University students experiment with human-robot interaction and autonomous manipulation, two elements of manufacturing’s future. Nikolaus Correll, CC BY-ND

America’s manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among many others, know it’s already happening. And a new report from PwC estimates that 38 percent of American jobs are at “high risk” of being replaced by technology within the next 15 years. But how soon automation will replace workers is not the real problem. The real threat to American jobs will come if China does it first.

Since the year 2000, the U.S. has lost five million manufacturing jobs. An estimated 2.4 million jobs went to low-wage workers in China and elsewhere between 1999 and 2011. The remainder fell victim to gains in efficiency of production and automation, making many traditional manufacturing jobs obsolete.

Though more than a million jobs have returned since the 2008 recession, the net loss has devastated the lives of millions of people and their families. Some blame robotics, others globalization. It turns out that those forces work together, and have been equally hurtful to manufacturing jobs. The car industry, for example, imports more and more parts from abroad, while automating their assembly in the U.S.

As a robotics researcher and educator, I strongly advocate that the best way to get those jobs back is to build on our existing strengths, remaining a leader in manufacturing efficiency and doing the hard work to further improve our educational and social systems to cope with a changing workforce. Particularly when looking at what’s happening in China, it’s clear we need to maintain America’s international competitiveness, as we have done since the beginning of industrialization.

Chinese competition

In 2014, China exported more, and more valuable, products than the U.S. for the first time. Many of these were made by the low-wage laborers China has become famous for.

Yet China has also emerged as the largest growth market for robotics. Chinese companies bought more than twice as many industrial robots (68,000) in 2015 than American companies did (27,000). China’s Midea – an appliance manufacturer – just purchased the German robotic powerhouse Kuka.

China has understood that its competitive advantage of cheap labor will not last forever. Instead, labor costs will rise as its economy develops. Look at FoxConn, for example, the Taiwanese manufacturing contractor of the iPhone known for the high-pressure work environment at its plants in China. The company already uses more than 60,000 robots, and has said it wants to use as many as a million robots by 2020.

That’s a bold goal, especially given the current state of robotics. At present, robots are good only at highly repetitive tasks in structured environments. They are still far inferior to humans in simple tasks like picking items from a shelf. But FoxConn’s goal of transforming its streamlined manufacturing line is definitely achievable. Many of the tasks now done by humans thousands of times a day can be easily automated – such as applying a puddle of glue, placing double-sided tape, positioning a piece of plastic, tightening screws or loading products onto a pallet.

The lesson here is simple: Some occupations will simply disappear, like those of weavers in the textile industry displaced by the power loom. We need to embrace this disruption if we want to avoid being taken out of the game altogether. Imagine if China is able to replace our low-wage jobs with its workers, and then can automate those jobs: Work Americans now do will be done here, or anywhere – but not by humans. FoxConn is planning its first plant in the U.S.; soon, Chinese robots will be working in America.

Seeing opportunity, not loss

The good news is that while many types of jobs will cease to exist, robots will create other jobs – and not only in the industry of designing new robots.

This is already beginning to happen. In 2014, there were more than 350,000 manufacturing companies with only one employee, up 17 percent from 2004. These companies combine globalization and automation, embracing outsourcing and technological tools to make craft foods, artisanal goods and even high-tech engineered products.

Many American entrepreneurs use digitally equipped manufacturing equipment like 3-D printers, laser cutters and computer-controlled CNC mills, combined with market places to outsource small manufacturing jobs like mfg.com to run small businesses. I’m one of them, manufacturing custom robotic grippers from my basement. Automation enables these sole proprietors to create and innovate in small batches, without large costs.

Returning to manufacturing dominance

This sort of solo entrepreneurship is just getting going. Were robots more available and cheaper, people would make jewelry and leather goods at home, and even create custom-made items like clothing or sneakers, directly competing with mass-produced items from China. As with the iPhone, even seemingly complex manufacturing tasks can be automated significantly; it’s not even necessary to incorporate artificial intelligence into the process.

Three trends are emerging that, with industry buy-in and careful government support, could help revitalize the U.S. manufacturing sector.

