The LUKE Arm in the Shoulder Configuration. (Photo: Business Wire)

By: Brian Gerkey

Fundamentally, robotics is about helping people. Robots help us manufacture things, help us build things, and help make our lives easier and more convenient. As robotic systems increase in sophistication and capability, they’re starting to help people more directly, in elder care, rehabilitation centers, and hospitals. In the near future, robotics will become even more tightly integrated with humanity, to the point where cybernetics will be able to restore function to people with disabilities. In particular, amputee military personnel are the focus of one such program.

In 2014, DARPA announced its Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program, which “seeks to create a prosthetic hand system that moves and provides sensation like a natural hand.”

According to Doug Weber, DARPA program manager of HAPTIX: “We believe that HAPTIX will create a sensory experience so rich and vibrant that the user will want to wear his or her prosthesis full-time and accept it as a natural extension of the body. If we can achieve that, DARPA is even closer to fulfilling its commitment to help restore full and natural functionality to wounded service members.”

Three different teams are involved in the HAPTIX project, and its success will depend on a carefully optimized mix of hardware, user interfaces, and control algorithms. OSRF is proud to be providing a customized version of the Gazebo simulator to the HAPTIX teams, allowing them to run tests on their software without being constrained by hardware availability: essentially, a kind of virtual playground for software engineers.

“The goal of HAPTIX is for OSRF to provide a realistic prosthetic simulation environment for biomechanical engineers to develop controllers for advanced prosthetics with high degrees of freedom,” explains John Hsu, co-founder and Chief Scientist at OSRF. The advanced prosthesis that DARPA is using in the HAPTIX program is DEKA’s “Luke” robotic arm, a 14 DoF cybernetic total arm replacement system. However, the arm is currently controlled by simple user interfaces designed for testing, and part of what HAPTIX hopes to deliver are interfaces that utilize control signals from muscles and nerves, while simultaneously delivering sensory feedback.

After nearly ten years of work and $40 million from DARPA, DEKA’s robotic arm is an amazing piece of hardware, but that’s just the beginning. “The hardware, in my opinion, needs to come before the software,” says Hsu. “They can be designed at the same time, but the hardware has a longer iteration cycle. Once you develop a nice hardware platform that’s stable, then you give it to the software team, and they take off, working really fast on the software while in the meantime trying not to break the hardware.”

This illustrates two reasons why having a good simulation environment is important: first, it lets you start working on the software before the hardware is fully complete, and second, it to some extent insulates software development from the hardware itself, meaning that you can have lots of engineers developing software in parallel, even if you only have one piece of hardware that may be fragile, expensive, and quite often inoperable for one reason or another.

For OSRF, creating and supporting a version of Gazebo for the HAPTIX program involves many different areas. Besides the customized simulation environment, OSRF has also provided teams with an OptiTrack motion capture device, NVIDIA stereo glasses and a 3D monitor, a 3D joystick, and the documentation required to get it all working together flawlessly. This custom version of Gazebo also includes support for a variety of teleoperation hardware, and for the first time, users can interact programmatically with the simulation using both Windows and MATLAB. HAPTIX developers can leverage these 3D sensors and teleoperation systems to translate the motions of physical arms and hands into virtual environments, allowing them to run common hand function tests in the real world and in simulation at the same time. This also lays the foundation for a framework that could provide amputees a powerful and affordable way to learn how to use their new prosthesis.

Once the HAPTIX teams receive their DEKA arms, OSRF’s job becomes even more important, according to Hsu, because they’ll get a chance to see how well the simulation is actually working and then refine it to bring it as close to reality as possible. “I’m really looking forward to the validation part,” Hsu says. “I think that’s one of the big missing pieces for many simulation platforms: good validation data. When we were working on Gazebo for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, we never had an ATLAS robot. Getting the DEKA hand to do validation is huge.”

Validation is the process of making sure that commands sent to the simulated DEKA arm result in the same movements as identical commands sent to the real DEKA arm. “We send commands to the real hand and the simulated hand to see if they behave differently,” explains Hsu. “If they do, we update our model to make them match.” The closer the simulation matches, the more useful it will be to the HAPTIX teams. The end goal is, of course, to get everything working on the real hardware, but an accurate and detailed simulator is critical to the development of effective software.

The first generation of the DEKA arm recently arrived at OSRF for validation testing, and the complete hardware is expected before the end of the year. OSRF has been steadily releasing a series of stable versions of the HAPTIX simulator, and as the fidelity of simulated position holding, force control and response, and other dynamics are verified on the arm over the next few months, OSRF will continue upgrading the simulation software to make sure that the HAPTIX teams have all of the tools that they need to progress as quickly and efficiently as possible.

By early 2017, Phase 1 of HAPTIX will be complete, and the software and hardware components that prove to be the most successful will continue into Phase 2, the end goal of which is a complete, functional HAPTIX system. DARPA is hoping that take-home trials of such a system will happen by 2019, and that soon after, any amputee who needs one will be able to benefit from a prosthetic hand that acts (and feels) just like the real thing.

Last week, the Humanoids 2015 conference was held in Seoul, Korea. It’s the first event to focus on humanoid robots since the Darpa Robotics Challenge (DRC) earlier this year and, in fact, the location is home to the DRC winners, Team KAIST. Hence, it was no surprise that the event was very DRC orientated and even featured a mini-Darpa challenge.

Humanoids is a small conference compared to IROS or ICRA. And I really appreciate that because it gives you the chance to interact more closely with people that actually work in the humanoid field; less people, fewer concurrent sessions and more interaction.

The conference lasted three days, with the first dedicated to workshops and the others to the main conference itself.

I attended the Benchmarking bipedal functions of humanoids robots: towards a unified framework workshop and gave a talk about how to use cloud simulations for benchmarking in a general and unbiased way. Very interesting papers were presented at that workshop, especially about how to build a general framework to benchmark walking in humanoids (by partners in the Koroibot project)

The main conference was divided into plenary talks, paper presentations and interactive sessions. There were guided visits to the laboratories of KIST (the Korean Institute for Science and Technology) and a full demo of the Hubo robot doing all the DRC tests.

I loved the two plenary talks, especially the first one given by Aude Billard from EPFL. She presented a beautiful path of research towards the creation of robots that can do better than humans (super-human competences). She showed her results with the study of a robot that was able to grasp a racket when it was thrown, by making use of dynamical systems. It was impressive to see how her robot was able to grasp rackets and even balls, where a human is not able to do this.

The second plenary talk was given by Russ Tedrake, a DRC participant. He outlined several problems the teams faced when trying to control a robot during the challenge. He demonstrated his quest in trying to exploit the structure of the governing equations of model based control, in order to create more robust control for robot dynamics. I really enjoyed his talk, even if I did not understand it very much.

Paper presentations were limited to ten minutes per publication and I recommend you check the whole list of presented papers here.

The Technical Tours were visits to some the KIST laboratories like the Center for Intelligent Robotics, and the Healthcare Robotics Research Group. The first lab is dedicated to the use of social robots to enhance the cognitive abilities of the elderly. It’s  focused on small humanoids that engage the elderly to play games that stress their cognitive skills. The second lab is more concerned with robots for surgery.

Now, the most impressive activity was the DRC demo. It was amazing to see how the KAIST team performed a complete demo from beginning to end without any trouble. The robot was able to get into the car, drive, get out, open a door, close the valve, perform a drill, walk and finally climb the stairs. And they did this on three consecutive days. Based on my experience at several Robocup competitions, I know how difficult it is to make all this work for a demo, so I cannot say anything but: bravo KAIST!

Evaluating the conference, from my point of view, I feel that it is very (too much) focused on control for humanoids. The vast majority of papers are dedicated to specific control problems that humanoids face and that make them so much more complex than wheeled robots. I, personally, noticed the lack of papers more concerned with cognitive issues, where the fact that the robot is a humanoid might be used to create more complex behaviours.

There could also have been a panel of experts of some sort to analyse the results of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and how a second round of the contest would improve humanoid technology (or not).

Perhaps next year!

Source: DARPA.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation is joining DARPA and Tandem National Security Innovations on the road to spread the word about DARPA’s Robotics Fast Track Program. We’re proud to support the opportunity for startups and roboticists to receive $150,000 to build a robot prototype.

Join us in Seattle, Redwood City, Livermore, San Diego (or all four!) to learn more about the innovative program designed to make it easier to get projects funded in weeks, not months or years, by the Pentagon’s leading advanced research lab. Whether you’re a roboticist, technologist, or entrepreneur, you’ll want to join us for this rare opportunity. The events will begin with an informational session to discuss the program followed by the chance for attendees to meet privately with representatives from DARPA, OSRF and TandemNSI to ask specific questions about individual projects. Food and drink will be provided at each of our free events so come out and join us.

Seattle Event Details

Date/Time: Nov. 17, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Maker’s Space (92 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121)
Register Here

Northern California Event Details

Lunch in Livermore
Date/Time: Nov. 18, 2015 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Location: i-GATE Innovation Hub (2324 Second St, Livermore, CA 94550)
Register Here

Evening in Redwood City
Date/Time: Nov. 18, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: TechShop Mid Peninsula (2415 Bay Road, Redwood City, CA 94063)
Register Here

San Diego Event Details

Date/Time: Nov. 19, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Basement — UC San Diego (9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093)
Register Here

To learn even more about the program, the Robotics Fast Track website has specifics on how to apply, and more details on the technologies that DARPA seeks. We look forward to seeing you at one of the West Coast events!

In a surprise move today, Toyota held a press conference (see video below) announcing a substantial investment in robotics and AI research to develop “advanced driving support” technology, with former Program Manager of DARPA’s DRC Gill Pratt directing the overall project as Executive Technical Advisor. Toyota will allocate USD$50M over the next five years in a partnership with MIT’s CSAIL (headed by Daniela Rus) and Stanford’s SAIL (headed by Fei-Fei Li) to develop research facilities in Stanford and Cambridge.

Two main themes from the press conference underline the tone of this effort:

First,  Toyota doesn’t refer to autonomous cars but to ‘advanced driving support’ . And this makes sense because, unlike Google (with its fully autonomous car), Toyota’s origins are in car manufacturing and not in software development. Car manufacturers have for some time been introducing ever rising levels of autonomy in their cars and Toyota is following that vector. There are legal advantages to having the driving be ultimately responsible for the car’s movements and therefor any possible accidents; when a vehicle doesn’t respond as expected, a costly product liability suit could follow, as Toyota well knows. Thus what appears at one level to be a more conservative approach to autonomy on the road may in essence be a way to bypass potential legal nightmares and bring autonomous driving technology to the market sooner.

Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota Motor Corporation Senior Managing Officer, repeatedly stated hybrid cars as an example of a specific technology that Toyota pioneered (along with Honda) and brought to market even while it was borderline unprofitable due to its large cost at the time. This offers a possible hint of what may follow.

The second interesting point made clear during Toyota’s Q&A is that this project is only part of the auto manufacturer’s investment in the field. $50M is a lot of money, but for a profitable car maker the size of Toyota, it isn’t much. It looks like Toyota wants to establish a strong presence in the US by collaborating with two of the best research centers in the world (the budget will be equally split between the two universities) … but being a truly global company, it is developing other projects elsewhere as well. It’s worth mentioning that almost all large car manufacturers have similar research projects, and they usually collaborate with research institutes, universities or with each other.

In this respect, Toyota’s decision to bring on Pratt as the project lead appears astute. Pratt’s high visibility role as Program Manager of DARPA’s DRC has left him with significant experience managing and promoting large, big-budget projects, and has provided him with deep connections into US research labs.

You can read Toyota’s press release here for all the details. Automaton has also an excellent coverage of the story (see Toyota Announces Major Push Into AI and Robotics, Wants Cars That Never Crash) and says they will be releasing more in-depth stories about the deal early next week. You can watch the full press conference below:

Team KAIST from Korea won the DARPA Robotics Challenge, held at the Pomona Fairplex in California on June 5th and 6th. KAIST was closely followed by Team IHMC from Florida and CHIMP from CMU. All three teams scored the maximum 8 points in one or other of the two final rounds, where robots had to complete 8 difficult tasks within one hour, including a surprise task. With three teams scoring maximum points, the contest became a race. KAIST was able to complete the whole challenge in only 44 minutes. Source: DARPA.

With this robotics Grand Challenge, DARPA has advanced both the science of robotics and the story. Real robots did useful things, like operate power tools, drive cars and climb stairs far more successfully than we anticipated. But at the same time, the world saw that it was incredibly difficult for them to perform simple human tasks like opening a door. Anyone who is worried about robots stealing their jobs, or killing us in our sleep, can sleep a little sounder tonight.

Most of the world only sees robots in sci-fi movies like Terminator, Chappie and Ex Machina, in out-of-context Youtube videos, or in popular robot combat events, like Battlebots or RoboGames. No wonder real robots are so often a disappointment.

Following the DRC, however, state-of-the art robots stumbling over simple tasks are the new meme.  Rodney Brooks said at the event:

Anyone who is worried about the robot apocalypse just needs to keep their doors closed.

If we were keeping score, then doors definitely beat more robots than any other challenge. Some robots just stared at the door for most of the round. Some fell over trying to open the door. Others managed to open the door, then fell over trying to get through. Some robots (like MIT’s Atlas) actually got a point just by falling out of the car or through the door – because they landed across the designated finish line when they fell. But the robots weren’t just falling over because of the doors. RunningMan, the 2nd place finisher from Team IHMC, fell over while waving to the crowd after successfully completing all eight tasks.

