Snake robot at the Robotics institute. Credit: Jiuguang Wang/Flickr

The biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden describes how the snake became the most cursed of all beasts: “you shall walk on your belly, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.” The reptile’s eternal punishment is no longer feared but embraced for its versatility and flexibility. The snake is fast approaching as one of the most celebrated robotic creatures for roboticists worldwide in out maneuvering rovers and humanoids.

Last week, while General Electric experienced a tumult in its management structure, its Aviation unit completed the acquisition of OC Robotics – a leader in serpent arm design. GE stated that it believes OC’s robots will be useful for jet engine maintenance, enabling repairs to be conducted while the engine is still attached to the wing by wiggling into parts where no human hand could survive. This promise translates into huge cost and time savings for maintenance and airline companies alike.

OC robots have use cases beyond avionics, including inspections of underground drilling and directional borings tens of feet below the Earth. In addition to acquiring visual data, OC’s snake is equipped with a high-pressure water jet and laser to measures the sharpness of the cutting surface. According to OC’s founder Andrew Graham, “This is faster and easier, and it keeps people safe. ” Graham seems to hit on the holy grail of robotics by combining profit and safety.

GE plans to expand the use case for its newest company. Lance Herrington, a leader at GE Aviation Services, says “Aviation applications will just be the starting point for this incredible technology.” Herrington implied that the snake technology could be adopted in the future to inspect power plants, trains, and even healthcare robots. As an example of its versatility, OC Robotics was awarded a prestigious prize by the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority for its LaserSnake. OC’s integrated snake-arm laser cutter was able to disassemble toxic parts of a nuclear fuel processing facility in a matter of weeks which would have taken years by humans while risking radiation exposure.

One of the most prolific inventors of robotic snake applications is Dr. Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University. Choset is the co-director of CMU’s Biorobotics Lab that has birthed severals startups based upon his snake technology, including Medrobotics (surgical systems); Hebi Robotics (actuators for modular robots); and Bito Robotics‘ (autonomous vehicles). Choset claims that his menagerie of metal reptiles are perfect for urban search and rescue, infrastructure repairs and medicine.

Source: Medorobotics

Recently, Medrobotics received FDA Clearance for its Flex Robotic System for colorectal procedures in the United States. According to the company’s press release, “Medrobotics is the first and only company to offer minimally invasive, steerable and shapeable robotic products for colorectal procedures in the U.S.” The Flex system promises a “scarfree” experience in accessing “hard-to-reach anatomy” that is just not possible with straight, rigid instruments.

“The human gastrointestinal system is full of twists and turns, and rigid surgical robots were not designed to operate in that environment. The Flex® Robotic System was. Two years ago Medrobotics started revolutionizing treatment in the head and neck in the U.S. We can now begin doing that in colorectal procedures,” said Dr. Samuel Straface, CEO.

Dr. Alessio Pigazzi, Professor of Surgery at the University of California, Irvine, exclaimed that “Medrobotics is ushering in the first of a new generation of shapeable and steerable robotic surgical systems that offer the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgical procedures for more patients.” While Medrobotics’ system is currently only approved for use through the mouth and anus, Pigazzi looks forward to future applications whereby any natural orifices could be an entry point for true incision-less surgery.

The Technion ‘Snake Robot’. Photo: Kobi Gideon/GPO

Medrobotics was the brainchild of the collaboration of Choset with Dr. Alon Wolf of Israel’s prestigious Technion Institute of Technology. One of the earliest use cases for snake robots was by Wolf’s team in 2009 for military surveillance. As director of Technion’s BioRobotics and BioMechanics Laboratory (BRML) Wolf’s lab created the next generation of defensive snake robots for the latest terror threat, subterranean tunnels transporting suicide bombers and kidnappers.  Since the discovery of tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Israel in 2015, BRML has been working feverishly to deploy snake robots in the field of combat.

The vision for BRML’s hyper-redundant robots is to utilize its highly maneuverable actuators to sneak through tough terrain into tunnels and buildings. Once inside, the robot will provide instant scans of the environment to the command center and then leave behind sensors for continued surveillance. The robots are equipped with an array of sensors, including thermal imagers, miniature cameras, laser scanners, and laser radar with the ability of stitching seamlessly 360-degree views and maps of the targeted subterranean area. The robots, of course, would have dual uses for search & rescue and disaster recovery efforts.

Long term, Wolf would like to deploy his fleet of crawlers in search and rescue missions in urban locations and earthquakes.

“The robots we are creating at the Technion are extremely flexible and are able to manipulate delicate objects and navigate around walls. Over 400 rescue workers were killed during 9/11 because of the dangerous and unstable environment they were attempting to access and our objective is to ensure that robots are able to replace humans in such precarious situations,” explains Wolf.

It is no wonder why on his last visit to Israel, President Obama called Wolf’s vision “inspiring.”

Transcript below

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews M. Bernardine Dias, Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, about TechBridgeWorld. TechBridgeWorld in an organization, founded by Dias, that develops technology to help serve developing communities. This interview focuses on a device that helps the blind learn to write. 

TechBridgeWorld would like to acknowledge the Qatar National Research Fund (NPRP #30-6-7-91), the Fetzer Institute, and individual donors for making this work possible.