First, robots are getting cheaper. Today’s US$100,000 industrial robotic arms are not what the future needs. Automating iPhone assembly lines will require cheap robotic arms, simple conveyor belts, 3-D-printed fixtures and software to manage the entire process. As we saw in the 3-D printing industry, the maker movement is setting the pace, creating low-cost fabrication robots. The government is involved, too: The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, has backed the OtherMill, a low-cost computer-controlled mill.

In addition, more people are programming robots. Getting a robot to accomplish repetitive tasks in industry – for example, using Universal Robot’s interface – is as simple as programming LEGO Mindstorms. Many people think it’s much harder than that, confusing robotic automation with artificial intelligence systems playing chess or Go. In fact, building and programming robots is very similar both physically and intellectually to doing your own plumbing, electrical wiring and car maintenance, which many Americans enjoy and are capable of learning. “Maker spaces” for learning and practicing these skills and using the necessary equipment are sprouting across the country. It is these spaces that might develop the skill sets that enable Americans to take automation into their own hands at their workplaces.

Lastly, cutting-edge research is improving the hardware needed to grasp and manipulate manufacturing components, and the software to sense and plan movements for assembling complex items. Industrial robot technology is upgradeable and new robots are designed to complement human workers, allowing industry to make gradual changes, rather than complete factory retooling.

A path forward

To fully take advantage of these trends and other developments, we need to improve connections between researchers and businesses. Government effort, in the form of the Defense Department’s new Advanced Robotics Manufacturing Institute, is already working toward this goal. Funded by US$80 million in federal dollars, the institute has drawn an additional $173 million in cash, personnel, equipment and facilities from the academic and private sectors, aiming to create half a million manufacturing jobs in the next 10 years.

Those numbers might sound high, but China is way ahead: Just two provinces, Guangdong and Zhejiang, plan to spend a combined $270 billion over the next five years to equip factories with industrial robots.

The stakes are high: If the U.S. government ignores or avoids globalization and automation, it will stifle innovation. Americans can figure out how to strengthen society while integrating robotics into the workforce, or we can leave the job to China. Should it come to that, Chinese companies will be able to export their highly efficient manufacturing and logistics operations back to the U.S., putting America’s manufacturing workforce out of business forever.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here: http://theconversation.com/to-really-help-us-workers-we-should-invest-in-robots-71125.

We have developed a new swarm robotic platform that falls in size, cost and capability between Harvard’s kilobot and the e-Puck. The Droplet is almost spherical, can self-right after being poured out of a bucket, and has the hardware capabilities to organize into complex shapes with its neighbors due to accurate range and bearing. Droplets are available open-source and use cheap vibration motors and a 3D printed shell.

The Droplets (Figure 1) have the following unique capabilities:

• 6-way range and bearing ranging from 2 to 20cm or 1.5 to 4.5 times the diameter of a single robot;
• Omnidirectional motion;
• Infinite experiments due to a powered floor that doubles as global communication medium for swarm programming.

We needed to pull a couple of tricks to get this done, which are described in detail in our upcoming ICRA¹ and IROS² papers.

Range and bearing

The way most robots do range and bearing is to abstract the robots as a point light source from which infrared rays emerge. This approximation makes the math relatively simple, but works poorly when the robots are too close together. For this reason, most range and bearing systems (such as that of the Khepera III or e-Puck) have a certain minimum range.

It is also notoriously difficult to use the same infrared channel for both ranging (via intensity measurements) and communication. This requires dedicated electronics that give access to the raw signal and demodulation.

We solve this problem on the Droplets by using two receivers: one that has a built-in 38kHz demodulation circuit (as used in TV remote controls), and another that provides us with the raw amplitude. In order to overcome the limitations of a point source approximation, we measure the incoming infrared from another robot’s emitter using all six receivers (as opposed to just one); we do this for all six emitters, leading to a 6×6 matrix of measurements.

Using a two-step approximation¹, we show how this data can be combined with accurate sensor and receiver characteristics to calculate not only the bearing to the other robots, but also its heading, and eventually the range. The advantage of this method is that an emitting robot can provide range, bearing and heading information to as many robots as can simultaneously hear it, making this approach much more scalable than other techniques that must exchange mutual bearings to calculate heading.