So we can forget the “robot apocalypse”!

Grand Challenges have become a successful tool for accelerating technological progress, operating as financial incentives to solve an issue of global significance. And they have been around for centuries; Napoleon issued several, including the ‘food preservation’ challenge (1795) and the ‘beet sugar’ challenge (1810), in search of ways to feed his army and circumvent port blockades. (The food preservation challenge was won in 1810 by Appert, who invented of canning.)

Gill Pratt, DARPA Program Manager and Robotics Challenge Organizer, expects that the DRC will bring advancements that were 10 to 15 years out into the realm of commercial or successful application. In his words, the DRC will “transform the field of robotics and catapult forward development of robots featuring task-level autonomy that can operate in the hazardous, degraded conditions common in disaster zones.”

In the 2013 DRC trials, only 18 months ago, the 16 qualifying teams were allowed a half hour for each challenge task and could reset the robots between each task. Robots were also tethered to power supplies and in constant communication with robot operators. Only 13 of the 16 teams scored any points; only four teams scored points driving the car; and only three teams scored more than 50% of the points available.

Fast forward to the 2015 finals where 25 teams qualified and 23 competed. Teams had to complete all 8 tasks within one hour, while carrying their power on board. Communications between robots and operators were degraded during much of the challenge to imitate real life disaster conditions. In spite of the big increase in difficulty between trials and finals, 19 teams scored points, 18 attempted the drive and 10 teams scored more than 50% of the available points.

Interestingly, one thing that didn’t change much from trials to finals were the team placings, with half of the top six teams staying in same rank as in 2013. While CMU’s Chimp had a strong lead after Day One, they were unable to repeat their success or improve in rankings and were overtaken by KAIST and IHMC. I’m sure this is much to the chagrin of CMU, who have a history of being pipped after early leads in Grand Challenges.

Another fun fact is that the DRC teams with best performances mostly used ‘transformer’ style non-humanoid robots. RunningMan from IHMC, which used an Atlas, was the exception rather than the rule. KAIST and CMU transformed from bipedal to wheeled or tracked, and CMU’s Chimp was the only robot able to right itself after a fall. RoboSimian used all four limbs and any body orientation it wanted to accomplish tasks, demonstrating that non-humanoid robots are both more successful at operating in human environments and just as capable of pleasing the crowd.

Hattip to EricStout @Goofuth for the IHMC compilation

So the story is out. Robots are ready for the real world, in limited but potentially lifesaving roles. They aren’t superhuman, and they won’t be replacing people any time soon. But they are capable of some useful things and they are fun to watch even if they are falling over instead of fighting.

Who here believed that real robots would make for an interesting spectator sport? I watched the first trials just 18 months ago, and it was like watching paint dry. By contrast, though the crowd at the DRC Finals was very mixed in terms of ‘robot awareness’, we were all captivated, and we gasped and cheered the robots along. As Pratt noted:

These robots are big and made of lots of metal and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety … But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell. And what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered! It’s an extraordinary thing, and I think this is one of the biggest lessons from DRC—the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us, but to help connect people to one another.

DARPA, you set the bar high and all the robot teams delivered! Congratulations to you all!

But let’s lift the bar again at the next Grand Challenge. Teams were claiming that their diverse backgrounds gave them an edge over the competition. But diversity doesn’t just mean competitors from different countries, universities or disciplines. Diversity means many things including seeing more women in robotics. Raise the bar higher again, DARPA. It’s a strategy that obviously works.

Photo credit: Brad Templeton.

This weekend I went to Pomona, CA for the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, where robots (mostly humanoid) competed at a variety of disaster response and assistance tasks. This contest — a successor of sorts to the original DARPA Grand Challenge, which changed the world by giving us robocars — got a fair bit of press, but a lot of it was around this video showing various robots falling down when doing the course …

What you don’t hear in this video are the cries of sympathy from the crowd of thousands watching — akin to when a figure skater might fall down — or the cheers as each robot would complete a simple task to get a point. These cheers and sympathies were not just for the human team members, but in an anthropomorphic way, for the robots themselves. Most of the public reaction to this video included declarations that one need not be too afraid of our future robot overlords just yet. It’s probably better to watch the DARPA official video, which has a little audience reaction.

Don’t be fooled as well by the lesser-known fact that there was a lot of remote human tele-operation involved in the running of the course.

Check out my Gallery of Photos from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

What you also don’t see in this video is just how very far the robots have come since the first round of trials in December 2013. During those trials the amount of remote human operation was very high, and there weren’t a lot of great fall videos because the robots had tethers that would catch them if they fell. (These robots are heavy and many took serious damage when falling, so almost all testing is done with a crane, hoist or tether to catch the robot during the many falls that occur.)

We aren’t yet anywhere close to having robots that could do tasks like these autonomously, so for now the research is in making robots that can do tasks with more and more autonomy, but with higher level decisions made by remote humans. The tasks in the contest were:

• Starting in a car, drive it down a simple course with a few turns and park it by a door
• Get out of the car — one of the harder tasks as it turns out, and one that demanded a more humanoid form
• Go to a door and open it
• Walk through the door into a room
• In the room, go up to a valve with circular handle and turn it 360 degrees
• Pick up a power drill, and use it to cut a large hole in a sheet of drywall
• Perform a surprise task — throwing a lever on Day One of the challenge, and unplugging a power cord and plugging it into another socket on Day Two.
• Either walk over a field of cinder blocks, or roll through a field of light debris
• Climb a set of stairs

The robots have an hour to do this and so they are often extremely slow, and yet to the surprise of most, the audience — a crowd of thousands and thousands more online — watched with fascination and cheering … even when robots would take a step once a minute, or pause at a task for several minutes, or would get into a problem and spend ten minutes getting fixed by humans as a penalty.  

Four wheels good, two legs bad?

One of the great debates in robotics is whether the humanoid form makes sense. It is popular in fiction, of course, but it’s much harder to attain. It needs to balance, it needs to be able to stand on one foot, it needs to have most of its weight up high, and to really walk like a human, it even needs to balance on its toes. It uses far more energy to travel and is slower. Legs can handle many more types of terrain, though four-legged robots like BigDog seem able to do more. Rolling is vastly easier and more efficient, but it can’t be done in as many places — though tracked rollers are able to cover fairly rough terrain and even climb stairs.

A number of the robots in this contest took a hybrid approach. They were roughly humanoid (or simian) but had tracks or wheels on their feet and sometimes their hands or knees. This allowed them to switch to a 4-wheeled mode when moving on a flat surface for any distance. This made them much faster, particularly because any walking for now is quite slow due to the risk of falling.

Strangely, the wheeled robots had an advantage in the debris task. While they could not use the wheels to go over the cinder blocks in most cases, the alternative — the field of debris — turned out to have debris that was so light that the big heavy wheeled robots could just bulldoze through it, pushing the debris aside (though one robot did get a wheel caught). In theory, the contest was supposed to involve the robots using their arms to clear the debris. The winning team even complained this was too easy, because they had worked on doing the harder task but would have been crazy to waste time doing it.

Most of the top teams, except the 2nd place IHMC crew, used wheels in some way. Of course, one thing that strongly discouraged wheels was the fact that DARPA helped several teams by providing them with an Atlas humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics (makers of BigDog et al.) The Atlas robot, which would have cost a fortune to make, gave teams the ability focus on software and worry less about hardware, but it also constrained what they did. The winning team from Korea (KAIST) had their own hardware division to make their own robot, as did a few other teams. Some teams collaborated on making the hardware platform. Building a custom robot is so expensive that it makes a great deal of sense to share — it’s so expensive, in fact, that even if you won the $2 million prize, you would still likely lose money building your own robot.

The fastest robot on Day 1, Nimbro, had four combination wheel/legs and was very non-humanoid. Watch this time-lapse:

A few of the top robots had fairly non-humanoid forms. The 3rd place Tartan Rescue robot named Chimp, as well as the 5th place Robosimian from JPL had more ape-like forms, walking or rolling on four legs, and doing that to climb the stairs and get out of the car. There was even some argument that we should not try to make our robots too humanoid, because that makes people see them as human replacements, rather than as tools.

Remote operation and autonomy

It will disappoint many to learn that there was still lots of human involvement in the running of the course. These robots had the autonomy to do very basic tasks, like walking or rolling, or rotating an arm, or grasping, but all high level decisions were done by a team in a garage on the other side of the fairgrounds. They could not see the video feed, and to force them to make their robots more autonomous, their data connections to the robots were deliberately seriously degraded once they opened the door and went into the room. At that point they were reduced to a 9600 bps feed, plus 1 second bursts and random every 30 seconds of the high speed feed. This meant it was not possible, as some had tried in the trials, to use them more like radio controlled waldo devices.

What happened varied from team to team and task to task. In most cases though, teams would look at the high-res images and 3D scans that would come from the short bursts, and then tell the robot to move to a certain spot or put their hand in a given spot. They would then wait up to 30 seconds to get another burst and figure out what to do. Some robots were much better. For example, in the wall drilling task, some robots, once told where to cut the circle, could do that on their own.

Most of the delays that made the progress so slow involved this loop back to the humans. As the contests progress, and there is more autonomy, the robots will get faster and more interesting to watch. I think even the 9600bps channel is too much for real applications, because it was (mostly) up all the time. Some teams were able to think back to the days when we considered 9600bps fast and build interfaces that worked with that. Others seemed to live and die by the short high-speed (300mbps) bursts.

To make all this happen, they used network stressing equipment to create the degraded connections, but they also banned all 5ghz wifi at the event to make sure that they only got artificial problems with the network, not real ones. To screw them up, they also dropped packets and delivered them out of order.

Once again, the message is not to be too disappointed in the amount of remote control, but look at the trend, and how much less remote control was needed in the finals, just 18 months after the trials. Likewise consider the move from needing a tether due to constant falling to having to move on their own, with serious risks from falling. One robot that fell broke a fluid line and was out of competition. On the other hand, the 3rd place Tartan Rescue team from CMU actually had their four-legged CHIMP get up after a fall, avoiding the 10 minute reset penalty — they were the only team to get all 8 points on Day One.

This article originally appeared on robocars.com. 

Robohub’s Andra Keay @svrobo is onsite at the DRC Finals to keep you posted. 

#DARPADRC Tweets

Check out all our DRC coverage, including these top stories:

• DARPA’s Robotics Challenge: A pocket-sized guide to the finals
• DRC is not just about building robots; it’s about building community
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing

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

The DARPA Robotic Challenge Finals at the Pomona Fairgrounds is a far bigger event than I imagined. Four sets like this one plus a stage, a grandstand full of people and an exposition hall with 80+ exhibitors!

If you study the picture (click to enlarge) you can see the whole process that each of the 24 participating teams must go through:

• The robot gets loaded into the drivers seat of an AGV under the white awning. It then drives itself down an obstacle course to the red door at the bottom right of the picture.
• Then the robot dismounts the vehicle and opens and goes through the red door.
• Then it moves past some electrical panels and finds a valve which it must turn sufficient to close it.
• It then moves over to the black circle and chooses a tool or tools from the shelf to carve out a hole in the drywall.
• It then returns the tools to the shelf and walks or climbs over the rubble through the doorway to the stairs.
• And the final task is to climb the stairs.
• If it’s able to do each task all within an hour it gets a lot of points.
• The three teams with the highest point counts get the big bucks: $2 million; $1 million and $500,000.

It all starts Friday at 8 am at the Pomona Fairgrounds.

This is a big story with implications well beyond the contest aspects. I’ll be writing about it over the next few days. This is just a teaser as to what it’s all about.

Source: DRC Blog.

The DRC is all about pushing robotics technology forward. It’s all about creating a community devoted to innovation. And as it comes down to the finale on Friday and Saturday, it will also be about theatre. When spectators take their seats in the Grandstands at the Fairplex on Friday and Saturday, they will see a quartet of virtually identical Finals Courses, or what Kathy Wadham, director of creative programming for Fairplex, thinks of as stage sets. “Anything that needs to be turned into something else, or created here, we do that,” said Wadham during a backstage tour of the concocted disaster zones the robots will have to navigate over and through.

Momentum toward these DRC finals-courses/stage-sets began picking up several months ago when DRC organizers met with Wadham to explain how the courses had to be laid out, so four robots could test their humanitarian assistance skills in parallel. “They said, ‘We have a vision, can you do it?’” Wadham recalled. Those initial meetings led to detailed specifications and drawings and then it was up to Wadham to translate those abstractions into four essentially identical sets that would put the most sophisticated humanoid robots on the planet through some of the most challenging tests they have ever faced.

“I didn’t want it to look cartoonish,” Wadham said. “I wanted it to look real.” And that explains why she had an aha! moment one day as she was doing some rounds on the grounds beyond the Grandstands. She looked up at the roofs of the old horse barns on the premises and she knew she had found the perfect material for the walls of her DRC sets—corrugated tin that had been aging and rusting for 40 years. It was a fitting artistic epiphany, given that the DRC is the Triple Crown of robotics.

Source: DRC Blog.

