MaximumTech on The Robot Report
By Markkus Rovito, MaximumTech
Tablets, Apps, and the Kinect Bring Robotic Costs Down to Earth: Interview with The Robot Report
Posted 08/08/2011 at 3:09pm | by Markkus Rovito
Here at Maximum Tech, we have a healthy appreciation for are stupidly gaga over robots. However, our propellerheadedness can’t hold a candle to the obsession of Frank Tobe, owner and publisher of The Robot Report and the Everything Robotic blog. In 2008, Tobe sold his business and gave up a successful career as a political consultant to dive headlong into robotics research, publishing, and investing. In addition to investigating and reporting on the developments of the global robotics industry, Tobe maintains a robotics database of more than 1,300 robot-related companies and has developed Robo-Stox, a proprietary method for comparing the stock performance of the robotics industry against the Nasdaq Composite Index.
Tobe’s recent article on technological breakthroughs that are bringing down the cost of both consumer and commercial robots caught our eye. In it, he sites among other things the Xbox Kinect as a low-cost way of adding 3D depth sensing vision to robots (for example in the Willow Garage TurtleBot pictured above), and tablets and apps as means for controlling robots and making their development more open-source.
Frank opted for a little human interaction so we could interview him about the significance of some of these recent tech breakthroughs in the world of robotics. The following questions all derive from the original article, “Recent Breakthroughs Are Enabling Consumer and Low-Cost Commercial Robots.”
Maximum Tech (MT): You mention series elastic actuators as making robots more safe to interact with people. What are some example tasks that a robot like the NASA Robonaut 2 (R2) can do with its series-elastic actuators that it otherwise could not?
Frank Tobe (FT): Safety. Imagine a robot arm swinging around from left to right at high speed doing a task. It’s all metal, gears, and electronics, and if it hits you, you get hurt. The series elastic actuators have an elastic spring component between the motor and the object the robot has to pick up. The actuators help the robot detect and control the force of its own movements. When sensors, cameras and haptics are added, the robot can sense and stop on a dime.
Capability. R2 is more versatile than factory robots at gripping things. Each of its humanlike fingers can hold up to five pounds, and the arm can hold around 20 pounds in a variety of positions. The series elastic actuators allow R2 to feel (through the use of haptic sensors and software) the force of objects, rather than only calculate their position and make projections about collision points. The new generation of robots coming from the R2 project can do smaller, more sophisticated tasks, such as handling the screws, handles, and airbag and blind-spot warning sensors that go into car doors on an automobile assembly line. That kind of work is “ergonomically challenging” for humans, says Marty Linn, the GM project leader on the R2/NASA project.
Low cost. Paradoxically, the cost to manufacture robotic devices with series elastic actuators is much less than traditional precision factory robots.
MT: What’s the general idea behind Heartland Robotics’ workplace assistant? What will it be able to do?
FT: In addition to the massive factories that produce cars, phones and food products, are small and medium enterprises–what are called SMEs. There are millions of them worldwide, and they are almost all small manufacturers without robots. SMEs have certain unique requirements: safety, low cost, ease of training, flexibility of use, and a broad range of capabilities. Heartland Robotics is attempting to build a flexible robot family based on the Obrero robot from MIT, which is being redesigned to meet the needs of SMEs. A similar project in Europe, funded by the EU, produced a wonderfully illustrative video about SMEs titled “Coffee Break.”
Heartland Robotics is still in start-up mode. Nevertheless, one can deduce from its website the direction the company is taking: “Today’s manufacturing robots are big and stiff, unsafe for people to be around, engineered to be precise and repeatable, not adaptable. Normal workers can’t touch them… What if ordinary people could touch robots? What if ordinary people got to interact with them and use them? Our robots will be intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They’ll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive. Heartland Robotics will change the definition of how and where robots can be used, dramatically expanding the robot marketplace.”
MT: What characterizes a telepresence robot, and what are some functions you expect to see them taking on in the near term?
FT: For one example, see the Willow Garage Texai Remote Presence System. They are all armless personal avatars which use a web browser to interact with and facilitate a mobile Skype-like experience, i.e., the operator can drive the device from place to place with a two-way set of cameras and microphones showing who is operating the device and what the device is seeing and enabling two-way conversations. The best example of a very necessary use was covered earlier this year on all the media (including Good Morning America) about a bed-ridden Texas student who was able to attend high school by the use of a telepresence robot.