Omnidirectional motion

You get reminded that using vibration motors for locomotion might be a good idea whenever you see your cell phone scooting of the table. Controlling its direction is hard, however, and omnidirectional motion using three motors has been thought to be only possible by carefully synchronizing all motors phases – something close to impossible with cheap hardware. The Droplets solve this problem by positioning the robots not above a leg, but opposite to it². Instead of using the inertia of the vibration motor’s mass to lift a leg, the Droplets use their motors to lift the opposite side of the leg, which let the robot pivot around its legs. While this solves the physics of the problem, another challenge that comes with cheap vibration motors is that they are, well cheap, and all spin at different frequencies, with different weights, and even different directions. The Droplets solve this problem by using an overhead camera for one-time calibration. An optimization routine finds the right offsets and gains so that the Droplets move in as straight as possible a line and turn on the spot.

Infinite experimentation

The ultimate challenge in swarm robotics is to recharge and reprogram hundreds, if not thousands of individual robots, and this is also why experiments at this scale are very, very rare. Although some platforms allow the robots to dock themselves on a charging platform, they actually need to reliably know when to do this and interrupt what they are doing. The Droplets solve this via a powered floor that is equipped with alternating stripes of positive charge and ground. Supercaps allow the Droplets to remain powered also during “airtime” or when navigating the small gaps between each stripe. In order to detect the unlikely case to stand directly on a gap – which is not a good resting spot – the robots can measure the voltage at each of its legs. We are currently working on using this feature for data transmission, enabling programming an entire swarm not only via infrared but directly via the floor.

Education

Being a feature-rich platform in a robust package, small form factor, and low cost (the powered floor is a simple 2-layer printed circuit board) could make the Droplets an ideal educational platform, enabling instructors to tangibly teach subjects such as organic chemistry (with each Droplet being a wiggling atom), geometry (with Droplets measuring angles and distances between them), or the spread of infectious diseases. Using the robots together with an overhead projector allows projecting an RGB coordinate system or environmental features such as obstacles, making the robot approximate the power of its much more expensive and larger peers. For more advanced roboticists, implementing odometry via the floor, neighboring robots at known location, or signals projected from above, might make for interesting challenges that allow teaching concepts like error propagation, the Extended Kalman Filter and SLAM.

Get engaged

• Come see our upcoming presentation at ICRA in Hong Kong this coming  Wednesday at 3:40pm in s429, or next September at IROS.
• Download the Droplet simulator and come up with cool swarming algorithms on your own.
• Help us to make a thousand Droplets by naming a Droplet, donating an educational package to a K-12 institution of your choice, or branding an injection molded shell.
• Follow us @correlllab to stay tuned on how to make your own.

References

1. N. Farrow, J. Klingner, D. Reishus, N. Correll (2014): Miniature Six-channel Range and Bearing System: Algorithm, Analysis and Experimental Validation . In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong.
2. J. Klingner, A. Kanakia, N. Farrow, D. Reishus, N. Correll (2014): A Stick-Slip Omnidirectional Drive-Train for Low-Cost Swarm Robotics: Mechanism, Calibration, and Control. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

•  Robots Podcast: Termite-Inspired Construction
•  The latest in ultra-affordable robots: AFRON competition announces winners
•  Outreach activities: Making nanoparticle robots to ‘treat cancer’
•  Researchers use single joystick to control swarm of RC robots

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Targeting a sustainable presence of humans in outer space will require solving air, water, energy, and food supplies within a few thousand cubic feet surrounded by vacuum. What seems at first sight to be a problem of an apocalyptic, remote future reveals itself as the grand challenges of our civilization in a nutshell. This article argues that space exploration can be one of the main drivers to revolutionize sustainable agriculture on earth.

