Robots Can be Pervasive in Everyday Life if Challenges are Overcome, Speaker Says

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One of the Amazon Picking Challenge teams tries to select items from a shelf. Photo: AUVSI.




Robots are on the way to being pervasive in everyday life, according to MIT’s Daniela Rus, who directs the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there.



“What I would like is a world where robots are as common as phones, and we are not there yet,” she said in a plenary address at IEEE’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Seattle.



She said she envisions a world where robots are “available at any time to help with any task. … You may call me an optimist, but I can picture a world that is rich with robots.”



For example, she cited a future visit to a supermarket. Some customers would send their walking or flying robots to shop for them. Others might take a self-driving car to the store, where automated shopping carts would help them locate the goods they need.



Before that day comes, however, there are challenges to overcome. One is communication — robots still have a difficult time communicating with one another and with people. 



“Modeling and predicting communications is notoriously hard,” she said. 



Algorithms can be used to measure the available communications environment — to see, for example, if signals can be bounced off a wall to avoid an obstacle — which would allow robots to better position themselves to talk. This could be scaled up to create base stations to “guarantee communications at any scale and any time,” eventually including high-flying unmanned aircraft that would provide global, seamless Internet coverage.



“So robots could be a very important part of a grand challenge, the challenge of providing Internet access to any person on the planet, and this is a very exciting part of our field,” she said.



Another challenge is that robots still have a limited ability to figure things out on their own. One way around that is to create core sets of data points that extrapolate from very large streams of data. 



For instance, using data from high-bandwidth video, one method charted a path using 1,000 GPS data points. By boiling that down using core sets of data, Rus’ researchers were able to create a similar path using a little more than 20 data points.



Using such streamlined logic would, for example, allow a security robot to determine if a door left open at a business represented a security threat.



Another challenge to the pervasive robot idea is that robots are difficult to make, Rus said.



“It really takes too much time to make robots today,” she said.



Her team has developed both modular robots, which can be assembled from standard core components, to one-off robots that can quickly be built from a library of templates and then printed and assembled.



“This could really enable pervasive robotics,” she said. Potential future customers could go to a store, design the robot they wanted, have it built right there and “the cost would be affordable.”



CSAIL has gone further by designing small robots from paper and other materials that can actually fold themselves, using internal layers built from the same material as Shrinky Dink toys.



One such robot, which resembles a golden beetle, folds itself by sitting on a hot plate and then runs away to perform various tasks, including moving objects heavier than itself and making its way through obstacle piles. 



When it has completed its task, it can drop itself into some acetone and dissolve so its materials can be reused later to build other robots. Some of the CSAIL robots can even dissolve in water.



“This is a very environmentally aware approach to making pervasive robots,” Rus said. “It’s not going to litter the planet.”



One other impediment to pervasive robotics is cost. Rus noted that the first color printer cost half a million dollars when it was released. 



“We will get at the price by developing new technology to make some of the steps required to develop robots more efficient and effective and also from the other end where the price of the hardware and components will drop, like in the case of most electronics today.”



Competitions

One company that would like to see robots become more pervasive is Amazon, which already uses them in warehouses and hopes to use them to deliver packages in the near future.



The company is sponsoring its first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. Unlike in its orderly, automated warehouses, some delivery environments are still unstructured, and the company wants to use robots to accurately pull items from them.



For the challenge, 25 teams are using a variety of robotics arms or entire robots to try to pluck certain items from shelves and place them on a table. Some of the bins have multiple copies of the same thing and some have just one item. The robots are scored on how many items they can select in a fixed period of time.



The top prize for the winner is $26,000, but they will be urged to share their approach to improve future challenge results.

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