Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (ASIT) have just unveiled the latest edition to their family of androids, the HRP-4. HRP-4 is designed “in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete,” and it certainly is pretty damn lean… At 5 feet tall it only weighs 86 pounds, and it boasts increased flexibility of its 34 joints over its predecessors. Despite its apparent lack of big fat heavy stuff like powerful motors, computers, and batteries, it has no trouble doing all of the important android basics:

HRP-4 is designed to aid in the development of robots that could replace humans in simple manual labor, specifically to address Japan’s impending labor shortage (due to an aging population and low birthrate). While I’m all for androids, when it comes to manual labor and repetitive tasks the human form (while adaptable) is not necessarily optimal, and I have to wonder whether it really makes sense to use humans as a research model in that respect.

HRP-4 will be available in 2011 for about $305,000.

VIA [ Physorg ] and [ Pink Tentacle ]

You know, I never thought about it until now, but QB would make a pretty decent (albeit kinda expensive) Weeble.

Also, I really liked this illustration from the Anybots FAQ on how to use QB while on a business trip:

Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

[ Anybots QB ]

For Discover Magazine’s 30th anniversary, they’re posting a series of predictions from eminent scientists about what’s going to happen over the next 30 years. One of these scientists is Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics at MIT and CTO of iRobot, and he’s got some interesting things to say (besides the all too familiar “robots right now are like computers in the 80s”):

One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it’s too cheap not to be autonomous. Military robots right now are too expensive to be autonomous—you can’t afford to have them screw up. If the Roomba misses a spot, no big deal, it can find it later. So there will be a lot more robot autonomy, but surprisingly it will start out at the low end. It will trickle up to the high end over time.

Too cheap not to be autonomous… The ‘trickle up’ idea for robotics isn’t something I’ve heard people talk about much. The conventional way of thinking is that expensive and complex robots with expensive and complex sensors will provide the origins of autonomy, and then as the hardware gets cheaper and more accessible, robots offering the same autonomous capabilities will also get cheaper and more accessible. After all, this is what happens with computers. Brooks is right, though, in that to some extent, the more expensive a robot is, the less likely we are to trust it entirely to itself. In order for true autonomy to trickle up from the bottom, however, we’re going to have to overcome the hardware limitations and start getting access to more technology like the $25 SLAM system in the Neato XV-11.

Cars will certainly be more robotic. There will be many more robots in our houses, in our hospitals, in our factories, and in the military. We don’t have armed robot soldiers yet, but if we did, a robot could afford to shoot second, where a person could not. A robot doesn’t care whether its life is at risk. One can imagine robots getting a lot better at detecting what’s dangerous and what’s not dangerous: where there’s a gun and where there isn’t one. They might actually become more moral than we are.

I know that this is a somewhat contentious subject, but I tend to agree with Brooks here, although I’m not sure about the morality bit… Plenty of people definitely don’t agree, but I think the idea of being able to shoot second with no risk is an important advantage that robots have and humans don’t.

[ Discover ]

PASADENA, Calif. — The rover Curiosity, which NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission will place on Mars in August 2012, has been rolling over ramps in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to test its mobility system. The suspension system on NASA Mars rover Curiosity easily accommodates rolling over a ramp in this Sept. 10, 2010, test drive inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Curiosity uses the same type of six-wheel, rocker-bogie suspension system as previous Mars rovers, for handling uneven terrain during drives. Its wheels are half a meter (20 inches) in diameter, twice the height of the wheels on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers currently on Mars.

Pimpin’. Those Martians gonna be jealous.

[ JPL ]

You’ve got more nerves in your fingertips than in (almost) any other part of your body. This is because you get a lot of critical information from your fingertips: every time you touch something, or pick something up, your biological sensing system sends your brain information about weight and strength and keeps you from wantonly crushing things. PR2 may not have nerves, but it does have tactile sensors on its grippers, and PhD student and Willow Garage intern Joe Romano has taught PR2 to recognize a variety of tactile cues and act on them intelligently.

This appears to build to some extent on previous PR2 research, like that brilliant bottle squeezing technique we wrote about a year ago… But there’s still a lot of potential here for fine manipulation, as well as keeping PR2 from inadvertently tossing you through a wall.

It’s pretty cool (and borderline shocking) how to see how fast PR2 is improving in all of those little ways that differentiate between a robot that’s simply functional, and a robot that’s… Comfortable. For example, remember PR2′s beer fetching demo? At the end, in order to get the beer from PR2′s hand, you had to pull up somewhat unnaturally on the bottle, moving the robot’s entire arm to let it know that you wanted it to let go. With this new programming, it would be a much more natural motion, since PR2 can tell when you’re touching the bottle and gently release its hand.

Make sure you stick around through the very end of the video to see what the whole point of this research really was.

[ Willow Garage ]

Tandy Trower, who helped launch Microsoft Robotics Studio back in 2006, has started a brand spankin’ new robotics company called Hoaloha Robotics. The goal? Affordable ($5000 – $10000) socially assistive (i.e. elder care) robots in the next three to five years. Trower envisions a robot able to do all of the conventional remote monitoring and pill reminder stuff, but also able to assist with movement, object retrieval, and potentially provide some degree of intelligent social interaction.

Trower believes he can make an important contribution by developing a common interface and software that will make assistive robots easy to use and customize with applications, similar to the way Apple standardized the interface and application model for smartphones. “This is what primarily I believe is holding back most of the industry right now. It’s not that robots can’t be built, it’s that nobody has defined the software that’s going to turn robots into useful appliances,” he said.

Er, they haven’t? Hm.

“The components exist; it’s not difficult to build such a platform,” he said. “What people have lacked is the ability to envision what the right package should contain and, most important, what the applications and user interface should be.”

