps work is that the smartphone is a very standardized device, with a closed OS (yes, even Android) that is highly predictable in behavior. The second is that web apps are typically used for communication – extending the basic use of a cellphone – rather than number-crunching or creating intelligent actions. There’s a world of difference between making an app that allows people to share photos, and software than analyzes the same photo. True, apps like Shazam hit the cloud for pattern-recognition, but one wonders whether any “cloud” of computers could handle all the cellphones running intelligent software.

The delusion in this article is: Apps blew up the cellphone market. Now there is a way to make a cellphone run a robot body. Therefore, apps will blow up robotics.

This pop science article is far from the only place we’re seeing this idea. It is as if every time a new technology advance comes along, it will “finally” kick robotics into high gear.

The problem is, IMHO that we know exactly what will kick robots into high gear – fluid motion, natural walks, movement in human spaces without modification, an ability to pick and hold objects without special techniques. No mind, just a robot that could do an aerobics class if it wished.

But our faith in Techna, the goddess that rewards us who believe in technology with ever-better apps is strong. Surely, when we are ready she will give us robot beer-bringers?

IMHO, a person starting out with robots is still doing better to use a simple microprocessor than program a beast like iOS. Apple’s Object-C libraries call for remembering long class names that put even German compound words to shame. Sensors are there, but limited. Brains are nonexistent, unless you hit the “cloud”. And valuable apps don’t think, they share.

 

Metal Puppets have feelings, too!

At the beginning of the year, there’s a lot of optimism. For the last few years, the stock market has been positive, along with the US economy, only to suffer “slowdowns” later in the year. In the area of robotics, we see both optimism and willful delusion at its peak for the year right now.

Jump to CES 2012, and an interview between iRobot and Forbes reporter Elizabeth Woyke.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2012/01/12/ces-irobots-telepresence-bot-ava-has-emotions-video/

Ava with a phony human head

earlier link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2011/09/15/inside-look-at-first-apps-for-irobots-iosandroid-robot-ava/

Well, Ava is a telepresence robot – the kind of remote-controlled metal puppet that robot science has been experimenting with for 30 years, if not more. The biggie is not creating a telepresence robot that looks like an animated broomstick – it’s using an iOS or Android tablet to run the robot’s so-called “brains”.  Apparently, iRobot is counting on Google and/or Apple to adapt features designed for cellphones (e.g. face and voice recognition) so that this can be applied in a standards-based way to robots. Great, since iRobot doesn’t have to create custom programs for the same.

Interestingly, Ava isn’t even on the iRobot website – just a trade show bunny.

Certainly, using a tablet for the computer might help in robot adoption. There’s been no real success at creating a “robot OS“, and so the boost to 1980s personal computers provided by DOS and Mac OS has been missing. Tablets are relatively cheap and a huge community exists to program them. The “app” model tends to produce single-purpose programs, often of low enough complexity that a lone programmer can produce quality code. And the app community might help develop “robotic apps” in the mode that has led to an explosion of apps on cellphones and tablets. The potential is similar to Microsoft’s Kinect SDK. What’s not to like?

I suppose to a young Millennial reporter from Forbes who doesn’t know anything about the past or robotics (sorry, the Millennial generation understands even less of the past then previous gens) – Ava must seem like something that “must happen”, “tomorrow today”.

Not.

To clarify, there are lots of telepresence robots, both old and new. Many of the groups making them, (including iRobot) have fielded several models starting about a decade ago. The current tech-everywhere boom, in contrast to a generally down economy, has made these robots interesting again:

Here’s one service/teleoperator robot actually doing stuff, from VGO Robotics

http://www.vgocom.com

VGO, another metal puppet

And, we cannot leave out this Google tele-operated robot worthy of Big Bang Theory:

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-02/low-cost-diy-telepresence-robot

Johnny Lee - or Sheldon?

And my old friend, Fred Nikgohar, at RoboDynamics:

http://robodynamics.com/

Fred in Luna

Boy, singularityhub.com (where I found Fred’s new stuff) has the Techna religion in full swing, witness this quote:

“...Will the future be filled with cool technologies and endless opportunities or will our own creations lead to eventual doom?…“

These were the guys warning us about the coming “End Times” 1000 years ago, if reincarnation is a reality…

Another “blast from the early 2000s” – Anybot

https://www.anybots.com/#front

Jeff Bezos and Anybot

This in itself is hardly “innovation”, except that cheap, mass-produced computers are being used to operate the robots. Tele-operated robots with enought height to show a screen “face” to humans is an idea many years in the making. They were being being tested in “trial” runs  in 2002. iRobot’s Ada looks behind the curve, rather than leading it, though I saw no mention of the tele-operated robot they released right after their floor-sweeper.