M. Bernardine Dias

M. Bernardine Dias is an Associate Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. She is also the Founder and Director of the TechBridgeWorld research group at CMU. Her research expertise are in technology for developing communities, assistive technology, and autonomous team coordination. Dr. Dias is a native of Sri Lanka. Her career goal is innovating means of developing and disseminating suitable and sustainable technology for empowering underserved communities. She is a strong supporter and mentor for women in science and technology.

Links:

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• TechBridgeWorld website
• Braille Tutor project website
• Braille Tutor SourceForge page

Transcript

Audrow Nash: Welcome to the Robots Podcast. Can you introduce yourself?

Bernadine Dias: I am Bernadine Dias, and I am an associate research professor at Carnegie Melon University in the robotics institute. I run a research lab, which I founded there, called TechBridgeWorld.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me the goal and motivation around your work?

Bernadine Dias: Our goal is to essentially re-think what technology can do for the communities around the world that aren’t currently served by technology – primarily communities in the developing world and communities with disabilities.

I grew up in Sri Lanka. I was born and raised there in a low-to-middle income family and was very lucky to get the chance to fly to the US and get an education in technology. Everything I ever learned about technology was at college. It’s been an interesting trajectory for me, and I’ve always been interested in understanding technology and becoming an expert in it so I can actually change technology to fit communities rather than forcing communities to change to fit technology. That’s basically our strategy and our motivation.

There are a lot of exciting things happening in the field of robotics, as I’m sure you would agree, but most of what was happening about ten years ago when we started this endeavor was only benefiting about two billion people (if we’re being generous). That’s not even half the global population. In our lab we’re trying to understand how we can change technology in ways that are accessible, relevant and affordable to the rest of the world.

Audrow Nash: Can you give an example of these kinds of projects? How are you fitting technology to people?

Bernadine Dias: We start by talking to people about their community, and about their vision: what their hopes are, what their dreams are and what is preventing them from getting there. We don’t ever want to go into community and tell them how they should live their lives. What we bring is our technology expertise; we rely on them for everything else.

For example, in 2006, we were introduced through a series of friends and connections to a small school for blind children in India. This school is pretty amazing. It’s a private school run by a woman named Miss Muktah, who herself had a disability due to an injury. Through her rehabilitation she met a lot of people who are blind and realized how difficult their lives are, so she started a school in order to help kids who are blind have a better education and access to a better life.

She raises funds through donations and then goes out to poor areas around Bangalore and slums where kids wouldn’t really be able to afford any form of education. The school is residential, and she brings them in, of course with their parents’ consent. They live there and they learn everything: life skills, health, hygiene, navigation, and she gets them through as far as they can get in their education system. It’s really amazing. A lot of the teachers there are also blind.

We started talking to them about what they do and we were very impressed about all the things they’ve accomplished. We were looking for ways we might be able to play a role. Those initial conversations were really to tell us more about the school, and then they got a local volunteer to get video of the classes – because this is all remote – and they would send that back to us.

One of the key things we are identified was that the students struggle to learn how to write braille, and braille is the only way blind people can be truly literate. In the developing world it’s especially important that they’re literate because they don’t have access to braille books, or audio books for that matter, or anything in terms of educational resources. How it works is that you learn to write braille in first grade, and then as you progress, the teacher tells you things and you take down notes in braille. Then you study your notes and you take your exams, and that’s how you pass out of the different grades in school. If you don’t learn how to read and write braille then you don’t get an education. It’s a pretty huge issue.

To make things worse, in the developing world students write braille using a slate and stylus. Braille is basically a tactile way of reading: the configuration of embossed dots on the paper maps onto either a character, or a contraction of several characters, depending on which grade of braille you’re writing or reading. To write braille, you insert a sheet of paper into the plastic pocket of the stylus, and you push down on the dots of the stylus to emboss the paper, and then you slide the paper out, flip it over and read it.

Now, because you have to flip the paper over, you have to write the mirror image of what you read … so if you read from left to right then you’re writing from right to left. Essentially you’re learning three alphabets at once: you’re learning English (Kannada is what they learn in this school, but they also learn English or Hindi or Arabic or whatever); you’re learning the dot pattern of the read version, which is typically a direct character map translation from each character; and then you’re learning the mirror image of that for writing. For a little kid in first grade this is a pretty stunning endeavor to undertake, and they don’t really understand why it’s important, so a lot of them to end up being literate.

We looked at this problem and we realized there were a lot of things we could do with technology, but we had to think very carefully about what exactly would be a tool that would be helpful.

One option would have been to eliminate braille all together … we could have come up with some form of audio system so they can avoid needing to learn to write braille. But this is not sustainable; when the kids leave the school they would not be able to afford something like this for a long time – maybe decades.

Another option would have been to create a tool that lets you eliminate that mirror image. In the developed world there are already digital braillers that let you write the same as you read, and it does the flip for you, and there are six key braille typewriters that you can type with. But even this technology can’t compete with the price point of a plastic slate.

We decided that the most appropriate and sustainable solution was to build an electronic tutor that would help make learning to writing braille using the slate and stylus more fun and effective. We call it our Braille Writing Tutor. We’re on our fourth version, and we’ve been developing it with this school and also other schools around the world.

It’s essentially an electronic slate that speaks to the child and gives them feedback while they are writing braille. We’ve incorporated games and curriculum to make it more fun and interesting.