“We went through our scrap piles to find the doors and the electrical switches,” she said. Those same piles were a gold mine for creating the debris fields in front of the steel staircases on the left side of each set. Each junk heap is an assemblage of rooftop turbine vents (some with long-abandoned birds’ nests inside), gas line piping, beat up steel drums, water heater vessels, and sundry other pieces of detritus. “Some of the stuff was not rusted enough at first,” she said. “So we have a person who rusts and weathers it and makes it look old.”

For some of the details on the set, Walham went shopping. She found the incandescent bulbs for the dingy metal mesh fixtures online and purchased decals of gauges for the square electrical cabinets from a store specializing in retro design.

“We create places,” says Wadham. “That’s what we do.” The precisely dilapidated settings Walham and her Fairplex coworkers ultimately built—each with somewhat different piles of rubble strewn around the periphery but by necessity identical in the areas where the competing robots must traverse—are sure to transport DRC spectators to the earthquake, tsunami or hazerdous industrial zones in which we all hope robots will one day provide life-saving assistance.

Robotica Comedia

Human beings rarely squander an opportunity for comedy. That tendency is holding true in Building Nine of the Fairplex in Pomona, where the DRC teams are preparing their robots for the big race days on Friday and Saturday.

Team THOR members couldn’t stop themselves from adding a doll head and some tattoo sleeves, not to mention a little UCLA bling, to their THOR-RD robot. Source: DRC Blog.

Team VALOR didn’t forget to pack a garden gnome—for a test bed they set up in their garage bay—along with a grab bag of props for their robot ESCHER. Source: DRC Blog.

One more thing: a baby shoe on a stick, here in the hands of team member and graduate student John Seminatore, has proven to be a useful and gentle engineering tool for prodding ESHER’s joints. Source: DRC Blog.

Team Grit makes a Western fashion statement atop its quadruped robot, Cog-Burn. Source: DRC Blog.

Team TRACLabs — at Homestead-Miami Speedway [photo: DARPA facebook page]

Something remarkable is happening in Building 9 here at the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif. Imagine a long, giant warehouse-like building divided into 24 bays, within which people from around the world are unpacking their robots and preparing them for the DRC Finals. Imagine lids being pried off the tops of reinforced wooden crates, foam padding and stuffing peanuts being brushed aside, and then slowly—with the help of gantries and winches—metallic creatures rising from their shipping crypts like mummies exhumed not from the past but from a future.

That’s the technical part—the fork lifts, the tools, the LEDs blinking to life as members of this new generation of increasingly sure-footed emergency responders prepare for the difficulties that await them on the challenge course outside. But the even more remarkable part is the human half of this evolving experiment in human-robotic collaboration. Members of competing teams are visiting each other. They are sharing tips and even software. Yesterday, two teams in adjoining bays wanted to know if they could lower the eight-foot-tall privacy wall that separated them so they could work together better. In less than a day, a community has arisen.

That’s a great reminder that the DRC is not about robots going off to mitigate disasters on their own. It’s about honing the interface between humans and robots, so we can take best advantage of what each has to offer. Hundreds of people are coalescing around a common goal that demands the best of people and their machines. I could not be more inspired.

Now, as the momentum builds, it’s time for me to focus on the final details of the Finals event itself, so I will take a break from updating this page personally. But please check out DRC’s new blog page—Post Cards from DRC—which will be updated regularly over the next several days to immerse you in the excitement, the tension, the people … and yes, the robots of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

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

• DARPA’s Robotics Challenge: A pocket-sized guide to the finals
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing
• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch

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

Illustration: James Provost & Erik Vrielink. Source: Automaton Blog.

DARPA’s latest Challenge reaches its climax on 6 June 2015, when 25 finalists compete for $3.5m of prize money in what’s possibly the most anticipated robotic contest ever. Since its inception in 2012, the event has lost its top competitor and the challenge is now even tougher. Here’s what you need to know to enjoy the event, in one handy guide.

The purpose 

In the past three years, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $96.6m in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) – a hugely ambitious program to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.

The DRC was inspired by the Fukushima disaster, and the US Department of Defense identifies disaster response as a priority area. In DARPA’s most recent briefing in mid-May, Programme Manager Gill Pratt broadly described the contest’s aims: “We really want to develop better tools, better techniques, ways of amplifying the effectiveness of our response to both natural and to manmade disasters.”

“If we could only better intervene from a distance in places where it’s too dangerous for human life, that would significantly add to our capabilities to mitigate the extent of disasters. That’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.”

In a disaster, one of the most problematic elements is a degradation of communication, and Pratt stressed that this is the most important aspect of the competition: “When you think about the DARPA Robotics Challenge, try to think beyond the physical robots, and focus on this very sporadic, very degraded communication between people and machines working together as partners.”

Why humanoids?

CHIMP. Source: Carnegie Mellon

According to DARPA’s research with first-response experts, the key capability requirements point to a humanoid solution – the ability to go through doors, climb steep stairs, walk on rough terrain and to use the tools on hand – are all only really achievable by a humanoid robot.

So most of the robots have bipedal designs and are humanoid in appearance, with a couple of exceptions: Tartan Rescue‘s Chimp (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform), the long armed robot that finished third in the 2013 Trials, and NASA’s RoboSimian, which has four limbs for increased stability. There’s also Team NimbRo Rescue, which has a anthropomorphic upper body on a flexible hybrid mobile base.

Human-robot interfaces must be intuitive and simplicity of use is also a primary reason why so many of the teams use bipedal, human-like forms, including DARPA’s Atlas robot model.

The challenge

This will be the final challenge in a long process that started with a virtual event in 2013 and a physical trial run later that year. Through these two preliminary rounds of competition, DARPA and the DRC teams have redefined what is possible in robot power efficiency, supervised autonomy, physical adaptability and human-machine control interfaces.

The final challenge takes place in a simulated disaster zone. It will involve two attempts at eight tasks; seven of these will be derived from the challenges of the last round, and one surprise task will be introduced at the competition.

The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they’ll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they’ll have to climb a flight of stairs. The fastest team with the same amount of points for completing tasks will win.

The main issues teams will face are communications with their robot and battery life: “Even the best batteries are still roughly ten times less energy-dense than the kinds of fuels we all use to get around,” said Pratt.

What’s happened since the last phase?

The Programme has been extended and is now truly international. Half of the teams are from the US, but Japan, Korea and the EU have invested funds. Says Pratt: “It’s a really global challenge.” 

SCHAFT

The biggest change is, however, the withdrawal of Team SCHAFT, head-and-shoulders winners of the last phase of the challenge. SCHAFT, developed by a Japanese start-up, was acquired by Google in December. Their withdrawal last June underlines both Google’s claims that it has no interest in seeking funding from the military, and the US government’s need to not be seen as funding a major corporation.

The new emphasis on the communications aspect of the challenge means DARPA will be purposefully sabotaging the link between teams and their robots. During the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it was communication issues caused by heavy radiation shielding and power outages that proved most problematic for the robots tasked with entering the site. The DRC communication outages will last up to one minute to test how well these robots deal with similar situations.

The teams are provided with situation awareness to help them visualise what the robots are up to. A change in the rules forces teams to rely less upon the remote control of individual joints and motions and instead implement task-based interfaces that incorporate advanced perception, minimal human guidance, and complex autonomous behaviour.

DARPA has also decided that the robots will operate completely untethered. There won’t be cables to provide power and data, or keep the robots upright. In view of this, DARPA has swapped the ladders used in the last challenge for stairs, making it a little easier.

The Atlas robot, created by Bostron Dynamics and DARPA, was used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

The ATLAS robot, used by the seven teams that are concentrating on software instead of hardware, has had an upgrade.The platform is manufactured by Boston Dynamics – another company recently acquired by Google.

Among the improvements to ATLAS is increased energy efficiency, with some teams now able to achieve several hours of functionality without the need for a recharge.

“We’ve provided these new robots with a very large, high-performance computer now, at least for the Atlas machines,” says Pratt. “But primarily what the robot is doing is perception, and I think that’s actually the hardest part of the job that it has. So it’s using the LiDAR sensors and the visual sensors that it has and it’s trying to decide what it is that it sees.”

DARPA is being fairly secretive about the specifics of the tasks the robots must perform: “We’ve been very purposefully not giving blueprints out to any of the teams to say this is exactly what the door handle will be like or what the valve will be like,” says Pratt. “I want to push the teams far away from trying to have scripted responses.”

The teams

There will be 25 teams competing in total, half of them from the United States. Japan, Korea and Germany are well represented with a total of 10 teams between them.

Out of the 25, a total of 14 new teams from seven different countries have been added, qualifying to participate in the DRC Finals. And 11 teams previously qualified during the DRC Trials.

Seven teams are using Atlas and the other teams have developed their own robots, which come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

Speaking about the differing capabilities of the teams, Pratt said: “We don’t know exactly what all the teams are bringing to bear, but I would expect tremendous diversity in the amount of autonomy that you’re going to see there. In addition, there’s also a variety of different user interfaces. The most primitive one just leaves it to the human being to use their brain to do the imagination of what is taking place on the other side. The best of them is actually gathering all of the data since the beginning of the run and putting together a statistical view of what the most likely scenario is at the other side.”

Team KAIST. Source: DARPA

Teams tipped for top spots include: KAIST, from South Korea and US challenger, Chimp.

What you can expect: 

The robots will compete simultaneously across four courses during hour-long runs throughout the two days.

At the DRC Trials held last December, the robots often moved excruciatingly slowly and depended upon the careful control of remote human operators. At the June final, the robots will be “at least four times faster than in the trials, and perhaps even faster,” says Pratt.

However, some would disagree, in The NY Times, John Markoff writes:

“Nobody needs to worry about a Terminator creating havoc anytime soon. Given a year and a half to improve their machines, the roboticists who shared details about their work in interviews before the contest in June appear to have made limited progress.”

However, in the December trials, organisers thought it unlikely that the winning team could score more than 15 points, but four teams exceeded that number and SCHAFT won a total of 27. So expect the unexpected!

In the trials, driving appeared to be a particular challenge, with only a few contenders even attempting it. In the DRC Finals, driving will be the first task that teams will have to tackle. “With the driving challenge coming first before anything else, we will see immediately who is serious about the competition,” says Andra Keay from Silicon Valley Robotics. “It’s a big fence first up.”

Adequate power will also present a problem. DARPA are not allowing any recharging of the robots during the event. In fact, Pratt warned reporters that the challenges in June will be even harder and told them that the “degradation of communications is a fundamental part.”

Artist’s concept of robots competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Source: DARPA

The planned interruptions in communications will mean that, “a substantial fraction of the teams will have difficulties here.” Although, whenever the robots do have a network connection, they’ll have significantly more computing resources than were available in the last round.

The teams have had to move a lot of the low-level mobility and manipulation skills from the human operators to the machines; the robots will need enough autonomy and intelligence to do tasks in a fraction of a minute. “You should expect to see a lot of robots falling down, and a lot failures of different sorts,” said Pratt.

This is largely due to the planned communications failures and the lack of hoists or safety ropes. If a team becomes stuck and the robot can’t get up, they can elect to take a 10-minute penalty during which a simulation is made of what it would be like to send in a second robot in to continue the mission after the first one has got stuck. “The simulation of that will be done by the team retrieving the first robot, bringing it back to the starting line, and, if it’s still in working condition, starting it over with a 10-minute penalty,” said Pratt.

It seems the DRC finalists are currently still at task level rather than mission level.

“I want to be very realistic about what stage we’re in right now,” said Pratt. “These are prototypes that are meant to advance the technology and it might be 10 years from now until they’re out in the field. There’s a huge difference between science fact and science fiction. Robots in science fact are more modest because the technology isn’t anywhere near what science fiction would have us believe – but they’re also more exciting because they point the way to what may be possible in the future.”

Want to go, or just watch?

The event is free and open to the public, who will watch from the Fairplex grandstands in Pomona, California on 5 and 6 June; several thousand people are expected to attend. To complement the competition, an on-site robotics exhibition and technology demonstrations from around 70 different robotics and disaster response groups is planned. All kinds of robotics hardware and software companies will be exhibiting. To attend the event, you only need to register: http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/media.

The whole Finals event will be webcast in realtime HD on YouTube. The best time to watch will be towards the end of each competition day, as that’s when the finest of the machines will be directly competing with each other, each on their own course.

What happens afterwards

The closing ceremony on 6 June will be be followed by a workshop on 7 June. The three winning teams will present the strategies and techniques that they used to gain the top spots. This won’t be open to the public, but it will be webcast.

There will also be talks about the international efforts in the field, other competitions that are coming up in the future, the different investments that are being made in various countries. Experts will also discuss the future of the industry.

Part of the day will be given over to “Robots 4us” – a DARPA competition for high school students who were given the opportunity to produce a winning video on the role of robots in society in the years ahead.

DARPA sees the DRC as an opportunity to lay the technological foundations for more autonomous and capable robots in the commercial market. In fact, the success of the competition lies in part in the commercial investments in robotics that it inspires. To this end, DARPA and some of the teams plan to publish their experiences academically.

And Atlas? What of him? The simple answer is that the DRC organisers have not yet reached a decision about Atlas’ future.

Could we see some of the resulting technology put to military use? “The key answer is that the technology is by its nature generic,” said Pratt. “It could be used in future systems for defense, or it could be used in a number of fields, like healthcare.”

Why it’s important

In short, the stellar progress we’ve seen in driverless cars in the last decade owes everything to DARPA’s 2004 Autonomous Vehicle Grand Challenge.