Now, onto the claims and willful delusion of the reporter, in the main article on Forbes.

1. Ava is “intelligent” because “she” (um, where are the genitals) has iOS or Android apps installed. That’s what the article says. This is crazy. Apps are not powerful enough to produce meaningful intelligence. IBM’s Watson needed several-thousand high-performance CPUs to produce one feature of human memory – deducing a question from an answer. A low-power, mobile device running a robot can’t possibly produce intelligence of the “Ai” variety.Why does the author say this? One possiblity is that, in the mind of the tech-faithful, robots are becoming intelligent, and will soon be smarter than us, end times, skynet, upload, immortal… (gag).Or, for this author, intelligence is the same thing as running a mobile app. It is as if intelligence and “good app” are the same. Such a statement tends to validate those old hippies out there who complain that Millennials lack the ability to question their own preconceived notions. A bit of reflection should make it obvious how stupid this is. If that’s the case, I recommend she read: “You are not a Gadget” (though it’s too long to text)http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.htmlApps are simply not intelligent. The only way that would happen is if the robo-app Ajaxed its way into a monster server cloud, which is suppose is possible someday.  The reporter confuses utility with intelligence. She maps gadget-ness to having a mind.
2. Ada is special because of her height (nope, that has been done for about 30 years).
3. Ada is special because she has emotions.This was irritating enough to motivate me to write this entire blog. It is another example of the bizzare vitalism that has resurfaced in a supposedly secular, scientific culture. Whatever Ada does to flash “her” lights is not emotion. The mammalian emotional brain is extremely unlikely to resemble iOS in any way. There are unlikely to be discrete programs creating emotion, software, discrete states, variables, etc. Ada most likely has some programs sampling recent sensory history, and then applying some state engine rules to jump to an “emotional” state.To let Mark Chiappetta blather on about this “female” robot’s emotions (girls are more emotional, of course and flash pink) is the sign of a nonprofessional journalist.“…Ava’s color-altering moods don’t flare up often…” - Elizabeth Woyke, Forbes OnlineApparently, asking Mark if Ada’s emotions were real, or if tested they would match, or at least mimic, animal emotion would have been like farting – too impolite. It’ like someone interviewing a priest and asking about “the meaning” of their faith, carefully ignoring hard questions whether a saint really did appear on a slice of toast.In fact, Ada is a big metal puppet. There’s much that is cool about that – it is what Aristotle wrote about when he imagined replacing human slaves with machines 2500 years ago:“…There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that
   

   ‘Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus…’

   as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.”  - Aristotle, Politics

   But, when I watch a puppet perform I don’t think that its movements make it emotional, unless I’m a gullible rustic like those visiting temples 2000 years ago where Heron of Alexandria put his robots. I bet the robot which hauled his “automatic play” to the stage looked a lot like the broomstick robots above.

   I might talk to a small child about the emotions of Kermit the frog, but kids more than a few years old know that the frog puppet doesn’t feel anything – it is “tele-operating” emotions created by its manipulator.

   And, I’m not knocking priests. There are plenty of religious people who enjoy debating their beliefs.  A typical Jesuit these days (though not in 1500 A.D.) would be happy if a chance for debate about the reality of God or soul came up – they’ve thought it through and through and can discuss it rationally, if not always convincingly.

   However, the new tech-religious faithful are more afraid of insulting their god, or their high poo-bahs at trade shows by asking if robots like Ada actually have emotions. It’s the new machine-vitalism.

   This article is one of hundreds on the web where the reporter blindly accepts any crazy thing said about arobot, since they apply only their irrational belief in Techna, and not their knowledge of robotic science.  iRobot may have created a useful robot, and I’m not knocking that. I’m attacking too-easy belief in “the ghost in the machine”.

   Now, if you say we will get more funding for robotics if we pretend the metal puppets are alive, you are exactly like a priest operating one of Heron’s “temple tricks” who lies to keep the unwashed believing in their religion.

   Hey, my programming skills are modest, but I could write code for a room-dimmer that used ultrasound and a microprocessor to detect a person entering a room, and flashed pink lights if they “left too soon”. Is this anger? Have I created emotion? The only way Ada can have emotions is if we accept that said room-dimmer can be “happy” or “sad”.