Audrow Nash: What does the device look like?

Bernadine Dias: There are a few different versions. The version for young children who haven’t got fine motor skills looks like a box with six big buttons. They start by learning the configuration of the braille cells, the dot numbering, and the patterns.

The next level up is still a box with buttons, but it has three braille cells, which are a little smaller now, and underneath that there are two rows of holes for the six-dot system; you press the stylus into the holes to connect the circuit. You’re trying to scaffold their learning and their motor skills.

The advanced version is essentially like a slate. It’s a box with a lot of holes in the six-dot configuration, and the goal is to get the kids to just use the slate and the stylus, so that eventually they can move onto the actual slate.

Audrow Nash: Can you talk a bit about the development process of working with the community to create these devices?

Bernadine Dias: Our methodology is to spend whatever time it takes to really understand each other. It’s not just about learning from them, but they learn from us as well … who we are and our process … and that takes time.

When we come to a point where we think the parties involved are in agreement on what is worth trying, we do a paper prototype or a sketch, depending on who the community is. If they’re literate we can write; if they’re not then we try to do things diagrammatically. If they’re blind, sometimes there is braille involved, or we will build something physical with paper or cardboard that they can feel.

We start with this initial prototype stage so that we can get their feedback early. This is really important because if you give them something too advanced, in some cultures they won’t say anything negative about it; they feel like you already did this pretty amazing thing and they don’t want to be negative … they want to be polite. People are really nice.

Audrow Nash: They won’t give you honest feedback on the device … ?

Bernadine Dias: Exactly. The more rugged or ‘prototypish’ it looks, the more they’re willing to say “Oh wouldn’t be nice to add this?” or “This part probably won’t work so well.” That whole conversation – that iterative process of designing with the community – is also good for us because it ends up building more trust, and it gives that joint ownership of the project.

When we feel that we are at a point where it’s worth going for a more complete prototype – it could be software, it could be hardware, it could be both – then we run field tests and iterate again. In some places that can happen really fast, in others it takes years. You just have to go with the flow of what is best for that community, because you’re taking people’s time and energy (including yours), and it needs to fit with everybody’s lifestyle and whatever they’re investing in the project.

Audrow Nash: You mentioned that when you were working with the school in India, you were often remote. What challenges were there?

Bernadine Dias: Oh gosh, everything! The school in India is actually one of our easier communities to work with because, even though they’re on the other side of the world, they generally have phone connections and they have access to a power grid. They sometimes have Internet and we can Skype, or we can call on a cellphone … they can send us things like video, we’ve helped them build their website … these kinds of things are possible, and it’s been nice to see their view of technology expand.

Some of our other communities are really difficult. For example we worked with a small school for the blind in Mongu, Zambia and that community just didn’t have any infrastructure. Even to call the school, you had to call the private cellphone of the principal or the headmaster, who might change over time. In places like that you have to find a third party … a person on the ground who can contact the school. You won’t get as frequent updates.

The biggest challenge is finding communication channels that work reliably and over time. Sometimes you won’t hear back until you get a chance to visit again, and that’s okay with us too. When we’re on the ground we try to do the best we can to not only create a technology of impact, but to also create and ecosystem of volunteers from the community who have some sort of technical background. We’ll train them in how to maintain whatever technology we’ve created … we try to build partnerships among different groups on the ground that might be beneficial to sustaining whatever technology solution we have developed, and then we hand it over to the community. And that’s okay.

With some communities we have more interaction, and with others, less. Language barriers can be a big problem unless you have a translator, but that’s okay too.

Audrow Nash: You’ve mentioned devices for the blind. What other devices and communities do you develop for?

Bernadine Dias: We’ve primarily focused on education. The first two years after we started our group were spent talking to communities around the world. We talked to anyone who would talk to us, whether it was remote or in person. We asked them about what they really wanted – not from technology, but in life – and their two biggest requests were for health and education. They wanted to be empowered to be healthy, and know enough to solve their own problems, to do their own thing, to earn their own living. After those two years, we were definitely more qualified to do education-related work, so that’s where we started and that’s been our primary focus since.

That said, we’ve done a few other projects, depending on what comes up.

Another popular project of ours looks at English literacy. A lot of communities want to improve their English literacy for job reasons.

You have teachers who want to improve their skills, but who sometimes haven’t been trained very well, who don’t have access to a lot of technology, who often work multiple shifts, and are so busy that they really don’t have time to do a lot of extras.

Then we have students … we’ve worked with a wide range all the way from primary school students and children with special needs, to adult learners, immigrant workers in Doha for example, and refugees in Pittsburg … who all have very different motivations for learning English and the kind of English they want to learn. Think of it as functional literacy versus educational literacy.

We were looking at ways to motivate students and teachers, and give them tools to work together. One exciting way to do this is through games, of course. There is a triangle of people … the game developers who want to build games that are cool, the teachers who have their own subjects and ways of teaching, and the students have to do homework but would rather be playing the games they are in to … so we put all these three together and created a framework where you can do your homework while playing a game.