The sale of the DRC Trials favourite SCHAFT and Atlas software manufacturers Boston Dynamics to Google would suggest history repeating itself.

The DRC has also helped in the development of tools; the organisers funded the development of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) simulator, which was first used in the virtual challenge.

It can also take some of the credit for the amount of investment the robotics industry has seen lately. Says Pratt: “DARPA’s job is to show what’s possible. We do those early investments… and the best case is that the private sector picks that up.”

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

• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing
• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch

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

Traveling from dozens of locations around the world, the teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge have begun unloading their precious cargo into their respective working bays inside the cavernous Building 9 on the Fairplex site in Pomona, CA. Each team has pulled off its own logistics miracle to pack up not only their robots but also huge chunks of their home laboratories into a truck’s-worth of boxes and crates. Today they are reassembling these small mountains of tech gear into 24 sophisticated pop-up robotics laboratories. One member with Team Hector, coming all the way from the Technische Universitat in Darmstadt, Germany, said there was almost nothing left in the lab back home.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Already at breakfast time, Building 9 was filled with the sounds of construction: a fleet of student-pulled dollies bearing robot parts and tools, fork lifts with sturdy crates, and massive, beeping materials-handling vehicles delivering cinder blocks and wooden frameworks that some teams will use to build replicas of the emergency-response tasks their robots will face later in the week. Now and again, team members rolled in a robot hanging on an aluminum framework—for now, looking like inanimate futuristic manikins—as other robots sat frozen, their arms and hands up in front of their faces like boxers in a defensive position.

Already apparent in Building 9 are signs of collaboration among teams and an eager comparing of notes. But apparent also was a rising competitive energy as teams were able to peer into each other’s pop-up laboratories and get first glimpses of their robot rivals. And already on everyone’s mind is which robots and which teams will come out on top.

Who wouldn’t love a win, place or show, and the respective take-home prizes of $2 million, $1 million and $500,000? But the far more valuable result of the entire DRC, noted DARPA program manager Gill Pratt during a welcome session on Sunday evening, transcends the specific outcome of the competition. The priceless payoff, really already in hand, is the community of researchers the DRC has catalyzed into existence with the collective goal of pushing robotic technology forward.

To come later from the DRC, Pratt and other participants expect, are robots that can open a pressure-relief valve to prevent a disastrous explosion in a nuclear power plant or disarm improvised explosive devices on battlefields. But as spectators will witness on Friday and Saturday, getting there will be a one-step-at-a-time journey.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

As a first step, we designed the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC). The VRC enabled us to invite software developers, who may not otherwise have access to robotics hardware, to participate in the DRC program. DARPA would provide robots to the teams that brought the best software to control them.

In June 2013, 26 teams competed in the VRC. The competition took place exclusively in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Simulator—also known as Gazebo—an open-source, cloud-based platform. Teams competed in this virtual environment from the perspective of a robot’s onboard sensors within a 3-D virtual environment that displayed the robot sensor data in real time. The top six teams moved on to participate in the DRC Trials using an ATLAS robot.  All of these teams are now moving on to compete in the DRC Finals this June.

You can read about the details of OSRF’s role in the Virtual Robotics Challenge or watch a short video here (link is external), but more generally, what I find most impressive about the simulator is how far the technology has come in such a short time, and how quickly it has been adopted throughout the robotics industry. Since the VRC, DARPA has continued to fund OSRF to evolve the simulator to improve simulation accuracy, usability, and a range of features. As of early last year, Gazebo became the first simulator to support four different physics engines (link is external). Each engine provides a unique set of capabilities, and provides users the ability to customize simulation to an unprecedented degree. Many of the DRC finalists continue to use Gazebo as part of their preparation for the upcoming competition.

Additional planned enhancements to Gazebo over the next few months will include Windows support, aerodynamics simulation, improved performance, and more realistic rendering.

OSRF has also expanded the types of virtual environments available. Digital elevation models are fully supported, allowing for simulation of real-world terrain or fictitious landscapes. An in-simulation building editor facilitates the construction of custom multi-story structures. Finally, a new graphical model editor simplifies the process of creating and editing robot and other simulation objects.

Use of Gazebo is now common among robotics professionals working in the areas of service and industrial robots, academics, training and more. It is also being used in DARPA’s HAPTIX program, which is seeking to create an advanced prosthetic hand system that moves and provides sensation like a natural hand.

Even after the DRC is over, the DARPA-funded Gazebo (link is external)
simulation software will continue to be available to future robotics innovators.

Source: violscraper/flickr

After years of alarmist comments from robo-ethicists, futurists, technologists, business leaders and pundits, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, two journalists bring some reality to the issue.

Many notable scientists and technologists think that the artificial intelligence field is advancing so fast that it needs ethical guidelines similar to those in the biotech sphere. Others think that millions of jobs are being displaced by ever-increasing numbers of robots. Their comments have been reported with alarmist headlines which are often out of sync with the actual remarks. Now, two prominent technology reporters reflect on those headlines and comments.

In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, regarding jobs being replaced by robots, journalist Robert Kuttner confronts the scaremongering headlines and posturing about higher unemployment imminent from the exponentially growing deployment of robots:

Take a closer look and you will see that many of the commentators warning about a new form of technological job displacement are either orthodox economists or those tacitly proceeding from the assumptions of standard economics that society can’t improve on the verdicts of market forces.

And that’s the deeper malarkey. The problem isn’t the technology, which, on average, is a huge benefit but, on average, doesn’t do it. (On average, Bill Gates and his gardener are very rich.) The problem is that market forces aren’t competent to translate the productivity gains into new jobs, much less good jobs, because the demand is in the wrong place.

With adequate taxation of wealth and sufficient public investment, society could readily create the new human jobs to replace the ones destroyed by automation. And the faster the rate of technological displacement, the more urgently needed is the social investment.

Read Kuttner’s complete article here.

Over at The NY Times, in an article regarding the fears about out-of-control AI, technology reporter John Markoff brings some common sense to the recent flurry of fearmongering in the statements of some notable technologists and scientists, and the two most recent sci-fi movies with the common theme of runaway AI. Markoff compares today’s state of the art in AI technology – the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals next week in search and rescue-oriented tasks – to comments from Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking:

Nobody needs to worry about a Terminator creating havoc anytime soon. Given a year and a half to improve their machines, the roboticists, who shared details about their work in interviews before the contest in June, appear to have made limited progress.

In the previous contest in Florida in December 2013, the robots, which were protected from falling by tethers, were glacially slow in accomplishing tasks such as opening doors and entering rooms, clearing debris, climbing ladders and driving through an obstacle course.

Reporters who covered the event resorted to such analogies as “watching paint dry” and “watching grass grow.”

In fact, the steep challenge in making progress toward mobile robots that can mimic human capabilities is causing robotics researchers worldwide to rethink their goals. Now, instead of trying to build completely autonomous robots, many researchers have begun to think instead of creating ensembles of humans and robots, an approach they describe as co-robots or “cloud robotics.”

Regarding the two recent sci-fi movies Ex-Machina and Chappie, Markoff wrote:

The agile robots in films like “Ex Machina” are far ahead of reality. Robots in films like “Chappie” are capable of great destruction. In real-world contests, state-of-the-art robots struggle simply to remove debris.

Read Markoff’s complete article here.

Since I’ll be one of the people “watching the grass grow” at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in June, I’m hoping that things have improved a bit – but not as outrageously as the beautiful robots in Ex-Machina.

My pet peeve isn’t the worry expressed about the possiblity of massive job displacement or runaway AI, but rather the headlines that tout and provoke and cause unnecessary fear and concern. I applaud those, like Kuttner and Markoff, who poke fun back at the headline writers while also provide real information that allays those fears and places the issues in proper perspective.

Read more

We’re excited to announce that OSRF and BIT Systems are seeking innovative and revolutionary robotics projects for the Robotics Fast Track (RFT) effort, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The goals of Robotics Fast Track are to:

1. Enable rapid, cost-effective development of new robotics capabilities for space, sea, land, and air applications. RFT will focus on the development of groundbreaking robotic hardware and software by funding novel approaches as well as creative adaptations of existing technologies.
2. Achieve breakthrough capabilities in less time and at a fraction of the cost typical of government-supported robotic development processes by engaging highly agile organizations and individuals who traditionally have not worked with the U.S. government.

Anyone can apply for Robotics Fast Track funding, both US and non-US organizations.  Learn more and apply at rft.osrfoundation.org!

Five short videos prepared by U.S. high school students have been selected as winning entries in DARPA’s “Robots4Us” video contest and will be featured at a June 7 invitational workshop on the future of robotics. DARPA launched the contest to stimulate student consideration of the societal implications of robotics.

Winners created compelling short videos about the future of robots in society and will get the chance to discuss their ideas and see current cutting-edge robots in action.

The student winners, whose videos look ahead to a future when robots will play ever more important roles in fields ranging from agriculture to medicine to emergency response, will travel as DARPA’s guests to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, to be held in Pomona, Calif., on June 5 and 6. There, state-of-the-art robots prepared by more than 20 top robotics organizations from around the world will compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt to complete humanitarian assistance tasks on a simulated disaster-response course.

The next day, the student winners will participate in a day-long DARPA workshop in Pomona, “From Better Robots to Better Futures.” That event will feature lessons learned by the top three DRC teams, announcements of future international robotics challenges and activities, and visions offered by industry and government leaders about the ways in which robots may become integrated into society in the future. The student winners will participate in a panel discussion about their videos and offer their visions and perspectives on issues to consider. The workshop will be webcast on DARPA’s YouTube page, where the Robots4Us winning videos—approximately three minutes each—will debut that day.

“DARPA wanted to hear from the generation that will be the first to grow up and live with a wide range of robotics technologies. Their ideas about how robots might make a difference for society will shape that future,” said DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar. “We appreciate the thought these students put into their creations. And we were inspired by their visions about the influence robotics could have in our businesses, our homes, and in the military.”

Robots4Us contest student winners are:

• Kristina Argao, Hagatna, Guam (Teammate: Riezzalyn Viray)
• Ben Chrepta, Rochester, Minn. (Teammate: Alden Giedraitis)
• Hector Cruz, Cedar City, Utah
• Shiloh Curtis, Santa Cruz, Calif.
• Atticus Jones, New York, N.Y. (Teammates: Kentaro Jones and Jigme Tinley)

A panel of judges with expertise in robotics technology, videography, science communication, and social and ethical issues evaluated the video submissions. The judges based their scores on how clearly each entrant communicated his or her vision of the future; creativity, thoughtfulness, originality and appeal; and technical quality.

Stay tuned in here to learn more about the Robots4Us contest and the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and to view the student-developed videos and watch the live webcast of the “Better Robots: Better Futures” workshop on June 7. More detail about DARPA’s goals for the Robots4Us contest is also available in this launch video:

The DRC finals will occur June 5-6, 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona, California. The event will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course.

This post originally appeared on the DARPA Robotics Challenge blog. 

To help HAPTIX performers to quickly and effectively conduct their research, DARPA is providing each team with open source simulation software in which to test their designs. The software includes a variant of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Simulator from the June 2013 Virtual Robotics Challenge, the first stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Source: DARPA.

The Gazebo team has been hard at work setting up a simulation environment for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program. The goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Managed by Dr. Doug Weber, HAPTIX is being run out of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO).

As the organization maintaining Gazebo, OSRF has been tasked with extending Gazebo to simulate prosthetic hands and test environments, and develop both graphical and programming interfaces to the hands. OSRF is officially releasing a new version of Gazebo for use by HAPTIX participants. Highlights of the new release include support for OptiTrack motion capture system; the NVIDIA 3D vision system; numerous teleoperation options including the Razer Hydra, SpaceNavigator, mouse, mixer board and keyboard; a high-dexterity prosthetic arm; and programmatic control of the simulated arm using Linux, Windows and MATLAB. More information and tutorials are available at the Gazebo website. Here’s an overview video:

“Our track record of success in simulation as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge makes OSRF a natural partner for the HAPTIX program,” according to John Hsu, Chief Scientist at Open Source Robotics Foundation. “Simulation of prosthetic hands and the accompanying GUI will significantly enhance the HAPTIX program’s ability to help restore more natural functionality to wounded service members.”

Gazebo is an open source simulator that makes it possible to rapidly test algorithms, design robots, and perform regression testing using realistic scenarios. Gazebo provides users with a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and convenient programmatic and graphical interfaces. Gazebo was the simulation environment for the VRC, the Virtual Robotics Challenge stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

DARPA’s Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program aims to develop fully implantable, modular and reconfigurable neural-interface systems that would enable intuitive, dexterous control of advanced upper-limb prosthetic devices. Source: DARPA.

This project also marks the first time Windows and MATLAB users can interact with Gazebo, thanks to our new cross-platform transport library. The scope is limited to the HAPTIX project, however plans are in motion to bring the entire Gazebo package to Windows.

Teams participating on HAPTIX will have access to a customized version of Gazebo that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) developed under the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, as well as representative physical therapy objects used in clinical research environments.

More details on HAPTIX can be found in the DARPA announcement.

photo: KMel Robotics

New Chinese robotics investment fund; the RIA says 2014 North American robotics set new sales record; marine robotics company gets acquired. These stories and many more … 

Kmel Robotics, the Pittsburgh-based flying entertainment robot startup that became famous when they did a show using a swarm of lighted drones at the Cannes Film Festival, sold to chipmaker Qualcomm for an undisclosed amount. Qualcomm recently partnered with TechStars to set up a San Diego-based accelerator that plans to annually fund up to a dozen robotic startups.