   We could apply a Turing test (essentially 1950s Behaviorism applied to machines) and say that if  Ada flashes the right lights at the right times, she has an emotion. This is acceptable only if actions are the only reality, and inner states (mechanism) is irrelevant or don’t even exist.

   But if you believe that, emotion in humans isn’t any different from flashing lights when you bump into something. And, if that’s the case, the scream of a dying human is not different from the reboot bell on a PC. I suspect that there’s a lot more going on in the human versus the machine.

   But the Forbes article, supposedly produced for critical-thinking adults, has a Santa Claus like acceptance of the intelligent and emotional Ada, along with an implied future rise of her brethren. Ada may be a useful metal puppet, but the idea of her iPad brain having a “mad app” is crap. I doubt if Ada Byron herself, even in the most kooky of her drug-induced dreams, would have accepted this idea.

   Here’s my advice to everyone who writes such faith-based machine flapdoodle. Stop worrying about the mind of a robot. Stop acting like a puppet really has feelings. Oddly enough, the same reporter did an article on RoMeLa, the Robotics & Mechanism Laboratory in the forefront 0f creating Robots That Jump.

   http://www.romela.org/main/Robotics_and_Mechanisms_Laboratory
   

   

   CHARLI - No Mind, Great Bod

   Unlike the babbling about the “mind” of a robot rife on tech-blogs and in Singularian bibles, robots that move confidently in the environment don’t require speculating about a ghost in the machine – they either do or they don’t work. My feeling  (unlike Ada, who doesn’t have any), is that Robots that Jump are the real cool.

Robots are fragile

The never-ending drumbeat for the rise of the robots imagines them super-strong, super-fast, and able to recover from massive injury and keep on going – sort of like mechanical zombies. In reality, robots today can’t jump because they are so fragile. This must explain the puzzlement techno-freaks have over why Japan, with its huge robot efforts, couldn’t field any of these “ready to take over” models in the  Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, the best that they could do were tethered tele-operated machines.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120106f1.html?fb_ref=article_japantimes

Telling quote:

“According to experts, the biggest reason Japanese robots such as Honda’s Asimo were not used early on was their vulnerability to high radiation levels, which could easily damage their integrated circuits.

The domestic robot industry, in fact, had stopped working on ways to shield robots from extreme radiation around 10 years before the Fukushima crisis, and manufacturers and institutes were caught completely off guard, experts said.”

This story shows how little robotics has actually advanced in decades, in terms of real-world useful devices. The robots that actually went in site were US company iRobot Packbots.

http://www.irobot.com/gi/ground/510_PackBot

These robots are not much different (though cheaper and sporting better sensors) than bomb-squad robots produced 20 or more years ago. In fact, I remember robotic, tele-operated arms being used in nuclear reactors in the late 1950s. They, and Packbot were built from a “body” perspective – a Robot That Jumps – though they were, and are, dumb as a stump.

The advanced Japanese “domestics” could not enter the reactor area for the same reasons that humans couldn’t – radiation. As microprocessors have become smaller and more complex, they have become ever-more sensitive to radiation. An Asimo entering the reactor area would have instantly fried its circuits. This combines with the sensitivity of robots to Electro-magnetic pulses, or EMPs, to paint a picture of a fragile lab experiment.

So, it’s not a surprise that “radiation hardened” robots like the PackBot are really tele-operated, with minimal autonomy. It is just too hard to make a complex brain in silicon that can also ride on a mobile robot body. The way we’re making more complex brains makes them more and more delicate.

NASA, which operates robots in environments with high levels of radiation, handles the problem simply – use old microprocessors. The Mars MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity used scaled-up versions of CPUs used in Macintosh computers from the early 1990s. The clock speed is 33MHz, about 100 times slower than a fast desktop today. My understanding is that the chip is radiation-hardened by making it much larger (with thicker wires) than the standard chip (a full discussion of radiation-hardening at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening). The take-home is that you can’t just put a shield around a modern chip – you have to redesign it, and go back into the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000

A modern 2012 Macintosh, or a comparable Windows system, would fry in the Martian radiation environment – and it’s not really that bad compared to Earth. As it is, the MER rovers have had several instances of memory corruption, despite radiation-hardened memory – an errant cosmic ray required a scary reboot of the system.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

We could see a similar idea at work in the Space Shuttle, which had the luxury of being below Earth’s radiation belts and relatively protected. For many years, the Shuttles continued to use 386 processors (pre windows 95 stuff). The latest and greatest, at least the computers you would would get at Best Buy, and whose microprocessors are the same as most robotic efforts, were just to fragile. While radiation was less of an issue, fragility probably was. It would be very interesting to find out if the laptops the astronauts bring up are subject to problems, even in low Earth orbit.