The teacher can upload his or her exercises, and the game developers only have to follow a few different rules for embedding this educational content in their games. They can decide, for example, that you will do quizzes or exercises to get more lives or get extra tools to get through your adventure game. It’s up to them, but we can have certain gradations, so that if it’s a quiz then it has to happen so often, for example. Then the students get to decide whether they will play the Dragon Game or the Adventure Game or this role-playing game, etc … they get to pick their exercise and their game, and they get their homework done.

It’s been really successful because everybody gets to do what they’re best at: the teachers like it because they don’t have to do the extra work of changing the format of their educational materials; the students like it because they get to the play games they want; and the gamers like it because there is a social component to what they are doing.

We have more requests for this project than we can field for it, and we’re at the stage where we have a pretty good prototype and we’re doing field tests around the world.

Audrow Nash: In working with communities to develop these projects, what kind of lessons have you learned?

Bernadine Dias: So many! I think the biggest lesson that I have learned is how incredibly resourceful people are. We travel the world and we work with communities where I just cannot imagine what I would have done in that situation, and they come up with very brilliant ways to do things. We work the deaf-blind community for example … and when I’m trying to teach my 4-year-old son to read and write, or my 1-year-old daughter to point to things and when I say “this is a bottle” or “this is the TV,” all I can think is: if my child was born both blind and deaf how do I even do that?! It’s just incredible to me how people find ways.

I think the biggest lesson for technologist is that you have to be open to learning; you’re not the expert in anything other than the technology. When you go into a situation with that mindset, then you end up building much more impactful solutions. You end up having a much richer experience because of it, instead of getting frustrated about not having a data connection or having a power failure or whatever it is that comes your way.

Another lesson is learning to roll with the punches. You cannot plan everything. You have to plan a lot, there is a lot of logistical planning that goes on especially in field tests, but you have to be prepared to adapt at any given time.

The final important lesson is diverse teams. Getting people of different backgrounds who can come up with very creative solutions, whatever conditions get thrown your way.

I could talk about lessons for years, but it’s incredibly rewarding work, and there is never a problem recruiting people to work on these projects. People find them incredibly motivating. We handle the logistics and creating the partnerships, which most people find very difficult to do. Given the opportunity, people are very excited to work on these projects, and everyone is touched by them. You have stories to tell your grandkids for a lifetime.

Audrow Nash: How would someone get involved in helping these communities?

Bernadine Dias: You asked earlier about lessons learned, but the flipside to that are the challenges that continue to arise. Finances are the biggest problem. People in the US cost a lot of money, people in Europe cost a lot of money, and people in Australia cost a lot of money as bcompared to someone who lives a developing community. Just paying for people’s time and travel costs money, and not a lot people, institutions or organizations fund this work.

At the end of the day it all comes down to funding. We’ve tried to provide internship opportunities where we can. We’ve had people come in and work with us from other universities, but these are much more limited opportunities. We’ve also tried to mentor others who are interested in starting similar efforts in their own universities, and we’ve certainly helped a lot in answering questions about how we set things like students groups up. We’ve also connected them to other organizations in the areas that we might know about, where they can get a similar experience.

We also help make connections with partners. Sometimes we’ll get requests from partners in the developing world, but we don’t have the right technical expertise for whatever they want, and then we’ll try and connect them to some else who we know has an interest. That’s the best we can do right now.

What’s nice is that in the ten years we’ve been doing this, more and more groups have been starting to do this work – not only universities, but now companies as well … startups that have grown and are now taking interns and hiring people. That’s been exciting, and that’s probably something we’ll compile through our website now that more people are asking for that information.

Audrow Nash: We all know about the publish or perish paradigm … how can researchers get involved in doing this kind of work if it means not publishing as frequently?

Bernadine Dias: It’s less about not publishing as frequently, and more about not being able to publish in the venues that are considered esteemed. You can publish – there are a lot of lessons learned and there are a lot of things that come out of it, but it’s about what people expect and what’s traditionally viewed as great or not.

There are two methodologies for this …

One is that, as an academic community, we need to create more venues for people who do this sort of work to publish, where there is a community that understands and values the work, and that can meaningfully review the work and contribute to tenure cases and such.

We’ve trying to do that through a community called Information Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). It brings together social scientists, technologists and humanitarian workers to take courses together and to publish in joint venues. We found that the social sciences were much more amenable to this, and their cases were going through a lot more easily than the technology cases. There was an ACM DEV conference started in 2010 that started as an offshoot of ICTD and now it’s become a conference on its own … it’s purely focused on the technology side but all the people who come to that conference are working in this space, so they can give more technical feedback. I’m hoping that will continue to grow.

Meanwhile, people still have to figure out their lives until this all gets accepted. So another method is to carve out a niche within your space of expertise, and when you write your regular grants and you publish your standard publications, you push part of that work into the developing world or whichever underserved community you’re most interested in working with. In that way you can cross subsidize the funding.

On the publication side, there are the major publications, but then you also have [development-focused] publications too. They can give you good PR, and generally universities like that.

As long as you don’t do only this kind of work, it ends up being a benefit …

… Unless you want to be a renegade like me, and go all-or-nothing, which is fine too, if that’s who you are!

Audrow Nash: Thank you!

Bernadine Dias: You’re welcome!

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

Humans have evolved to be incredibly efficient at walking. In fact, simulations of human locomotion show that walking on level ground and at a steady speed should theoretically require no power input at all.