TM-100 robot from Harvest Automation

A Sole Source Notice of DARPA contracting with KMel to provide a fleet of fast lightweight autonomous (FLA) mini drones may have forced KMel partners to seek funding and partners to scale up. We won’t know the real reason or amounts involved until Qualcomm provides that information in their quarterly SEC filing.

Harvest Automation, located just outside of Boston, is getting $2.9 million as part payment in an as-yet uncompleted funding round to start a new product branch: the OmniVeyor, a mobile device focused on e-commerce companies moving items around their warehouses. According to the Boston Business Journal, Harvest Automation has already raised $25 million for their agricultural robots and have sold over 100 of them to more than 30 farms around the U.S. with an active sales program underway to increase those numbers significantly.

photo: Oceaneering

Oceaneering International, the Houston-based marine engineering and services company serving the offshore oil and gas industry, is buying C & C Technologies for $280 million. In the image above, one can see all the drilling, rig and oil and gas operations going on in offshore deep waters. Lafayette, LA-based C & C provides ocean-bottom mapping and survey services using customized AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles). Oceaneering has a fleet of ROVs and AUVs and a design and manufacturing unit that makes ROVs and expects to maximize use of those ROVs in support of the mapping and survey services C & C provides. The acquisition is anticipated to be completed in early April. C & C’s sister company ASV (Autonomous Surface Vehicles) is not involved in the Oceaneering acquisition.

The Robotics Industries Association (RIA) reported that 2014 was the strongest year ever for North American robotics. Their detailed statistics will be sent to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), combined with other data, and compiled into the IFR’s annual report of industrial and service robotics.

27,685 robots valued at $1.6 billion were ordered from North American companies during 2014, an increase of 28% in units and 19% in dollars over 2013. Robot shipments also set new records, with 25,425 robots valued at $1.5 billion being shipped. Shipments grew 13% in units and 6% in dollars over the previous records set in 2013.

The automotive industry was the primary driver of growth in 2014, with robot orders increasing 45% year over year. Non-automotive industries also grew at 7% over 2013. Plastics and Rubber (25%), Semiconductor and Electronics (21%), and Metals (16%) were the prominent non-automotive industries.

According to Alex Shikany, Director of Market Analysis for RIA, the fastest growing applications for robot orders in North America in 2014 were Arc Welding (+58%), Spot Welding (+57%), Assembly (+16%), and Material Handling (+11%). RIA estimates that some 230,000 robots are now at use in United States factories, placing the US second only to Japan in robot use.

Han’s Laser Technology, a Chinese provider of laser processing equipment for marking, welding, cutting, drilling and solar, has, according to China Money Network, partnered with Guosen H&S Investment Company Limited, the private equity arm of state-owned financial service company Guosen Securities Company Limited, to establish a new $160 million fund to invest in the Chinese robot and artificial intelligence sector. Han’s Laser employs 6,200 people and plans to use the fund to improve its competitiveness in high-tech sectors such as laser systems integration, linear motors and visual identity.

Resort Savers RSSV, a Chinese companies that acquires market-ready petroleum industry technologies for installation and distribution in China, particularly technologies to clean oil storage units and recover usable oil, invested $2 million for a 20% share of Worx America, a designer of automated and robotic solutions that help improve efficiency and systems output for the energy industry. The Worx automated robotic system quickly cleans and recovers clean oil from container waste sludge, resulting in increased sales and decreased tank cleaning time giving RSSV the ability to offer proprietary solutions for onshore, offshore and subsea oil production, refining, cleaning and reclamation.

US President Barack Obama linked robots and jobs in his sixth State of the Union address this Tuesday. The State of the Union Address is usually delivered annually by the President in a joint session of the US Congress, and is a platform for highlighting the President’s legislative agenda and national priorities.

Obama began by offering a positive link between technology as a driver for employment and business opportunity. “I want Americans to win the race for the kind of discoveries that unleash new jobs,” he said, giving the examples of DARPA’s robotic prosthetics program and NASA’s program to send US astronauts to Mars.

However, following these remarks he immediately launched into cautionary words about the negative effects of income inequality on the moral state of the country: “When it comes to issues like infrastructure and basic research, I know there is bipartisan support in this chamber. Where we too often run into the rocks is how to pay for these investments. We don’t mind paying our fair share of taxes as long as everybody else does too.” He went on to discuss the need to end tax breaks that encourage companies to shift profits overseas and to support small businesses and entrepreneurs.

ATLAS climbs a ladder in December’s DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

Teams of roboticists from around the globe will convene in Los Angeles for the third and final round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge on June 5^th  and 6^th, 2015. For this phase, DARPA will be cutting the safety tethers, power cords, and network connections that previously assisted robots. The roster of participants has also changed, with Japan, Korea, and the EU electing to sponsor teams and Team SCHAFT, winners of the last phase, deciding to withdraw from the competition. DRC Program manager Gill Pratt explained that by raising the stakes and expanding participation, DARPA is hoping to foster the development of more advanced autonomous behavior for robots that operate in complex environments.

Pratt started the announcement by explaining how the Challenge has already exceeded his expectations. At the DRC Trials held last December (check out our beginner’s guide if this is news to you), organizers expected the winning team could maybe score about 15 points, but four teams exceeded that number and SCHAFT won 27. Now that participants have shown what they’re capable of, DARPA wants to push them further.

He explained that robot hardware was, across the board, robust, and teams did surprisingly well with grasping and dexterity, mobility, and human-robot interface design. But it’s time to solve, in Pratt’s words, “the really hard part of the robotics problem.” He wants humans and robots to be able to collaborate more effectively in the field by leveraging the unique capabilities of both. To see this happen, he’s changing the rules to force teams to rely less upon the remote control of individual joints and motions and instead implement task-based interfaces that incorporate advanced perception, minimal human guidance, and complex autonomous behavior.

The trial will still involve two attempts at eight tasks. But there’s a twist: robots will now only have an hour to perform all eight consecutively. In the last round, robots attempted each stage separately and were allotted 30 minutes for each task. The tasks have yet to be finalized, but details will be sparse until the teams converge in California for the competition. Seven tasks will be derived from the challenges of the last round, but one surprise task will be introduced at the competition. Pratt pointed out that robots will be “at least four times faster than the trials, and perhaps even faster.”

“We think the robot being able to survive a fall is difficult but not too hard. We have little information on the difficulty of getting up. This is a very new thing we’re trying, very high risk, for those machines that do fall down, it’s going to be really neat to see how they handle it, because […] humans will not be able to teleoperate the machine with any reasonable performance.”

At the DRC trials last December, the robots often moved excruciatingly slow and depended upon the careful control of remote human operators. Even with this divine guidance, they still fell down on their safety tethers quite often. But these handicaps will be gone in the next round. DARPA organizers want to see how well a robot can perform in the field without an umbilical cord, so they’re cutting the robots’ physical and electrical tethers. They’ve also decided that robots will entirely lose their network connection “for a substantial fraction of the time available” explaining this had the goal of preventing direct teleoperation.

In the December trials, robots were connected to tethers that kept them from crashing with the ground. In the next round, robots will lose their leases, fall down, and — hopefully — pick themselves back up. Source: Team IHMC

Pratt explained that these requirements were added to more accurately simulate the challenges faced by disaster robots at Fukushima-Daiichi. Robots depended upon limited battery power and thick concrete and steel-reinforced walls in the plant made network connectivity intermittent at best. And there certainly weren’t any safety lines to prevent the robots from falling.

Whenever the robots have a network connection, they’ll have significantly more computing resources than were available in the last round. Organizers are curious about the new paradigm of cloud-assisted autonomy and want to see how it could be used in field robots. So robots will have access to “as much computing power, as much disk space, as much crowd-sourced expertise” as the teams desire. Robots will also be able to connect to the internet. Look for DRC robots to ask for your assistance via Facebook next summer!

In the DRC’s final round, robots will have more resources available via their network connection, but the connection will only be intermittently available. Source: DARPA

Pratt also announced that the governments of Japan, Korea, and The EU are planning to sponsor teams. In light of this funding infusion, and the surprising performance of unfunded teams in the last round, DARPA has invited more teams to join this final round of the competition. Any team that can demonstrate a robot completing several “simple” DRC tasks is invited to submit a video to the DRC website by February 2^nd, 2015. Eleven teams are qualified at this moment but organizers are hoping 24 teams will participate next June.

Another important announcement today was the news that Team SCHAFT – winner of the December trials – has withdrawn from the competition to focus on commercializing its technology. Remember that Google acquired SCHAFT last December.

SCHAFT, who won the last round by 7 points, won’t be competing in LA next June. Instead, SCHAFT’s technology might soon appear in a Google robot. Source: DARPA

Considering executives’ assertions that Google had no plans to become a military contractor and the rumor that started circulating in January, SCHAFT’s disaffiliation from DARPA isn’t too surprising. As announced in March, the funding to which SCHAFT was entitled will be distributed among two previously-unfunded teams, THOR and ViGIR.

“[DARPA hopes] companies will pick up the technology developed in the DRC, develop it further, commercialize it, and the results will be cheap enough to make reasonably-priced disaster robots.”

By making the challenge so demanding and offering a $2 million prize, DARPA is hoping to lay the technological foundation for more autonomous and capable robots in the commercial market. In fact, DARPA will measure the success of the competition in part by the commercial investments in robotics that it inspires. To help DRC technology reach the market, DARPA and some participating teams plan to publish the lessons they learned in the challenge in academic journals.

Left: Team Stanford’s Stanley, the winning car of DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge.
Right: The Google Car, developed by a team led by Sebastian Thrun, former leader of Team Stanford. Sources: DARPA, Google

It’s reasonable to expect success — by hosting the Grand Challenge in 2003, DARPA turned the key on autonomous vehicles. Google acquired the winning team from Stanford, so you can trace their autonomous car’s lineage back to DARPA. With SCHAFT’s announcement and Google’s acquisitions of it and Boston Dynamics, history is repeating itself. Dr. Pratt’s vision of the DRC’s legacy seems to be materializing before the competition even finishes.

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

• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• Robots Podcast: The DARPA Robotics Challenge
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.
For more DRC reading, see our interview with Dr. Pratt.

When Google bought Boston Dynamics last December, the news made headlines, but it was not the first time the Internet giant has invested in DARPA-funded robotics. As part of Robohub’s Big Deals series, we asked Gill Pratt, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, to shed some light on what DARPA thinks about Google’s robotics acquisitions , and what it might mean to the robotics and open source communities.

Congratulations, Gill, on the DARPA Robotics Trials – what was your personal assessment of the event?

I was very pleased with how well the teams performed, and in particular that the hardware for the majority of the teams worked so reliably. In general, the teams did slightly better than we had expected and this was probably the result of a lot of very careful preparation. The infrastructure that we set up also worked reliably in the trials. Still, the DRC Trials were really just a beginning and showed us the potential of what can be done in disaster scenarios with robots.

Cloud computing was an important facet of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and especially the Virtual Robotics Challenge … How do you see cloud computing helping the development of robots?

The importance of cloud computing for Robotics falls into two different categories. The first has to do with simulation environments. We used cloud computing for the first time with the Virtual Robotics Challenge, which we had back in June as a precursor to the DRC Trials, to do real-time simulation of tasks in unstructured environments. We rented a whole lot of cloud computing space, we ran a very good simulator developed for DARPA by the Open Source Robotics Foundation, and we adjusted the latency – the time delay – so that it would be the same for all the teams, even though they were located in different parts of the world. It was a tremendous enabler to run a real-time competition based on simulation that also involves human-robot collaboration. Doing so required that the simulation run in real-time. That was a big first and we felt it was very successful.

Another important aspect of cloud computing is something that we have not used to date, but I think has a lot of potential for the future: the ability to have a robot’s computing and data hosted remotely. There’s a lot of potential for this, in particular for doing perception. Forty percent of the human brain is used for perception, and perception is one of the most difficult tasks for an autonomous robot. It’s very difficult to fit a computer with the size, weight, and power that you need to achieve really good perception onto a robot: the computer just gets too large, it consumes too much power, and it weighs too much. However, if you have access to cloud resources with lots of data and lots of computing cycles, they can help move that burden off of the physical robot.

Perhaps most exciting for the future of cloud computing in robotics is that when one robot learns how to perceive something, or learns how to do a particular task, that learning can be instantly shared with other robots. This sharing could have a catalytic effect on the capabilities of robots, particularly in structured environments.

This is really an up and coming field. How likely are we to see commercial interest come out of cloud computing for robotics?

If you look at the research being done we see a lot of possibilities with cloud computing for robots. In the commercial world, I think we are going to see it applied first to structured environments where there are lots of human artifacts — things like doors, stairs, furniture, tools — and where a large database of stored examples of these artifacts can help the recognition problem.

The Atlas robot, created by Bostron Dynamics and DARPA, was used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

This is an interview for our Big Deals series, so we’re wondering, what does DARPA think about Google buying up some of the technologies that DARPA has spent years building? We’re thinking of the cars, the humanoids …

We are thrilled to see commercial interest. It’s one of the signs of success for the investments that we have made in future technology.