Now that’s something I wholeheartedly agree with. Or at least, I agree that the interface is going to be the tricky part. I’m not trying to minimize the amount of work that it’s going to take to get the hardware and programming up to snuff, but in order to be an effective assistive robot, the Hoaloha platform is going to have to be more independent than a Roomba or an XV-11, both of which are designed to be totally independent (more or less) and neither of which quite pulls it off. This, specifically, is what Hoaloha is going to be focusing on, partnering with other companies for hardware development. And when it comes to hardware components, they do exist, and they’re getting cheaper in leaps and bounds, making that three to five year timeframe (and the target price) potentially achievable.

Also, here’s the same obligatory quote we’ve been hearing for like the last decade:

Trower said the industry feels a lot like the early days of the PC, when there were Apple II and TRS-80 computers, but they weren’t yet doing a lot to enhance productivity or change people’s lives.

Dammit, I’m getting old over here… It feels like we’ve been stuck in the roboeighties forever.

[ Hoaloha Robotics ] VIA [ Seattle Times ] and [ Hizook ]

Thanks Dan!

Juanma Oyarzábal and Álvaro Amor are two students of Computer Engineering at the University of Deusto in Bilbao (that’s in Spain). For their final year project, they created this small swarm of construction robots who cooperate to build a structure (mostly) autonomously. The long-term concept is that robots will be able take over many of the repeatable heavy lifting tasks on a construction site with minimal human supervision.

Thanks to this new way of looking at construction, costs and construction time can be reduced considerably, and it exempts the workers of the most arduous tasks so that they can focus on more rewarding tasks such as finishing facilities and monitoring that everything runs properly.

While this is the first swarm of constructobots I’ve seen, getting robots to build structures by themselves is something we’ve seen a few times before around here… There was that robot bricklayer that’s able to lay bricks so precisely that they create pictures out of reflected sunlight, and the robot that can “print” an entire custom house out of concrete in a single day.

Incidentally, I love how the video looks like it was shot in a dorm room, and evidently they only had access to one color sensor that had to be shared between four robots. Mad props on the suit (gold cufflinks!) and fancy shoes… Way to keep it classy guys.

Thanks Juanma and Álvaro!

See this friendly looking piece of equipment? Just stick your head in the middle there, and a tiny little robot will fix your eye problems and you’ll get telekinetic powers.* Those giant coils are very precise magnetic field generators, and they’re capable of manipulating a half-millimeter long microbot with a fine enough touch to get it to fix clots in the blood vessels in your eyes:

The whole system is called OctoMag, and the primary advantage that it offers (besides the robotic fine manipulation that makes other assistive surgical systems so promising) is that the microbot is completely untethered. So, instead of having to shove a bunch of needles into your eyeballs and dig around, one single needle can deposit the robot, which does its thing with minimal invasiveness and then comes back out via the same needle. Very tidy.

This same type of technology can also be used to do itty bitty construction projects, as in this video of the MiniMag magnetic micromanipulation system, which won the free-style and manipulation events at the 2010 NIST Microrobotics Challenge:

[ OctoMag (PDF) ]

*Telekinetic abilities not guaranteed

This is neither the first, nor the best, robot dancing video we’ve seen, but what I like about this one is how unapologetically not made for dancing this robot is. It’s an industrial robot, in an industrial setting, and you get the sense that it might be neglecting its duty as boxes pass it by in the background while it’s groovin’ out.

So why is it dancing, you ask? Because it’s a robot, and if you have access to a robot, it’s basically impossible to keep yourself from finding cool (albeit non-productive) stuff to do with it.

VIA [ YouTube ]

Last August, we posted about some swarm robots at EPFL that evolved deceptive behaviors to fool other robots into starving to death (or something). These behaviors were passive, however, in that the robots weren’t making intelligent decisions to deceive other robots, but simply executing evolved behaviors where deception improved overall fitness.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have taught a robot to be able to identify situations where deception might be a good idea, and then use deceptive tactics to help it accomplish its goals. While the immediately obvious application is militaryish (and the research is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research), deception is potentially important in lots of other situations. One example is a search and rescue scenario, where a robot might be better off deceiving victims than informing them that (say) there’s a 93.77% chance that everything is about to go terribly horribly wrong.

Their first step was to teach the deceiving robot how to recognize a situation that warranted the use of deception. A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception — there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception. Once a situation was deemed to warrant deception, the robot carried out a deceptive act by providing a false communication to benefit itself. The technique developed by the Georgia Tech researchers based a robot’s deceptive action selection on its understanding of the individual robot it was attempting to deceive.

To test out the deception programming, the researchers had their robots play hide and seek. The hiding robot had a choice of three hiding spots, each with a set of markers in front of it. Recognizing that the situation could benefit from a deceptive tactic, the hiding robot would knock down markers in front of one hiding spot, and then go find a different spot, avoiding the markers. This technique fooled the seeking robot 100% of the time, as long as the hiding robot was able to knock down the correct markers.

One of the researchers involved in this project is Ron Arkin, whom you may remember from a few previous posts on robot ethics. And it’s no coincidence that he’s involved in sneaky robots:

While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers.

“We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects,” explained Arkin. “We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems.”

Robots capable of deception is a pretty serious thing. Of course, it has to be understood that when we say robots being deceptive, we mean robots that we’ve programmed to execute behaviors that appear deceptive… It’s not that inherently, some robots are somehow deceptive. I suppose you could argue that there’s no functional difference, but the important thing to remember is that robots do what we tell them to do. If we tell them to be sneaky, they’ll be sneaky. And if there are potential ethical issues with any of this, look to the humans, not the robots.

[ Project Website ] VIA [ Physorg ] and [ GT News ]