But anyone who works on their feet or has taken an arduous hike knows otherwise. In fact, people expend more energy during walking than any other activity in daily life, and for the elderly and those with mobility issues, that energy can be precious.

For decades, engineers have envisioned systems that could make walking easier. In fact, so many researchers have tried to build unpowered exoskeletons and failed that it was hotly debated in the field whether it was even possible to improve the efficiency of walking without adding an external energy source.

In news reported last week in Nature, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University have demonstrated an unpowered ankle exoskeleton that reduces the metabolic cost of walking by approximately 7 percent. The results are roughly the equivalent of taking off a 10-pound backpack, and are equivalent to savings from exoskeletons that use electrically-powered devices. The research was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation.

“It’s a real exciting milestone for the field of assistive devices,” said Thomas Roberts, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University and an expert in the biomechanics of locomotion, who was not involved in the research. “They’ve taken an assistive device and lowered the cost of human walking. That’s kind of a big deal because walking is already really cheap, and they did it with a very simple, but clever device.”

The device is the result of eight years of patient and incremental work, mapped out on a whiteboard by Steve Collins and Greg Sawicki when they were graduate students together at the University of Michigan in 2007.

“Walking is more complicated than you might think,” said Collins, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Everyone knows how to walk, but you don’t actually know how you walk.”

Collins, Sawicki and co-author M. Bruce Wiggin succeeded where so many in the past had failed by performing careful analyses of the biomechanics of human walking and then designing a simple, ultra-light-weight device that relieved the calf muscle of its efforts when it wasn’t doing any productive work.

Ultrasound imaging studies had revealed that the calf muscle exerts energy not only when propelling the body forward, but also when it performs a clutch-like action, holding the Achilles tendon taut.

“Studies show that the calf muscles are primarily producing force isometrically, without doing any work, during the stance phase of walking, but still using substantial metabolic energy,” Collins explained. “This is the opposite of regenerative braking. It’s as if every time you push on the brake pedal in your car, you burn a little bit of gas.”

With this insight in mind, the team created an ankle exoskeleton that offloads some of the clutching muscle forces of the calf, reducing the overall metabolic rate.

A mechanical clutch engages when the foot is on the ground and disengages when the foot is in the air, to avoid interfering with toe clearance. This clutch takes over the effort of the calf, producing force without using consuming any energy and thereby reducing the overall metabolic rate.

In developing the device, the research team faced a challenge. When you place heavy objects on the legs, there’s an initial penalty that increases your energy costs. Previous efforts had not been able to overcome that initial penalty. For that reason, it was critical to the researchers to keep the device light.

Over several years and many iterative designs, the team developed a carbon-fiber design that is ultra-light, yet rugged and functional. The entire device weighs approximately one pound per leg, or less than a work boot.

According to experts, the device is a triumph of elegance, simplicity and bio-specific interventions over complex, over-engineered designs.

“This unexpected and unprecedented result, with the potential to improve such a familiar human activity as walking, was discovered during a fundamental scientific study of mechanically augmented ankle function,” said Jordan Berg, a program director at NSF. “It is a great example of how basic research can lead to new beneficial devices.”

One of the long-term goals of Collins and Sawicki’s project is to use lightweight, energy-efficient exoskeletons to assist individuals with mobility issues.

“You can imagine these lightweight efficient devices being worn on the affected limb to help people with the permanent aftereffects of stroke,” Collins said. “We’re hopeful that designs that use similar techniques can help people who have had a stroke walk more easily. We’re still a little ways away from doing that, but we certainly plan to try.”

In the future, the team intends to test the current device with individuals who have a variety of mobility issues to determine what designs might work best for different populations. They are also interested in developing exoskeleton components for the knee and the hip, where they believe they may be able to garner even larger benefits.

“As we understand human biomechanics better, we’ve begun to see wearable robotic devices that can restore or enhance human motor performance,” said Collins. “This bodes well for a future with devices that are lightweight, energy-efficient, and relatively inexpensive, yet enhance human mobility.”

Related Website:
Experimental Biomechatronics Lab:http://biomechatronics.cit.cmu.edu/

Below are some key takeaway points from the talk (with some embellishment by me), followed by a video clip of the talk itself.

Physical Safety

• One way to determine how close people can be to autonomous vehicle is to look at the speed with which you can stop the vehicle, and the distance traveled in that time. When looking at the time to stop the vehicle you need to look at human reaction time, signal latencies, and mechanical stopping time of vehicle.
• You can improve the above time by having an independent safety critical system onboard that evaluates safety at run-time and can stop vehicle faster than a human can. I really like this idea and have taken a similar (more basic) approach in the past

Testing Motivation

• IEC-61508 is a key safety standard for determining how safe a system needs to be. It provides guidance on what traits map to a given safety integrity level. However, dynamically changing parameters and AI generally make a system fall into the NOT safe categories.
• For safety critical systems we need to look at the worst case scenarios (and not the nominal or best case).
• We need to test, since some scenarios will violate assumptions that we did not even know that we made.
• “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong” – Albert Einstein
• Software cares about the range of the inputs and not necessarily about the duration that you run the code for. (Duration can also matter and needs to be tested for memory usage, and other unexpected parameters that will only show up after code has been running for awhile.)
• The value of a test is not the test, but how you improve the system and learn from it