We think that it takes commercial investment to drive down the cost of technology. A very well known example is the cellphone. Cellphones have microprocessors in them that many years ago began with investments by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office and others. Cell phones have inertial measurement units to figure out the tilt of the cellphone. They have displays; they have GPS receivers; they have radio devices that work at low power. I can point to any number of DARPA investments that helped start those technologies, and of course cellphones now talk to the Internet, which is probably the best known output of all of DARPA’s investments. But if the Department of Defense wanted to produce a cellphone without the commercial world having picked it up and turned it into a product that billions of people use, it would cost many orders of magnitude more than it does now. It’s really because of the commercial world that we’ve seen the price of cellphones go down.

But DARPA is not only interested in seeding technologies with these early investments; we are also committed to solving real problems for national security. In fact, we have a variety of programs that use cellphones. One of these is called TransApps, where soldiers use smart phones to plan and carry out missions and layer and share data between teams. This is an example where investment by the commercial world made possible a national security capability that otherwise might not be feasible because of excessive cost.

By analogy, what’s going on in robotics is that we’ve seen some interest in the commercial world in taking this to the next step. And they have resources far beyond what DARPA has to further develop a technology and, most importantly, to drive down cost.

So these big deals are a good thing for DARPA?

Yes, they are a wonderful thing for DARPA and, more broadly, for our nation.

Do you think it’s a good thing for the field of robotics in general?

Absolutely, but I understand why there’s some anxiety.  It’s true that, for a very short time, some talented people in the field will be working for a commercial firm rather than for DARPA. However, that effect is transient and very small compared to the much more important thing, which is that these corporate investments both accelerate the field and show that it is going to be real.

This anxiety is a lot like the kind you get when your kids leave home. It’s sad, and for a while you’re going to miss them, but wait a while and then the grandkids come. The important thing is for Robotics to become a field that is not only about prototypes or lab demonstrations, but a field where significant resources are invested to make products that really improve people’s lives. We saw it with the Roomba vacuum cleaner, but we want to go beyond that. These kinds of commercial investments will make the field far more attractive to startups and to students who are planning their careers. The net effect is strongly positive.

How do you think this corporate interest in robotics will impact the open source community?

Open source is very important. It allows us to develop pre-competitive catalysts to help the whole field move forward.

In the integrated circuits world it was recognized that you couldn’t build experimental integrated circuits as easily as you could wire up a circuit with discrete components like capacitors and resistors and transistors that you solder by hand. As a result, people working in the area at that time needed to develop a simulator to allow for the experimentation of how a chip would work without actually having to make the chip. The idea was to do the design and the debug cycle on the computer in simulation instead of having to do it on the bench: when you were done you could press a button and have confidence that the chip would actually work. The open-source simulator SPICE filled that niche.

The very same kind of thing is true in the robotics field. The key is to recognize that simulation is really a pre-competitive technology now.  We don’t need to have proprietary closed simulation systems and keep reinventing the simulator over and over again. We’ve done it enough times now to know that it would be useful to apply open source. In the same way, I think that an operating system is precompetitive – it has been done enough times that a new company should not try to distinguish itself based on a proprietary version of an OS.

Rather, let’s just move on to the next thing where the real innovation is going to occur. DARPA funded the Open Source Robotics Foundation to develop an open source simulator for the DARPA Robotics Challenge because we think that it will catalyze the whole field to everyone’s advantage.

With the purchase of Boston Dynamics, some headlines were saying that Google bought military robotics. Is this an accurate assessment?

I think it’s very inaccurate. It’s based on the confusion – and the conflation – of two aspects of robotics: remote bodies and remote brains. A robot allows you to have a mechanical body take the place of a human being; for example, a robot can work in a dangerous environment while a human supervisor is in a safe place. And a robot also allows you to perform some of the function of the human brain autonomously in a remote location. When you conflate bodies and brains, and say that there is only one idea here, it’s like saying, “The robot looks like person, so it must be as intelligent as a person, and therefore I should be scared of all robots, particularly those funded by the Department of Defense.”

All of the robots that I’m aware of, except for the ones that actually have weapons or specialized sensors on them, are generic. They are neither military nor commercial. They are just robots that have mobility and perhaps some manipulation, but there are not classed to one type or the other. And they are all almost completely empty-headed: their bodies may look like ours, but their heads are almost totally empty.

In terms of autonomy, the technology has such a long way to go that the fears that have been generated are way out of proportion to the state of the art. At the DRC Trials, for example, we had people supervising the robots in pretty tight loops, telling them what to do. While autonomy may be able to handle very simple environments, close human supervision is going to be needed in unstructured environments for some time.

What do you say to people who are uncomfortable with the use of military robots in a commercial context?

I think there are legitimate concerns, but from a rational point of view it’s important to distinguish between a weapon, which none of the robots we are talking about are, and a machine that makes us feel scared because it looks like us but it’s hard to understand exactly how it works. Of course, science fiction has stoked that fear with movies like Terminator and so forth, but that reaction actually goes back a long, long way to stories like Frankenstein – anything that sort of looks like a person but is hard to understand will generate fear. It’s an emotional reaction. However, from a rational perspective, if you consider how little autonomy these real machines actually have, you realize that the worry is way out of proportion to reality.

What are some of the benefits that could come out of combining Google’s expertise in data with hardware from Boston Dynamics?

I don’t know the specific applications that Google is thinking of – it’s their prerogative to discuss them or not, and they haven’t told DARPA.

Generally speaking, when you think about data and robotics, there are a lot of exciting things that could happen. For example, you could do perception better by using a lot of data and sophisticated search. This is not necessarily the kind of search we think of when we type words into our browsers, but the kind that involves images, where a robot could say, “Okay, I see something and because of many prior examples I know what to do,” and share that data in a useful way.

Would voice commands play into this dynamic, in addition to visual search? Would it make it easier for humans to interface with robots?

I’m not an expert on voice, so I don’t want to speculate, but I know that you can train better when you have a lot of data. Voice and natural language recognition have the potential to help with planning and perception, and I think they could also facilitate more intuitive interfaces for sharing information between robots and humans.

Team SCHAFT raises the arms of its S-One robot in victory after successfully completing the Climb Industrial Ladder task at the DRC Trials. SCHAFT won that task and three others, and scored the most points of any team at the event. Source: DARPA.

What new robotic technologies will DARPA be pushing that might appeal to big companies that are not traditionally robotics focused?

We’re really interested in cooperation directly between robots and between human beings and machines. We are also interested in dealing with dynamic environments. What I would like to do for the future of the DRC, and what I think that DARPA is going to push even beyond that, is to answer questions like “What if the communication is intermittent?” and “What if the environment is beyond a set of familiar things that I’ve seen before?” … What do we do if we’re actually outdoors? How do we handle this piece of vegetation that’s in front of us? Do we go through it or around it? If we go through it, do we move the branches out of the way?

We also still have a lot of research to do to figure out how to apply cloud computing when the environment is unstructured, like it would be in disasters or outdoor scenarios.  And if the communications are intermittent, we have to figure out how to cache enough of the intelligence on the robot itself so that it can continue to do what it needs to even when it’s disconnected from the cloud. Of course, disconnected operation may be at a reduced level of effectiveness, but we don’t want the robot to stop altogether when communications go down for a little while. We want the robot to have at least some ability to complete the tasks it was given to do.

How do you actually put behavior in the cloud? How do you take a data driven approach to behavior? I think that’s very much an unknown thing right now. Data driven approaches to perception are easier to understand, but we are going to try to take the next step and look at behavior as well.

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

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• What do Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and all the airlines and car companies want?
• Robots Podcast: Privacy, Google, and big deals
• Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare

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

Day One

Day Two

 
[ UPDATE 2 ]: This is the final results list with the points gathered by each team. You can also read the extensive coverage from Automaton blog here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-results
and of course on the official website:
http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/

[ UPDATE 1 ]: coverage from Automaton blog:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-watch-it-live

Tweets about “#DARPADRC”

Click here for the trials event agenda (pdf)

This is a general overview of the arena and the tasks the robots need to perform, you can find more on the official website.

CHIMP – CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform – is one of 17 robots participating in the challenge.  The four-limbed robot has a wingspan of almost 10 feet and is designed to navigate on tank treads affixed to each limb.  For tasks that require use of its arms such as climbing a ladder or operating power tools, CHIMP can stand on its leg tread.  CHIMP also uses 360 degree sensing using a pair of laser rangefinder mounted to its head to visualize and map its surroundings, which a remote operator can use to analyze the disaster site.

In a recent press release, Tony Stentz, NREC director and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team said he has high hopes for the competition: “We’ve been on a fast track for the past year, doing detailed design and development of CHIMP at the same time as we were writing and testing its software on surrogate hardware. That’s an aggressive approach to producing a robot unlike any we have built and not without risk, but it appears to be paying off.”

And when it comes to his team’s readiness for the competition: “Even though we would love to have more time to practice with CHIMP prior to the trials, we’ve been pleased so far with its performance.”

The competition comes with high stakes – only eight of the seventeen teams will receive future DARPA funding to help prepare for the DRC finals next December.  All of the tasks in the competition require an extremely high level of mobility and dexterity by the robots. Some of these tasks include: driving a utility vehicle, going up a wall and cutting a hole, and opening and closing valves. If CMU’s performance in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge serves any indication, this year’s Tartan Rescue Team will be a strong contender for one of those eight spots. We will still have to wait to observe the long-term effects of the DRC on the robotics industry. Will it be just another exhibition of expensive robotic gadgetry or will it expedite the commercialization of rescue robots as the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges did for self-driving vehicles?

Link to audio file (40:39)

In this episode, Sabine Hauert interviews Paul Oh, the Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab at Drexel University. His team, spanning 10 universities, is competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with the HUBO humanoid made by KAIST in South Korea. The goal of the challenge is to design robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters. Trials will take place next week in Florida from December 20-21 and will require robots to drive a vehicle, walk over rough terrain, clear debris, open doors, use a hand tool to break through a wall, climb a ladder, turn a valve, and finally drag a hose and connect it to pipes. The 7 HUBO robots on Oh’s team will be competing against sixteen other teams from around the world to determine which teams continues on to the DRC Finals in 2014 with continued DARPA funding. Competing in the 2014 Finals will lead to one team winning a $2 million prize.

The video below shows Oh’s vision for robot-enabled disaster response in 2020. You can find more videos of the HUBO working on tasks for the trials here.

Paul Oh
Paul Oh is a Full Professor at Drexel’s Mechanical Engineering Department, Affiliated Faculty in the ECE Department, and Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab (DASL). He received mechanical engineering degrees from McGill (B.Eng 1989), Seoul National (M.Sc 1992), and Columbia (PhD 1999). Honors include faculty fellowships at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (2002), Naval Research Lab (2003), the NSF CAREER award (2004), the SAE Ralph Teetor Award for Engineering Education Excellence (2005) and being named a Boeing Welliver Fellow (2006). He is also the Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and UAVs. From 2008-2010, he served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the Program Director managing the robotics research portfolio. Paul Oh was named ASME Fellow in 2011.
Links:

• Download mp3 (17.8MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Paul Oh’s Website
• DRC-HUBO team
• DRC coverage on Robohub

If you’ve recently wondered where all the roboticists were going, the answer is to an unassuming complex in Palo Alto. Google has backed Android developer Andy Rubin to acquire at least 7 major robotics companies, including Schaft, Industrial Perception Inc, Meka and Redwood Robotics. Other companies include Holomni, makers of high tech wheels, Bot&Dolly and Autofuss, the super cool robotics software companies behind the special effects in the film Gravity. Unsurprisingly, a number of the new acquisitions are also involved in the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge, where robots take on human scale problems in the latest Grand Challenge.

According to John Markoff’s interview with Andy Rubin in the New York Times, the new research company has plans for the manufacturing and logistics industry, with particular focus on the consumer electronics industry, where Rubin sees ‘clear opportunities’ to combat the increasing complexity of the massively growing field..

“I feel with robotics it’s a green field,” he said. “We’re building hardware, we’re building software. We’re building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack.”

Google hasn’t yet announced whether or not this new robotics research group is a subsidiary or separate. But Rubin talks about a 10 year runway, and a vision. The vision is clearly to capitalize on the DARPA Grand Challenges, as Google has done so thoroughly with the automobile/self driving challenge. DARPA create challenges that plausibly have a 10 year solution, with sufficient early incentive and the self-driving cars have met most of the technical hurdles in less than a decade and now primarily face regulatory issues.

Google has purchased a number of teams and people involved in the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge or DRC, with an aim to commercializing humanoid robot research for manufacturing and logistics. And pure pleasure. With a 10 year runway, this is still a bit of a playground. Like Willow only double.

The first real world trial in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) will be held on December 20-21 2013 at Homestead Freeway in Florida. Yes, it’s open to the public. Anyone can come along and watch humanoid robots try to perform difficult disaster relief human type tasks. This is the geekolympics, it’s nerdvana. Honestly, it’s like sport only better. Here’s the basic background and the rundown on the top teams.

The DRC was inspired in part by recent disasters like Fukushima. In the DRC 2013 trials, the robots will need to perform disaster response operations such as driving a utility vehicle, traveling dismounted across rubble, removing debris from doorway, opening doors, climbing ladders, using power tools, locating and closing valves near a leaky pipe and connecting and using a hose. Connectivity with the robot may also be compromised during the Challenge. Simple tasks for a human but very very difficult for a humanoid robot.