Why are we at this stage? Part of the problem is the very technology enabling advanced robotics – silicon-based processors. If you make the wires small, they’re vulnerable. To reach the complexity required for a robotic brain, the chips become fragile. As we iterate through the final shrinking of this technology to wires a few atoms wide, we will end up with exquisitely sensitive chips. The will be powerful, but will require massive shielding to work in any real-world environment.

So, unlike the dorks at Slashdot think, the robot race isn’t about to take over yet – instead of a shotgun through the head like a zombie, just get a radiation source and – zap! Fascinating that Asimov had his positronic robots vulnerable in the same way – in more than one story, a gamma ray blast was able to destroy the robot’s brain. Strange that we’ve forgotten this (or don’t want to remember) and movies are made with robots that can’t be destroyed.

I suspect that robot’s still won’t be ready for the next natural disaster – at present, the human body, or simple teleoperated devices, are the way to go. However, it is interesting that the Japanese are going to try automated farm machinery in the area damaged by the tidal wave.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/05/japan-to-put-robots-to-work-on-futuristic-farm-in-tsunami-zone/

The best irony – instead of showing us what an automated farm machine might look like, we get a picture of the Asimo with the morning $5 double extra frapmeister chinuscope coffee, as if a robot that can’t even go outside is going to farm. This is the silly gap between robot fantasy and reality.

The “Uncanny Valley” and Autism

Robot scientists have long known about “the uncanny valley” – a place between a real human face, and a cartoon robot one.

http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html

Cartoon-y robots that display basic human features, but keep it basic (or look like a funny animal) are accepted. But as you get too close to human, the like turns to disgust. We’ve had some recent examples of this effect – the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within springs to mind, as do latter efforts like Beowulf and The Polar Express. But everyone likes talking trains, or walking french fry packs. The Uncanny Valley explains why current CGI characters are almost entirely humanoid “aliens” or “creatures” instead of virtual people.

A robot, even a primitive one like Electro, built for the 1939 World’s Fair, is not really scary – it’s as cool as any robot today:

Cool

Here’s a YouTubevideo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuyTRbj8QSA

The popularity of zombies and vampires comes from the opposite direction – they embrace the Uncanny Valley.  They are “almost human”, but that little difference makes them monsters.

They keep trying to make humanoid robots in Japan which cross the “uncanny valley”. Unfortunately, every effort I’ve seen lands square in the middle of horror.

Yewww

Even more awful – youtube video of a robot zombie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXBM0w9lV1k&feature=related

My suggestion: Anyone trying to make a zombie movie should rent this robot. Instead of rice falling heedlessly from this metal puppet’s mouth, it could be brains.

I suppose robot fanatics, uber-futurists, and transhumanists try to tell themselves these things are cool. They’re not, and their uncritical, reality-denying boosterism of such electric puppets undermines their broader belief system. These things are horrible. They hardly inspire the rest of us to embrace a future full of them.

A recent PNAS article (cited at this link) demonstrated that the Uncanny Vally exists for non-human primates. It is something we acquire as we grow up and become social – very young infants don’t show the disgust seen with older children. So, this is not just our “prejudice”, and it won’t go away with the younger generation as they grow up with robots. It will take genetic engineering to eliminate the Uncanny Valley in humans.

But one of the most fascinating aspects of the Uncanny Valley is that artists can make images of robots, even strongly humanoid ones, that don’t disgust.  Rather than put one here, I suggest doing a Google search on “robot girl” or “robot boy” to see what I mean. Most images are erotic, but the fact that they are erotic means they overcome the Uncanny Valley. Apparently, artists can create images that, unlike photographic ones, don’t have that “dead” quality. Great photographers can do the same.