Testing Approach

• Field testing is very important. Field test till errors diminish. Then simulate system for the “next million miles.”
• The question becomes how to simulate and error check the code. One method is with robustness testing, which lets the software use automated methods to find the problems, so that the developers know what to fix.
• With robustness testing you can apply random inputs to the system and see what causes it to crash or hang. This lets you simulate inputs and not just scenarios.
• You can also probabilistically modify the real world inputs that are entering your system, and verify the outputs.
• Use system requirements to generate safety rules that are checked in real-time. The great thing about safety rules is that if a rule ever fails, you know something is wrong, and the code/test/robot can stop.
• You can also add a dictionary test on your code, where you control the inputs to see what the outputs will be. You can build a dictionary over time so that as you continue testing the system you do not reintroduce old errors that you have seen already.
• Temporal logic is useful to create rules such as “get a message within x seconds”; as opposed to “a message must respond eventually”. Tests need to reflect that.

Things that commonly fail testing:

• Improper handling of floating point numbers (out-of-bounds, NaN, infinite (inf), etc.
• Array indexing
• Memory issues. Leaking, too much specified, not enough specified, buffer overflows, etc.
• Time going backwards and old/stale data (I have seen this error more times than I can remember)
• Problems handling dynamic state

And now the part you have been waiting for:

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

• Programming safety into self-driving cars
• Safety concerns for collaborative robots
• ShanghAI Lectures: Weidong Chen “Enhancing Autonomy and Safety of Assistive Robots”
• Quadrocopter failsafe algorithm: Recovery after propeller loss

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

I’ve written about Uber before, not just because of interest in what they do today, but because it teaches us a lot about how people will view Robocars in the future. Uber’s interface is very similar to what you might see for a robocar service, and the experience is fairly similar, just much more expensive. UberX is $1.30/mile plus 26 cents/minute with $2.20 flag drop. The Black service is $3.75/mile and 65 cents/minute with an $8 flag drop. I expect robocar tax service to be cheaper than 50 cents/mile with minimal per-minute charges. The flag drop is not yet easy to calculate. What richer people do with Uber teaches us what the whole public will do with robocars.

Uber lets you say where you are going but doesn’t demand that you do. That’s one thing I suspect will be different with your robotaxi, because it’s really nice if they can send you a vehicle chosen for the trip you have in mind. Ie. a small, efficient car without much range for short, single person trips. Robotaxi services will offer you the ability to not say your destination — but they will probably charge more for it, and that means most people will be willing to say their destination.

Uber does not hide their desire to get rid of all their drivers, which sounds like a strange strategy, but the truth is that cab driving is not something most people view as a career. It’s a quick source of money that requires few special skills, something people do until something better comes along, or in the gaps in their day to make extra cash.

A version of this article first appeared on robocars.com.

CORAL lab’s research focuses on developing further the CORAL’s CoBot robots, type of robots which are aware of their perceptual, physical, and reasoning limitations and proactively ask for help from humans, for example for object manipulation actions. While Brian Colin focused on robot scheduling before transferring to NASA’s Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, Joydeep Biswas studies how the robots handle changes in a human environment. Both researchers’ general interest is to improve robotic systems’ autonomy and intelligence in the real world. Joydeep also participates in CORAL’s robot soccer project and maintains all lab’s robot hardware. At CORAL, they mainly work with CoBots, soccer playing robots, Baxters and Naos. Among the most challenging tasks they’re facing are obstacle avoidance and the need for a CoBot to rely on and autonomously ask for a human’s help when adapting to the environment. Biswas and Coltin give us their views on how these challenges are being handled and what will probably be the turning point in achieving fully autonomous robots.

Another interesting point made in the interview refers to the current state of robotics research published in today’s robotics publications. According to our interviewees, there’s quite a bit of research overlapping among research groups where researchers seem to rediscover separately over and over again the exact same challenges; from this arises the need to work more on collaborative efforts to limit the time expenditure on solving problems already tackled by other robotic labs. In this view, as underlined by Biswas, publishing more in Open Access should allow a larger audience of robotic professionals as well as anyone interested in working with the latest robotic softwares and hardwares to freely access the latest research published by labs such as CORAL. In addition to that, Biswas forwards the need to make it easier for roboticists to publish code and data (both closed binary and open data) to be shared with a wider audience who could then run it directly on their computers – an avenue to be explored by Open Access publications such as our own International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems.

In the last part of the interview, we asked Coltin and Biswas separately about their personal challenges in pursuing their PhD. degrees and who influenced them the most in their career. You may be surprised with who they name as their favorite roboticists, and what they admire the most in their current adviser, Dr. Veloso. Less surprising is their favorite fictional robot – which we will let you discover for yourself.

Biswas J, Coltin B. IJARS Video Series: Joydeep Biswas and Brian Coltin interview – CORAL research group (Carnegie Mellon University) [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V4. DOI: 10.5772/59985

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

• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
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The Summer of Learning initiative is sponsored by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Academy – an educational outreach of Carnegie Mellon University and a part of the university’s world-renowned Robotics Institute. It’s mission is to develop educational tools and resources to use the motivational effects of robotics to excite students and teachers about science and technology.