BACKGROUND

DARPA’s Grand Challenges are designed to speed up important research in an area that has been previously difficult but has the potential to provide great changes. The idea of a grand challenge has a long history. Great achievements have come from competitions for centuries, from the invention of the pocket watch for longitude calculations to Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, from the introduction of the potato to the development of canning.

The rapid progress we’ve seen in driverless cars in the last decade owes everything to the last DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2004, DARPA held the first autonomous vehicle grand challenge, offering $1million prize money for a vehicle that could complete a 150 mile desert course. In 2004, the best result was 7.32 miles from the CMU team. DARPA offered a $2million prize for a repeat challenge in 2005 and this time all but 1 of the 23 finalists travelled further than 7.32 miles and 7 teams completed the course.

In 2007, the Grand Challenge was relaunched as an urban environment challenge. Eighty-nine applicants were whittled down to 35 contenders. Six teams successfully finished the course. By 2011, driverless vehicles were a commonplace sight on the 101 near Google HQ, with no reported accidents. That’s less than 10 years from zero to 65mph on the freeway.

Now we’re about to see the first real trials of the DARPA Grand Challenge for humanoid robots. Or at least for robots capable of working in a human environment. They don’t have to look humanoid but most of them do. In July of 2013, the first round of simulated trials was held to winnow down the 26 teams from 8 countries who had qualified to compete in the Gazebo VRC simulated environment.

”The reason we had this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams whose strength is primarily software,” said Dr Gill Pratt, DRC Program Manager.

After successfully completing 3 simulated disaster response tasks using Gazebo, the finalists should be able to transition their algorithms to ATLAS robots, built by Boston Dynamics for the physical DRC. The open source simulator will be an ongoing legacy for the robotics community, according to Brian Gerkey, the CEO of OSRF, the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

“The simulation work that we’re doing is really part of a broader effort to build a common ecosystem of software tools and libraries that everyone can use.” said Brian Gerkey, OSRF, in an earlier article on Robohub.

MEET THE TEAMS

The competing teams are either Track A; funded teams who are building their own robot and have passed various evaluations and reviews. Track B/C; funded/unfunded teams who successfully qualified in the simulator rounds (VRC) and have been given an ATLAS robot for the trials. And finally, Track D; unfunded teams from anywhere who have a humanoid and aren’t afraid to test it. The qualifying teams in the 2013 round will go on to compete again in December 2014, performing the same type of tasks, but with greater difficulty.

TRACK A

CHIMP
	CMU-NREC proposed to develop the CHIMP (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform) robot for executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments. CHIMP will have near-human form factor, work-envelope, strength and dexterity to work effectively in such environments, yet avoid the need for complex control by maintaining static rather than dynamic stability.
Pittsburgh, PA	CMU Carnegie Mellon University | NREC National Robotics Engineering Center
Hubo
	Drexel University’s design focuses on a mature, open-architecture, bipedal robot call Hubo. Each member on Drexel’s team will be equipped with a stock Hubo, a complete, full sized humanoid. This infrastructure will catalyze a multi-university effort to “hit the ground running” and successfully address all anticipated DRC events in a “program-test-perfect” model.
Philadelphia, PA	Drexel University
RoboSimian
	JPL proposed to build RoboSimian, an apelike bio-inspired, limbed robot that will use deliberate and stable operations to complete challenging tasks under supervised teleoperation. The team, which includes contributions from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, will employ design methods, system elements and software algorithms that have already been successfully demonstrated in JPL’s existing robots.
Pasadena, CA	Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Valkyrie
	NASA Johnson Space Center proposed to develop a next-generation humanoid robot and control paradigm capable of performing dynamic, dexterous and perception-intensive tasks in a variety of scenarios. NASA JSC’s development approach will apply successful practices that have been used to develop multiple generations of Robonaut and related technologies in collaboration with academic, commercial and other government partners.
Houston, TX	NASA Johnson Space Center
HRP-2 based biped
	SCHAFT Inc. proposed a bipedal robot based on mature hardware and software designed for its existing HRP-2 robot. SCHAFT will create an Intelligent Robot Kernel in which it will combine the necessary software modules for recognition, planning, motion generation, motion control and a user interface. The group will divide into three teams to execute the tasks: hardware design, software integration and scenario testing..
JAPAN	SCHAFT Inc.
THOR-OP
	Virginia Tech proposed to develop THOR, a Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot, which will be state-of-the-art, light, agile and resilient with perception, planning and human interface technology that infers a human operator’s intent, allowing seamless, intuitive control across the autonomy spectrum. The team will emphasize three essential themes in developing THOR: hardware resilience, robust autonomy and intuitive operation.
Blacksburg, VA	Virginia Tech

Here’s a short video of all the Track A teams in action:

TRACK B/C (with ATLAS robots)

Team IHMC
	The IHMC team is confident it has an innovative approach to combine the cognitive abilities of humans, computational power, and the physical abilities of robots to handle novel situations in a new way.
Pensacola, FL	Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
WRECS
	Team WRECS strives to foster a dedicated and well-managed team, composed of students, professors, and professional engineers, collaborating to discover and lead the state-of-the-art research enabling advanced human-level performance for the Atlas humanoid. We aim to publicly demonstrate the successful completion of tasks related to major disaster response with the intent of leading to relevant peer-reviewed publications, credibility for future DARPA solicitations, and the ultimate goal of winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
Worcester, MA	WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS) Worcester Polytechnic Inc
MIT
	The MIT team, based at CSAIL, is drawing on research that is underway in several MIT departments and labs. For example, Teller’s own research group is developing methods that make it possible for robots to interpret sensor data, allowing them to make sense of their surroundings and understand their movements. They are also creating human-robot interaction methods by which humans can help robots formulate and carry out plans. State-of-the-art, real-time planning and control methods that are being developed in Tedrake’s lab make it possible for humanoid robots to balance, walk and climb.
Boston, MA	MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TRACLabs
	Over the past 15 years, TRACLAbs has used its 3T robot intelligence software to program robots to search for, find and recognize people, to recognize a user’s gestures to carry out tasks, to perform inspection tasks for the International Space Station, to hunt for mines underwater, and to form teams with humans to carry out repair and replacement tasks on earth or in space. We have also extended our approach to intelligent robotics to include graphical and natural language interfaces. So users of TRACLabs robots can motion-to, speak-to or just point-and-click the robots into action.
Webster, TX	TRACLabs
ViGir (Virginia-Germany Interdisciplinary Robotics)
	TORC engineers have been part of both the DARPA Grand Challenges and the Urban Challenge, where TORC led the software development VictorTango’s 3rd place finish. With two RoboCup world championship titles in autonomous humanoid robot soccer and two RoboCup Best-in-Class Autonomy awards for search and rescue robots, TU Darmstadt adds significant expertise in humanoid and rescue robotics to the team. The team will leverage experience from Virginia Tech’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – a world leader in design and research of novel HCI concepts – and winner of three straight 3D User Interface IEEE competitions. Oregon State will provide expertise in human-inspired robotic grasping and manipulation.
Blacksburg, VA	Torc Robotics | TU Darmstadt | Virginia Tech | Oregon State University
TROOPER
	“Our team’s software solution controls a robot in a state of ‘supervised autonomy,'” said Bill Borgia, director of Robotic Systems at Lockheed Martin ATL. “This means a robot completes simple tasks independent of the operator. Then, if there’s something tricky the robot can’t work independently, a remote, and largely untrained, operator will step in and assist.” Lockheed Martin ATL is partnered with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and University of Pennsylvania (GRASP Lab) for the effort.
Cherry Hill, NJ	Lockheed Martin | University of Pennsylvania | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Team HKU
	“It is a significant accomplishment for our new initiative to produce a team that made it into the top 10 worldwide in its first attempt,” said Professor Norman Tien, HKU Dean of Engineering. “It is encouraging to note that researchers from the US, Japan and partner institution like the university of Edinburgh will join hands with HJU Team in developing advanced and sophisticated software, ie. cultivating a brain for the robot,” he added.
Hong Kong	Hong Kong University | Team K Japan | Case Western University

The ATLAS robot is based on the Petman humanoid robot platform and has been specifically developed by Boston Dynamics for teams in Track B/C of the DRC. ATLAS is a hydraulically powered robot in the form of an adult human. It is capable of a variety of natural movements, including dynamic walking, calisthenics and user-programmed behavior. ATLAS has:

• Near-human anthropometry
• 2 arms, 2 legs, torso and head.
• 28 hydraulically actuated joints with closed-loop position & force control
• On-board real time control computer
• Electric power & network tether
• On-board hydraulic pump & thermal mgmt
• Crash protection
• Modular wrists accept 3rd party hands
• Head-mounted sensor package with LIDAR, stereo sensors, dedicated sensor electronics and perception algorithms.

TRACK D

There will also be Track D teams who are unfunded and have built their own robots. Registration for Track D has now closed and DARPA have qualified 4 teams based on video footage of 3 tasks being attempted at the end of October.

Buddy
	Team Mojavaton developed an autonomous NISSan Xterra that finished in 13th place (out of 195) in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Now the self-funded, small but highly passionate and dedicated team of undergraduate students, professors and professional engineers take on the DRC with Buddy. Buddy features 34 electric servo motors that enable him to walk and use his two arms and hands. Buddy is special in that he’s a quadruped not a biped and we’ve made extensive use of 3D printing to build him, so that he’s a lot lighter than many of the other robots. While he’s only 4’8″ tall, his full wingspan is 6′.
Grand Junction, CO	Team Mojavaton
CHIRON
	Simple static motion and manipulation is very useful in tasks that require precision and reliability. The Chiron hexapod design gives great dexterity to travel over uneven terrain as well as stable manipulation. The majority of our team members have been focused primarily on hardware component creation, while a smaller number of team members have been focused primarily on software development. Team Chiron has benefited from numerous technology vectors produced by Kairos Autonomi.
Salt Lake City, UT	Team Kairos Autonomi
Intelligent Pioneer
	We divided the team into 6 groups, each one is responsible for a subsystem, and the subsystems include integration, machinery, controlling, perception, interaction and environment modeling. Software d and hardware are developed independently. Software in all subsystems is running under ROS architecture.
tbc	tbc
DRC-HUBO
	We separate team to develop basic technologies for tasks and each team conquer tasks. 1. Hardware and software Platform: Rainbow Co. 2. Vision: KAIST 3. Motion: KAIST and Rainbow Co. Each teams are involved to each task 1. Walking: SeoulTech and Rainbow Co. 2. Wall: Rainbow Co. 3. Other tasks: KAIST
Daejon Metro City, KOREA	Team KAIST
WATSON (not progressing to next round)
	Our biped WATSON (Without A Tether Stereoscopic OmniNavigation) was started 6 years ago, but early versions had trouble walking. We have since worked on the two major design areas that allow WATSON to walk and balance. We are now working on a neural net with our smaller platforms that will enable WATSON to learn to walk from the smaller platforms successes while avoiding mistakes with a larger heavier and more expensive robot.
Silicon Valley, CA	Team Walk Like A Man | Daniel Albert, Chris Mayer

Welcome to a wonderful month of robotics. Full reports on the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) are on the DRC website.

As part of our series on ‘High-Risk / High-Reward’ robotics, I interviewed SRI International‘s Director of Robotics, Rich Mahoney, who’s role there is to help identify important emerging robotics technologies, align them with the needs of funding sources, and bring them successfully to market.

[Hallie Siegel]
Tell us about yourself, SRI, and your role in the R&D and entrepreneurial space…

[Rich Mahoney]
I’ve been at SRI for five years, and my position before coming to SRI was in an early stage venture-backed environment as the general manager of a company introducing and developing a new robot for stroke therapy in the US market. Before that, I did product and business development, and before that I did university-based research just after finishing my PhD. So, I have a broad background in applying robotics, from university research to commercial product development to venture-backed early-stage companies.

What’s interesting is that, because of SRI’s business model as a nonprofit, I actually practice my background in all of those areas in just one job. SRI’s primary business is contract research and development, but our overall mission is to invent, apply and commercialize technologies. As the director of the robotics program, I’m responsible for running the business of our robotics program. I have profit and loss responsibility for our performance in this nonprofit environment where we’re really working towards a higher mission of impactful R&D.

It’s a very aggressive and difficult environment, and it’s for people who want to work in a place where they can have a lot of impact: where they can work on applied solutions, and where the problem-solution is the focus, rather than the PI-driven research that you see at universities.

SRI is an offshoot of Stanford, correct?

You can say it’s a spin off from Stanford University. SRI originally stood for Stanford Research Institute, when it was founded 65 years ago, but it spun out as an independent nonprofit in the 1970s. It was doing some military-oriented research at that time – during the Vietnam War era – and the students didn’t want that kind of work going on on campus. Instead of closing it down it was spun off and made independent. Since then it’s really developed its own identity, and now we’ve got 40 different programs working on leading edge research. It’s not all hard-core technology like robotics; some of it is education policy…  some of it is pharmaceutical discovery …  so we operate in a very broad base of areas, but always with the mandate to work at the leading edge of applied solutions.

It seems like SRI operates half way between a university innovation lab and an investment company…  

That’s right: there’s university research, and then there’s commercial research, and SRI lives right between those two… in a space often referred to as ‘the valley of death’ [Chuckles.] It’s where things go that get invented, but which just can’t seem to get applied and transitioned to the commercial world. It’s very dry to say our primary business is in R&D: I would say that SRI is a big party tent in the valley of death! [More laughter.] People at SRI don’t just work there, we thrive there: we’re just really good at taking early stage technologies and transitioning them into practical value.