The Skype-like schema for telepresence is rapidly changing with the introduction of iPads and other tablets. All of a sudden the platform becomes a general-purpose personal robotic device with telepresence capabilities. iRobot’s AVA telepresence robot is a platform to help robot designers, application developers and market innovation specialists expedite practical, affordable mobile robotic applications. It is designed to work with a pad-based interface. The use of these tablets and inexpensive mobile platforms has dropped the cost significantly – from prohibitive to almost affordable. Both RoboDynamics and iRobot are shooting for a price of less than $1,500. With a price in that range, businesses are willing to experiment and see whether travel costs can be cut or reduced, whether managers can efficiently carry out their duties in multiple locations, whether technicians can coach on-site people to make the repairs that would otherwise require an expensive visit, and whether their technical staff can come up with other applications for the device that can solve a company problem.
MT: Is the idea for Android apps in robotics just to use the apps to control robots, or will it be a scenario where the app + the tablet hardware = the robot brain, and that brain will be able to be docked on different robot bodies?
FT: The library, tools, and hardware that come with Android devices are well-suited for robotics. Smart phones and tablets are sophisticated computation devices with useful sensors and great user-interaction capabilities. Android devices can also be extended with additional sensors and actuators thanks to the Open Accessory and Android@Home APIs. iRobot has partnered with Google to have Android apps run on its iRobot AVA mobile robotics platform and is open to a similar arrangement with Apple and it’s iOS for iPads and iPhones.
Earlier in the year Google partnered with Willow Garage to get ROS to run on Android devices. ROS is an open source and very capable robotic operating system. As a result of porting it down to low-cost tablet devices, the prospect of the tablet being the brains of the device could happen. But at present the plan is that the device will have the operating system and the tablet will have the application(s) and communications that need carrying out. The whole concept of a $500 mobile platform with navigation system, a $150 vision system with voice and gesture recognition capabilities, and a $600 tablet working in sync with the these other devices, sets the imagination afire. And that’s what is happening at research facilities in the Bay Area, Boston, Pittsburgh, Israel, in Europe and Hong Kong and Seoul: hundreds of different apps from silly and whimsical to ingenious and poignant.
MT: RoboEarth sounds ingenious in theory, but science fiction tells us that robots learning beyond their initial programming inevitably spells doom for the human race. What are some real-world outcomes stemming from robots sharing information through RoboEarth?
FT: Robots have been incapable of coping with unstructured environments like the ones humans work in because their systems have relied on knowing in advance the specifics of every possible situation they might encounter. This is one of the main reasons why robots have been relegated to highly controlled and predictable environments like manufacturing plants. Consequently the EU is funding a four-year program to develop a network where robot apps can be stored, retrieved and put to use by robot operating systems and their robots worldwide. Their goal is to enable collaboration and sharing where little has occurred before and to encourage the development of a shared high-level robot operating system that is not robot-specific.
Every university and major robot manufacturer has their own proprietary robot operating system. Few share with one another although there is some momentum, at least within the educational world, to settle on one or two common operating systems – such as Willow Garage’s ROS. There is even interest in and support for the RoboEarth project. But before any of the science fiction scenarios play out, many years of development and lots of pride and corporate protectiveness will have to be removed from the playing field. How many years did it take IBM to embrace Linux?
MT: The last line in your article reveals that there was a recent American government stimulus program for robotics manufacturing. That’s news to many Americans, who are told the government has no money. Can you offer some extra information on the nature of that American government program?
FT: The case for keeping manufacturing in one’s own country, manned by their own workers and supervised by one’s own skilled technicians has been made hundreds of times and in hundreds of ways. Simply said, if we offshore a product to a cheaper manufacturing source, we lose jobs, and soon we’ll lose skilled technicians too as the foreign resource enhances their capabilities to include engineering, QC, packaging and design. Recently it’s come to light that many of our defense products are manufactured in Asia–an intolerable situation.
Thus, the Obama Administration enacted and provided $430 million for the AMP (Advanced Manufacturing Partnership) and $70 million for the National Robotics Initiative. Much of the AMP money is earmarked to insure that manufacturing of defense and homeland security products is facilitated in the U.S. The money for robotics is to stimulate targeted research toward breakthroughs that will jumpstart the kind of human/robot interaction we’ve been discussing.
MT: Your sites largely cover the business of robotics, but what is the business model for the sites — or are they a labor of love?
FT: The business model was (and still is) three-fold: #1: to get money from others advertising on my sites; #2: to find, select, and invest in a basket of robotic stocks and make gains from their price appreciation; and #3: to be open to VC and angel-type equity investments in promising start-up companies. I’ve never marketed #1 beyond Google’s AdSense; I’m doing fine on #2; and I’ve not found a good match yet for #3. So it’s turned out to be a labor of love, but didn’t intend to be.
THOMAS PR WEB SITE: http://www.thomaspr.com
Thomaspr's Blog 