Here are the features and challenges that will be offered through the Robotics Summer of Learning…

Programming Robots 

The Robotics Summer of Learning will offer students the opportunity to program a variety of robots in deep space, on a tropical island, and a VEX or FTC game board. The robots are programmed in ROBOTC, a programming language for LEGO, VEX and Arduino robots. Beginning ROBOTC users are able to utilize simple Natural Language commands like forward, reverse, and pointTurn at the introductory level and then migrate to full C-Programming to learn advanced computer science concepts like recursion, pointers, multitasking/threading, and multi-agent communications.

Students will program the virtual robots using ROBOTC’s Robot Virtual Worlds (RVW) software, an interactive educational video game software that allows every student to experience the same benefits of learning robotics and programming without needing a physical robot. RVW tracks and stores student’s progress, through CS2N, as they solve different levels in each World. After successfully completing a World, students earn a badge that documents their achievements. At the end of the summer, students will have the opportunity to take an exam that will earn them a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy programming certification, which can be included in the student’s academic portfolio.

Introductory programming lessons are taught in the tropical themed Palm Island, one of three virtual environments in Robot Virtual Worlds. Once students learn the basics in their first mission, they are then challenged to complete missions on Planet H99 in deep space, and underwater in the Ruins of Atlantis. The final challenge is a national robot programming competition that will include over ten thousand dollars in scholarships and prizes. Two new “programming only” robotics game have been developed specifically for the Robotics Summer of Learning programming competition, which take advantage of current VEX and FTC games in Robot Virtual Worlds. The games are played by autonomously programming your robot to place objects into scoring positions as quickly as possible.

VEX “Toss Up”

CS2N’s VEX Toss Up challenges you to program your autonomous virtual robot with ROBOTC to score as many points as possible, via scoring or locking BuckeyBalls and large balls, as well as hanging from a colored bar!

FTC “Ring It Up!”

CS2N’s FTC “Ring It Up!” challenges you to program your autonomous virtual robot with ROBOTC to score as many points as possible, via hanging rings on the center or corner post hangers and placing rings on the red floor tiles!

Animation

Animation programming languages, such as Scratch and Alice, make it easy for students to create video stories, animations, games, music, and art. By using storytelling and animation as a motivator, students learn the importance of the design process while using and learning interactive programming software. CS2N offers free tutorials to get you started in both programs!

Animation Competition

Our Robotics Summer of Learning Animation Challenge is called Nature Doc-u-mentary. This challenge asks students to write a narrative introducing a creative new creature and make an animated documentary focused on your new subject using either Scratch or Alice 2.0.

Game Design Challenge

Our Robotics Summer of Learning Game Design Challenge is called Beacons and Barriers.  This challenge will have users focus on creating levels for a virtual robot to navigate through. They will use the Model Importer, included in Robot Virtual Worlds, to create objects to serve as checkpoints and obstacles.

The Robotics Summer of Learning Program is excited by the opportunity to advance students’ interests in STEM and advance their programming skill sets! Software and training will be provided for free throughout the summer. Students will have 24/7 access to the online course materials, as well as professional support from developers of the software and curriculum. There will be over $10,000 in prizes available to participants in the challenges, including free software, robot kits, and college scholarships. The Robotics Summer of Learning kicks off on June 1 and runs to September 1, 2013. 

Sign up today for the Robotics Summer of Learning!

 Professional Development

Also offered during the summer are our Professional Development courses, which do have an associated tuition fee. These courses provide teachers and coaches with a solid foundation for robot programming in the respective languages, and experience in troubleshooting common student mistakes. It also focuses on identifying and extracting academic value from the naturally occurring STEM situations encountered in robotics explorations. Classes are available on-site or online.

The Hummingbird robotics kit is a spin-off product of Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE lab. Hummingbird is designed to enable engineering and robotics activities for ages 10 and up that involve the making of robots, kinetic sculptures, and animatronics built out of a combination of kit parts and crafting materials. Combined with a cross-platform, very easy-to-use visual programming environment, Hummingbird provides a great way to introduce kids to robotics and engineering with construction materials that they are already familiar with.

Read more

AndyVision is a robotic inventory system that takes the form of an autonomous robot that can patrol and scan the aisles and shelves of a retail store.
The robot generates a detailed aisle/shelf-level interactive store map that can be displayed on an in-store digital sign for customers to browse the virtual world of the store using gestures or a touchscreen interface.

The project is part of Priya Narasimhan’s work as head of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Embedded Computing at CMU. Check out the demo video below.

Another company finding their unique niche is Liquid Robotics. More about them later.

RE2 began with an SBIR

A lot of robotics companies started with defense research objectives. Some, like iRobot, have branched into other applications commercializing what they developed for the DoD into consumer products. RE2 has stayed in defense because it’s really good at what it does – providing high torque, high payload robotic arms and manipulators.

Arm manipulation is a niche within defense — a large niche — as it is in robotics in general. Capitalizing on research and product development to meet the military’s high torque, heavy payload requirements, RE2 is not only a provider to the military but is beginning to commercialize those special capabilities into non-defense applications as well.