First, the agricultural industry has classically not been the driver, but on the receiving end of innovation in automation. Current economic drivers promote increasing the size of farm equipment and mono-cultures, which are more suitable to automation. Thinking about solving food production on a space-ship, Mars-colony or city-scale, which have opposite requirements than industrial agriculture, makes it clear that solutions will not come from incremental changes to the current system, but require a disruptive approach that has very little to do with current agricultural practice. Second, sustainable agriculture is a systems challenge that does not stop at innovation in automation, but also requires advances in renewable energies and integration into water and air management to be successful, in particular when considering integration of agricultural production into urban environments. Third, advanced life support systems are not only mission-critical for long-term exploration missions, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) support strongly hinges on the perceived value of its mission; using space exploration as a driver to solve our most pressing grand challenges is a strong narrative to gain public support.

A brief history of agriculture

Since the advent of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, humans have developed a highly sophisticated system for global food production with the most rapid technological advances occurring during the first half of last century. In the 1920s, agriculture had not only adopted new machinery, but also the financial, cultural, and ideological apparatus of industrialism. This process has led to farm equipment of ever-increasing size, modern plant breeding programs, the use of synthetic fertilizers, delivery of water via irrigation systems, and the use of pesticides to control crop herbivory, which have all contributed to a tremendous increases in crop yield. For example, corn yields in the US increased approximately 400%-500% from 1940 to 1997. Together with consolidation of small farms into larger ones, the number of people that a single farmer in the US provides for increased 9-fold from 15.5 people per farm in 1950 to 140 people per farm in 1997.

While providing immense cultural benefits, these developments came at tremendous environmental costs. Increased fertilization has led to excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the water systems impacting both human health and the integrity of aquatic ecosystem, and also to increases in nitrous oxide production (a potent greenhouse gas). More recently, there is also an increasing awareness that the global supply of phosphorus, which is a non-renewable resource but an essential plant nutrient contained in most synthetic fertilizers, is expected to peak mid-century and decline thereafter.  Also, cultivation of just a few crops (corn, soybeans, hay and wheat make up 68% of farm land in the US) in ever-increasing monocultures and the resulting lack of plant diversity make these systems vulnerable to large-scale pest outbreaks. Finally, the high specialization on certain crops in different parts of the US – which is the result of industrial streamlining the process – requires considerable transportation cost, and might become infeasible with increasing cost of oil.

Taken together, there is a critical need to develop agricultural practices that deliver water and nutrients in a manner that minimizes losses from these systems, while creating an ecologically resilient agricultural system that can withstand or quickly recover from disturbances such as pest outbreaks, for example by using companion plants and poly-cultures.

Advances in robotics can decrease detrimental effects of farming by precise administration of water and nutrients and inter-cropping, while bringing agriculture closer to consumers. Besides being able to provide individual plants with the required resources on an as-need basis, small-scale robotic platforms are not limited to operating on fields, but could also reclaim urban environments that are currently deprived from agriculture and horticulture, such as within offices, shopping malls or on roofs. A concept drawing of a team of robots cultivating plants in a shopping mall is shown in Figure 1.

It is worth noting that neither agriculture nor horticulture have ever been the main drivers for innovation in automation. Rather, industrial methods and techniques were adapted to agriculture long after they have proven successful in other trades. This trend seems to be persistent still today. For example, automation in agriculture is enabled exclusively by the availability of small-scale and cheap computation, which has been driven by the electronic spread-sheet. Similarly, disruptive actuation and sensing technologies that have the potential to bring agricultural automation to a new level are being developed in orthogonal markets, such as the gaming industry, manufacturing, or construction.

Indeed, major industrial players in precision agriculture support their technical innovations by developing for the construction industry, e.g., large earth moving equipment, which provides higher margins than agriculture or horticulture. Based on this history and lack of economical drivers that will require industry to leap from large-scale automation to urban-scale precision agriculture, I argue that truly disruptive innovation is more likely to be developed for niche applications, such as space exploration.

Air, water, energy and food in a nutshell
Going to Mars is in the tradition of setting foot on the moon, exploring the West, and ultimately the very exploration that led to the discovery of America. All these missions have in common that they are variants of the “knapsack problem”. Explorers need to decide on a combination of provisions and tools that allow them to maximize exploration and minimize risk of failure. Parameters of this problem are the set of brought-along goods, available resources harvested on the way, and the constraints of vessel size. Larger vessels allow more goods to be brought along, but also require larger crews to maintain them, again requiring more resources.