What’s interesting is that the Uncanny Valley doesn’t apply to the autistic. Observers of Second Life, the reference “Virtual World”, have noted that many of the most passionate members suffer Aspeger’s syndrome, a mild form of adult autism. Here’s a slide presentation on the topic, noting the potential for doing research on autism in virtual worlds:

http://www.slideshare.net/Milton.Broome/autism-and-aspergers-in-second-life

Here’s an older article on the topic:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7012645/ns/health-mental_health/t/virtual-world-teaches-real-world-skills/#.TvilPjVSRtw

This article makes an interesting point about the difference between virtual worlds and standard games. In short, the non-repetitive interaction of a virtual world is better for autistics than the repetition of a game. Some might argue that it is true for everyone(!) :

Now, research is being done with deliberate “uncanny valley” puppets and autistic kids.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-16261057

In this concept, a robot firmly in the uncanny valley is given as a playmate to autistics. The kids are nasty with the robots – initially doing stuff like trying to gouge their eyes out. But the robot does not provide negative feedback (!) from this behavior, and the autistic child soon changes their behavior in a more positive direction – after the robot demonstrates that the aggressive behavior “hurt” it.

But here’s my own take on the “uncanny valley”, tying it into Robots That Jump. The near-human robots look like dead people that are animated – in fact, they are zombies. In the image above, I immediately detected that the machine doesn’t care about how its hair looks – it is being styled by an outsider. The machine doesn’t know its hair is wrong, because it doesn’t have sensors and doesn’t react to its appearance.

The problem is that most robot designers and CGI artists focus on making their creature look as real as possible. The last part of the “uncanny valley” is behavior and movement – even the slight motions we see when a real person holds still for a portrait. Susan Sontag wrote a book on photography which mentions this effect. Nested deep in the political dribble (obviously my opinion) she described how photographs create “dead people”, since the highly realistic images aren’t aware of themselves, and can’t react to their surroundings. Timelessness, which is also true of “models” in CGI, and designed robots, is the root of the uncanny valley. It doesn’t bother very young children, who have not developed a model of others being aware of themselves. It doesn’t bother autistics as much, since they experience subtle behavior indicating self-awareness as complex data that they have to laboriously process.

The lesson for robot designers, is that behavior should come before appearance. Making a nasty humanlike puppet with herky-jerky motions is the source of the uncanny valley. Awareness of physical space is a must. Traditional puppets (rather than the metal monster puppets created by robot designers) don’t have this problem, since their operators infuse them with lifelike behavior – they feel as if they were alive, aware of themselves, and reacting to their surroundings.

Designers creating humanoid robots have put the cart before the horse – making them look good, with nothing inside. This is the exact description of an “undead” creature. Little wonder we hate them, and wonder at the Singularians who dream of being one of them, downloaded into immortal (clumsy) robot bodies.

I’d much prefer a cartoony Robot that Jumps to an anatomically-correct, lurching zombie sex-slave.

China keeps working on Humanoids

Like the rest of Asia, China has been working for many years on the development of humanoid robots. Their models seem similar to earlier Japanese designs, with the shuffling “bent knee” walk that Robots that Can’t Jump typically display.

Case in point:

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/12/bhr-3-humanoid-robot/

BHR-3 From Beijing Institute of Technology

There is more detail at http://www.plasticpals.com/?p=28937

The robots are functional, and are being supplied for publicity and promotional purposes, similar to the PR provided by Japanese robots. As far as practical…well, another decade, no Robots That Jump. I’m beginning to feel we are in the robot version of Zoolander.

Here’s a link to the robot in a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPAuLoE1e-0&feature=player_embedded

It’s also ironic how the robots – this one, and all the other huanoids since the 1990s – are previewed with dance music. It would be more interesting if the robots were getting something from the music. People use music to sync their movements in social interaction, and “feel the beat” as a guiding forces. No other animal, except possibly Parrots, “feel a beat”. A robot that wanted to dance when there was a heavy beat in the background would be very interesting. Instead, we play the music so people feel the beat, and possibly forgive the robot’s clumsy locomotion as dance.

Here’s another video link showing (slow) dance music with clumsy robots:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztaRq2jRIng&feature=related

(sigh)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHJf365p_zw&feature=related

It would be much cooler to see someone get the sense-motor feedback loop working, even if the robot fell down constantly, compared to these windup staged events.

In their current form, humanoid robots are doing the same function (and not all that differently) that mechanical Temple Gods performed in the Roman Empire. The public has their religion (Terminator), and then sees some toys in a temple that mimic or imply the presence of the real (Terminator) god. The fact that most posts on the Chinese robot reference Skynet, and imaginary movie thing-e, proves my point. This is not the positive role that similar “hopeful” devices have in stimulating research – it is simple affirmation of religious faith in our goddess Techna.

Let’s make one listen, jump, and fall down.