RE2 is a success story for the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program. Founded in 2001, RE2 remained a contract engineering firm until 2005. The company won its first DoD SBIR in 2006 to develop a small robotic arm for unmanned ground vehicles. The Phase I and Phase II awards, totaling $850K, set the course for the future of RE2. The military was keenly interested in the RE2 approach because existing robotic arms weren’t very strong or precise. CEO Jorgen Pedersen puts it, “That was enough for us to focus on and realize that we could solve those problems. Then later we realized the arms needed to be faster, more modular, and less expensive. We fulfilled on those capabilities too.”

Those first SBIRs allowed the company to become a recognized expert in mobile manipulation. SBIRs also allowed the company to grow over a several year period from six to 18. Since then it has won dozens of SBIRs that have helped fund the development of its robotic technology and provide jobs. Today, RE2 employs 60 and is growing by about 20 every year.

RE2 never had any outside investment. It never needed it, given the string of SBIRs. But Jorgen doesn’t believe that the awards represent money without a return: “We have provided the DoD with $6.5 million in revenue return so far from their $850K investment in our first SBIRs. On the SBIR commercialization index, we are 90 out of 100 because they know that we have a 90% chance of commercializing technology over anyone else.”

Liquid Robotics: A Passion for Whale Songs

Liquid Robotics has developed a unique wave glider for science, oil and gas exploration, oil production management, environmental and spill detection and a myriad other applications using only renewable energy. It has blossomed into a very promising start-up company with a broad market: any business which needs to monitor, measure, surveil and explore our oceans. Liquid has recently created two new entities to handle its success: a joint venture with Schlumberger and a new Defense/National Security subsidiary. Liquid will soon be offering a new business: ocean data as a service for those who don’t wish to own and operate their own wave gliders. Clients specify their data needs, geographic areas and duration and Liquid Robotics provides the data.

The Wave Glider development was the result of a single man’s passion for whale songs. Joe Rizzi, Chairman of Jupiter Research Foundation, had a love for the sounds of whales as they migrated along the coasts of Hawaii to Alaska. He wanted to capture their songs “live”. Not an easy task — to develop a device capable of capturing the pure sounds of the whales and stay out at sea for extended periods. After a few years experimenting, Joe enlisted Roger Hine, a mechanical engineer and Stanford University robotics expert, to help develop an unmoored, station-keeping data buoy. It was from this partnership they developed the first Wave Glider.

The original intent was purely to invent a way to capture whale songs. After they had developed the first Wave Glider and were testing in the waters off of the Big Island, they were approached on the possible commercialization of their invention by entrepreneurs looking beyond whale songs.

Early funding was predominately done by the non-profit Jupiter Research Foundation. Roger Hine came to the project with his own funds and then headed Liquid Robotics, which, in 2007, was spun off from Jupiter Research, with angel investors and mutual friends of Joe and Roger. This money seeded the early development and critical endurance/mission testing. In May/June of 2011, Vantage Point Capital Partners and Schlumberger invested a Series D round of $22M.

A Common Thread

RE2 and Liquid Robotics share one common thread: they provided a solution involving robotics to solve a real need. They didn’t provide a technology and then search for applications that fit that technology. RE2’s Jorgen said, “Even on the military side, it’s still not about the robotics. We are helping to save lives. What is the price of a human life? What is the amount of money that the military will invest to train and protect their most valuable resource, people? If we can help disarm the improvised explosive device (IED) on the road, that’s a no-brainer. And that’s a market need!”

Jorgen cites the acceleration of viable robotics companies from the September 11, 2001 catastrophe: “9-11 was bad but it was a catalyst for ground robotics. In 2002 there were four robots deployed. By 2004, it had gone to12. By 2005, 163, and by 2006, 2,000 robots, an order of magnitude jump each year. 7,000 robots were deployed by 2010.” Jorgen sees that trend continuing as robots are demystified and integrated into products and services.

Similarly, Liquid Robotics had a need to develop an autonomous unmoored, station-keeping data buoy with enough renewable energy to power a platform full of sensors and devices capable of capturing the pure sounds of whales.

British Petroleum (BP) began using Liquid’s wave gliders in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill disaster:

“Initially we will be calibrating a set of nine optical sensors to monitor water quality, including trace amounts of dispersed oil, and will then add acoustic monitoring of marine mammal activity,” said Roger Hine, president and CEO of Liquid Robotics. “We look forward to working with BP on this extended research program.”

Data collected by the deployment was posted on a public website for all to see. News spread and oil, gas and military executives saw a fit of Liquid’s gliders with their oceanographic needs. Schlumberger, an international supplier of technology, integrated project management and information solutions for the oil and gas industry, took an interest which led to their 2011 funding and 2012 joint venture with Liquid.

Conclusion: Build a Product That Satisfies a Specific Need

Colin Angle, CEO and co-founder of iRobot, has consistently held that we are going about developing the robotics industry wrong: “The idea that a humanoid robot with arms would push a vacuum cleaner is an image that has set many expectations and, in some ways, has set back the industry,” when, by just rethinking what needs to be done, we can build a product that satisfies a specific need (vacuuming), as iRobot did with their Roomba line of robotic vacuums. “I used to think that I was a self-respecting high-tech entrepreneur, but it took me becoming a vacuum cleaner salesman to actually have some success for my company, my investors and myself.”

** Portions of this article have been excerpted with permission from “It takes the military to spawn robotics.” by Babs Carryer, Adjunct Prof, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Advisor, Carnegie Mellon University, Editor and Author, New Venturist**