A space mission adds an additional complication as the launch mass is limited by the amount of fuel. The larger the rocket, the more fuel is needed, in turn requiring more propulsion to increase launch mass. This optimization problem currently limits how long we can sustain ourselves in space and therefore where we can go and what we can do there. While advances in agricultural practices and transportation systems have solved this problem for humans who have now permanently settled earth’s most remote spots, this approach is about to reach its limitations on earth and does not extend to space.

Considering the vast emptiness of space (and the scarcity of resources on other planets), solutions to this problem will require us to make better use of resources found in place, and to think about how to recycle them. For example, food can be grown and fertilized from “black water” and help to turn toxic carbon dioxide into carbon – to remain in the plant – and oxygen. While maintaining a fully enclosed ecosystem that is significantly smaller than our own planet and can support human beings has not been accomplished yet, doing the math on launch mass and potential yield has shown that growing food in space becomes advantageous for missions exceeding two years in space. For missions shorter than that, the additional launch mass and space of the tools and provisions that plants require is better used by bringing additional resources. An alternative scenario is to launch life support systems to arrive before humans do (Figure 2). In both cases, automation is necessary as the use of humans to perform these tasks is highly inefficient in a space scenario.

A major payload driver for autonomous food production is the additional required water resources. Yet, after reaching a critical mass, plants are an excellent natural system for converting black water into drinking water. Hereby, plants consume the water via their roots and return purified water into the local atmosphere via evaporation. Although small-scale systems to replace waste-water treatment plants in remote areas have been successfully demonstrated, additional research is needed to implement such systems in a self-contained, easy to maintain, fashion. Future long-term space exploration missions are likely to depend on a combination of bio-chemical processing and biological filtration, requiring a systems view and increased understanding of the micro-biology of the underlying processes. Although other planets provide massive reservoirs of frozen water in their pole caps and under their surface, water shortage has become a major problem in the US west of the continental divide and large areas of the world are subject to desertification, making water shortage a global problem, and requiring drastic increase and decentralization of processing. While water shortage for now mainly affects our quality of life, water conflicts have been linked to the Rwandan genocide and the war in Sudanese Darfur.

Plants also have the capability to absorb carbon from the air and releasing oxygen. On earth, this task is to a large part accomplished by tropical rain forests, which are responsible for roughly a third of the earth’s oxygen turnover. For space exploration, plants alone are not sufficient, requiring machines to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While regenerative carbon dioxide scrubbers – a process mainly requiring electricity – have been in use on the now decommissioned space shuttle, terrestrial applications include carbon dioxide reduction of power plant exhausts. Albeit feasible, current technology is not cost-efficient to deploy and to operate, mainly due to the lack of economical drivers. This research would be desirable, however, as carbon dioxide emissions are believed to be the main driver behind man-made global warming, with its long-term effects yet to come.

Lighting for food production and photosynthesis, water purification, and carbon dioxide scrubbing will require additional energy, further driving the required launch mass of an exploration vessel or station equipment. Energy is available in effectively unlimited quantities from the sun, but requires efficient conversion. On earth, solar power is also an attractive alternative energy source for earth-based applications and could drastically reduce our dependency of fossil fuels, which are both a source of international conflicts and carbon dioxide emissions. Current solar cell technology is not yet competitive with electricity generated from fossil fuels and nuclear power, requiring additional research into reducing production cost while enhancing efficiency. A space mission could be a significant driver for the latter without being limited by the economical drivers of fossil fuels that dominate next-generation solar cells that industry deems economically viable.

Space exploration as a driver for our most pressing grand challenges
Space exploration has historically been a geo-political, strategic instrument. Showing the ability to precisely place an object into lower earth orbit or onto the moon demonstrates the capability to project power at long distance with high accuracy. In addition to leading to game-changing military capabilities, space exploration has transformed life on earth. Sputnik, the first radio satellite, led the way to worldwide telecommunication and global positioning. Sputnik also spurred a space race, leading to launch systems of increasing size and precision, eventually culminating into the Apollo program, the first human on the moon and the strategic defense initiative (SDI), also known as “Star Wars”. Albeit the collateral science and engineering benefits of these missions are beyond doubt, they became increasingly less tangible.

NASA has recovered from this by focusing its missions on atmospheric sensing, revolutionizing the fields of geology, agriculture, archeology and many others, and space exploration leading to jaw-dropping and deeply inspiring photographs of outer space that have fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe and our role therein. Nevertheless, the cost of these missions seems to less and less justify their benefits.  With the industrialized nations accumulating prodigious amounts of debt and the developing countries fighting over water and food, understanding the origins of our universe and setting foot on other worlds becomes more and more a secondary goal in public perception.

NASA is currently rallying interest for a “planetary defense” mission with the goal of robotically bringing asteroids into a near-earth orbit where they can be used as a shield to deflect asteroids such as the one grounded in Russia in the spring of 2013. Albeit such a mission supports the geo-political narrative of the US as global guardian and would lay the technical foundation for a paradigm shift from earth-launched to space-launched exploration, the actual risk of an apocalyptic asteroid impact is minuscule compared to risks arising from political instability and resource problems elsewhere in the world.  Therefore, it is unlikely that such a mission can inspire the same national energy that the space race did, and which is imperative for the success of a manned mission to Mars.

Instead of motivating space exploration with geopolitical advantages and science outcomes that are inaccessible, or even moot, to the general public, I argue to identify missions whose success is aligned to solve mankind’s greatest challenges: food, energy, water and air.

Next steps in robotic research

With growing food in space not on the critical path of missions immediately ahead, but a long-term requirement, research in space-based agriculture should focus on the following three fronts: increasing our knowledge of in-space plant growth, solving the key perception and manipulation challenges of plant maintenance, and understanding the impact that observing, maintaining and eating plants has on humans in the isolation of space. These three thrusts are closely inter-related and can benefit from automation. Indeed, plant growth experiments are recurrently undertaken on the ISS and could tremendously benefit from automation. For example, light-weight, low-energy robotic arms could enable scientist to systematically sense within the plants’ canopy, and automated management of air, water, and nutrients on a per-plant basis would allow us to better understand how the space environment affects these parameters.

As fully autonomous plant maintenance requires solutions to a series of hard problems in perception and manipulation, initial focus should be on remote operation of the growing process (Figure 3, left). Devising a system that solves all the mechanical, user interface and communication challenges that would allow to grow plants (from seeding to harvest and re-planting) can serve as the basis for further developing automation and could motivate its own mission such as deploying a greenhouse container to Moon or Mars.

Concerning human-factors, there is strong evidence that humans living in the isolation of space will drastically benefit from interactions, including taking care of, harvesting and eating, of plants. Active research challenges here are how to design this experience to be most beneficial for the astronauts. This includes not only identifying care-taking tasks that the astronauts actually enjoy, but also providing solutions to automating those tasks that are undesirable or induce additional stress. In the long run, remote operation will be more and more subsumed by actual autonomy. Here, key challenges are automatic assessment of plant status, manipulation of soft, flexible objects, and dealing with adverse environmental conditions such as mud, water and unpredictable growth that can quickly jeopardize a running system.

Summary
Our agricultural system is about to reach its limitations, with demand for its products to outpace availability of resources. Space exploration is concerned with similar challenges, albeit at an extreme scale: water, energy, and air need to be turned into food in a nutshell in a most sustainable way that minimizes the influx of external resources. While industrial agriculture addresses its challenges by ever-increasing monocultures that are economical to automate, the needs of future urban centers on earth and colonies in outer space require an opposite approach: small-scale precision agriculture that provides care to plants on an as-need basis and that can integrate with water purification and air revitalization needs of its consumers. As the technological leap this approach requires is gigantic, it is unlikely to be performed by the agricultural industry, whose economics exclusively support incremental changes. This is not the case for space exploration, which can – given strong public support of its mission – support disruptive technological advances such as sending a man to the moon and eventually allow us for sustainable existence on other planets. This is a challenge that dwarfs sustainable living on earth.