As we were developing this series it became clear that “high risk, high reward” can mean different things to different people … the researchers on our team were talking about technical hurdles, and our start-up and business experts were talking about commercialization hurdles… and then, even if you can make it through these technical and commercial hurdles all the way to the public sphere, maybe the market isn’t ready for you… maybe policy isn’t ready for you… maybe there are going to be legal issues. I find it interesting that you seem to be coming at it from such a broad perspective.

Maybe the environment in which SRI operating is so challenging because there are so many perspectives. We’re trying to actually cross this valley of death, but all the while we’ve got multiple market perspectives, we’ve got the inventors, and we have all this investment that we have to do to get it ready. How do we know how to invest in the right way? It really seems like a big problem…  The person who will grow a company is not the same person who can get it started, and it’s not the same person who can do the initial invention, or the person who can do the engineering effort to get the invention ready for market … it’s very rare to find somebody who can follow something from the very beginning to the very end.

So there is this broad set of competing interests, but the driving perspective for SRI is to align resources with what it takes to be successful – and that’s key. Really understanding what’s going on, being connected to the market by being connected to the technology, having the right people doing the right things… yes it’s broad, but there’s a single focus on finding solution sets, and one thing I’ve learned in this job is that you succeed best by putting people in a position of strength for them.

So where is your work initiated? Are you mostly assisting inventors who are seeking investment? Or are you looking for technical solutions for government and policy-makers?

If you look at just the business part of what we do, our main revenue comes from our contracts to do research. Our customers are organizations that want to fund research and development, and so either they come to us because they have a problem that needs solving and they don’t know have the resources or people to solve it, or they come to us because they know we have technologies that could solve their problem and they want us to develop our solutions further in order to suit their purposes.

On one side, we operate in this business development environment that is essentially being 100% on soft money. We have no endowment or annual corporate budget. If you don’t get the business development right then you are out of business after one year. And so you also have to be really good at evaluating your technology and qualifying the people and organizations that want to fund you to develop them. Part of my job as director is to figure out who the chronic innovators are, evaluate who could possibly fund them, and then do the work of building the relationship and making sure that everyone understands the market needs.

Basically, we are inventing new kinds of technologies that we believe will solve fundamental problems that are aligned with our customers’ needs. In the case of the robotics program at SRI, DARPA is a key customer, and one of their needs is to maintain the US lead in various applications of robotics technology. As a result, we work with them in a very collaborative process where we are educating and interacting and supporting that mission all at the same time.

Why does DARPA need SRI? Couldn’t they just work directly with the innovators themselves?

In rare cases DARPA would work directly with an inventor, but it’s a government agency, and it’s not easy to manage a government contract and to meet all of the costing and security requirements. SRI provides the overall support structure for managing the business relationship with the government. The other part of what we do is managing and documenting the intellectual property.

It goes back to what I was saying before that it’s very rare to have a single individual who has the aptitude to do all aspects of the technology transition process from invention to commercialization. So in an organization like SRI, we have people who are strong in business development teamed up with people who are strong innovators and people who are systems applications experts. By putting teams like this together, you can actually create a better market or industry response.

Do you have a formula or process for working out risk versus reward in terms of the research you undertake and the specific technologies that you select to move forward?

SRI definitely has internal processes for defining the value in its technologies and how it communicates that value. We have something we call “the discipline of innovation,” which is a series of processes that, when applied, allow you to be more successful in transitioning the technology. These include simple things like identifying a champion (and the champion may or may not be the inventor, but is someone who believes in the application of the solution and is personally committed at some level to being successful), and making sure that all the resources in an organization are aligned for success.

We also have a very clear process for communicating the value of our innovations to the clients – and that’s something we call ‘NABC’, which is really just a structured approach to communicating value to the customer. N is the need, so we define the specific need back to the customer to make sure that we understand it. The A is the approach, the actual technical solution. Us hardcore technical personalities love to focus on this part, and what often happens is that we either have a technology looking for a solution or we have the right technology but we focus so much on describing the approach that we forget to really look at the need and align it better with what’s required to be successful… so having a balanced approach is important. B is the benefit: having a very clear understanding of what the benefits are, and at what costs, and this is relative to C, the competition.  We go through this process in a very structured way, and it creates a much better solution set and sense of clarity to our technical and business development staff when they’re beginning to look at whether to apply a specific technology to a problem.

The other thing I’ll add is that there is a culture of iteration at SRI, and its understood and practiced through open communication and assessment of value, so that an NABC is not a single static document – it is a dynamic document that’s constantly being revised.

What would you say are the next breakthrough areas for robotics?

I think there’s a very clear progression that is occurring right now, and there are two different tracks that are going to be coming together in the near future.

One of them is that there’s a drive for robotics technology to become more low-cost and more accessible. A lot of people think about robotics as an independent technology space, and at some level it is. But if you really look at the current state of robots that are getting penetration, like drones/UAV’s and mobile robots, the emergence of these technologies has a lot to do with the fact that their components are cheaper and more available than ever before. And part of that is not because of robotics per say, but it’s because of other markets. In particular, the cost and availability of many sensors is driven by growth in the personal and mobile computing markets. Robotics is drafting off the last 30 years of evolution of personal computing technology, and represents the next stage in that evolution.

The second track is manipulation solutions: robotic arms and hands that allow you physically manipulate the world. If you look at the trends again, you’ve got lots of mobile robot solutions and emerging tele-presence platforms, which generally cost under $10,000 – and some of them cost a couple of thousand dollars – but they’re all lacking manipulation.

There’s been an enormous amount of investment from DARPA to develop lower-cost robot arms and hand solutions, and in the next three to five years, these manipulation technologies will begin to emerge.  And when the cost of these is lowered to the extent that they become accessible to entrepreneurial, hobby-level roboticists, that’s when we’ll start to see a much broader dissemination and application of robotics into a personal robotics market, similar to what happened in the early 1980s with personal computing. That convergence of low costs and manipulation technology is part of an ecosystem that is going to drive innovation in the next three to five years.

Is access to lower-cost equipment making it less risky to invest in robotics now?

It’s not going to make it less risky from an investment perspective because the overall funding required for a company developing something to the point of commercial viability is so much more than the cost of the product hardware components. And often the real risk is with the management team’s ability to properly set up the business model. But it will create products that have a greater potential to get penetration because they can be offered at a lower cost to the end user. Lower cost robotic components will also enable more entrepreneurs to start companies.  So, I would say that the real benefit is that more robotics companies will get started, which will ultimately lead to more successful companies and broader uses of robotics.

What other factors are contributing to this rapid growth in robotics?

The number one place to look is DARPA. If you go back in the entire history of robotics innovation, and look at which technologies are emerging right now in the market and what their origins were, DARPA was the inspiration and funding driver for almost all them at their early stages. It’s really pretty dramatic if you think about it.

Some people look at DARPA programs and think, ‘What are those crazy scientists up to now?’ but every one of those programs represents tens of millions of dollars of R&D funding, and these awards are being made to some of the top people in the country. If you look closely at who those researchers are, what their programs have been doing, and what they are being funded to do, you’re going to see the future of robotics.

The first competition of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a software simulation of humanoid rescue work. The 6 best teams were to be allocated ATLAS robots for the next stage of the challenge, but there’s been an interesting change. Gill Pratt, the DRC program manager, and Nate Koenig, the CTO of OSRF, will be on reddit from 1:00 – 2:00 PM ET today (June 27) to discuss the results of the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) and the future of the DARPA Simulator with the community.

In the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), teams competed in a simulated suburban obstacle course. Twenty-six teams from eight countries qualified for the VRC, which ran from June 17-21, 2013. Competing teams applied software of their own design to a simulated robot in an attempt to complete a series of tasks that are prerequisites for the next stages of the grand challenge.

Gill Pratt: “The reason we wanted to have this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams that were strong not just in both building hardware for robots and programming them with software, but to include a wide variety of teams including those that had experience with just software. So for those teams whose strength is primarily software, we are having this contest in simulation. They will essentially be programming and interacting with a robot that we will provide for the people who will do the best in the contest, which is a robot called Atlas that was designed by Boston Dynamics. The government, at its expense, will give up to six teams who do the best in the VRC this robot to use in the [final] event itself.”

While DARPA had only allocated resources for the top six teams to move through, a combination of good sportsmanship and generosity will see members of the top nine teams move forward:

10. Robot and Frank Film looks toward elderly care future

Among films like Real Steel and I, Robot, Robot & Frank emerged from the Sundance Film Festival as a refreshing film that offered roboticists a realistic vision for robots in elderly care.

9. First robotics ethics and law conference

The University of Miami School of Law hosted the first conferenceon legal and policy issues relating to robotics, a sign of things to come as unique enable robotics technologies raise new philosophical and legal concerns for lawyers and policymakers.

8. Baxter brings manufacturing robotics to small businesses

For four years, Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics (now called Rethink Robotics) remained in stealth mode as many wondered what the acclaimed researcher and iRobot co-founder was plotting for the “manufacturing” domain. Finally, we met Baxter, a two-armed robot that can be programmed by demonstration to perform pick-and-place tasks. But it’s the small $20,000 price tag that is turning heads.

7. Amazon acquires Kiva for $775M

Amazon shocked the robotics world with its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems, maker of the automated warehouse logistics robots. It may not be a price we’ll see again any time soon, but the purchase signals a maturation of mobile robots that have become an integral part of business logistics.

6. Robonaut, Curiosity pave the way in space, WAVE glider robot traverses Pacific

With recent news in Washington considering the future of NASA, 2012 was a great year for the agency’s robotics program. First, Robonaut aboard the International Space Station began the year with an iconic handshake with the ISS commander. Since then, it has performed a variety of tasks in flipping switches, turning knobs, and grabbing handrails. b. Of course there was the “terrifying” Mars landing of the Curiosity rover in July. Armed with an arsenal of tools and laboratory equipment, Curiosity is turning out to be a successful robotic explorer. And just this month we learned that an autonomous wave glider robot from Liquid Robotics completed its one-year, 9000-mile Pacific voyage from California to Australia.

5. U.S. Government flexes muscle with DARPA ROBOTICS challenge and NRI

Back in 2004 when DARPA announced its first Grand Challenge in robotics, a reliable driverless car was a dream. Now, well, see the #4 story of the year below. The blue sky agency is at it again with the Robotics Challenge, a $34 million effort with the goal of producing a capable humanoid robot for disaster response scenarios. An added innovation to the challenge is an open-source simulator being developed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which will serve as a contribution to the community but also permit a software-only team to earn a humanoid hardware platform and advance to the second phase of the challenge.

A year after the Obama Administration announced the National Robotics Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $50 million in funding toward collaborative robots. While the amount is small compared to programs in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, the NRI is the first coordinated research funding focus in the U.S. for non-military robotic applications. For that, U.S. efforts come in at number five.

4. Driverless car legislation becomes law

The Google self-driving car has racked up 300,000 miles on the road as California, Florida and Nevada (last year) passed legislation setting up the procedures and requirements that will be needed for commercial driverless products. Several others, including D.C., are reviewing bills. With car manufacturers now introducing advanced sensors and increasing autonomy features in upcoming models, the legislation is ahead of the technological curve for once.

3. ROS turns 5

The Robot Operating System from Willow Garage. There’s not much more to say than I already have in previous posts. But a five-year anniversary for an open-source robotics software framework that continues to grow is a significant achievement. How fast has it grown? According to Tully Foote’s blog post at ros.org, there are 3699 public ROS packages (up from 1600 three years ago), 90 community-supported robot platforms (up from 50), and people are using ROS on all seven (yes, seven) continents. The recently launched Open Source Robotics Foundation is also a good sign for a sustainable movement.

2. Maker and start-up culture pushes robotics

In the same year that the iRobot Roomba celebrated 10 years on the market, we saw an acceleration of viable robotics businesses and products. For years many said that venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with hardware startups; they were too risky and required upfront capital, manufacturing, and inventory. That has clearly changed now, with increasing investments in robotics startups and entrepreneurs figuring out how to create products and solutions using robotics technology. The prestigious Y Combinator program funded Double Robotics and their price-shattering telepresence robot. Dmitry Grishin, a Russian investor, launched Grishin Robotics with $25 million of his own funds to invest in personal robotics companies. As of this writing, he’s invested in Double and the RobotAppStore. Furthermore, The Robot Report’s detailed map of nearly 1000 companies indicates 173 startups, 89 in the U.S. alone (not including many others still in stealth mode). And lest we forget the crowdfunding movement, which has spawned several robotics products and dozens more related “Internet of Things” devices. Some of our favorites: Romo, Hexy the Hexapod, OpenROV, and Autom.

Feeding into this hardware movement has been the growing maker culture, with a combination of 3D printers, hacker spaces, and inexpensive microcontrollers like the Arduino reducing the barrier to tinkering, building, and experimenting. Similarly, the Do-It-Yourself drone community has taken off with Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson leaving his post to take over 3D Robotics full-time.

1. Drones take center stage

It seems a week didn’t go by without a major story involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as they continue to be used in warzones in Afghanistan and shadow campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and the horn of Africa. Regardless of the ethics, sovereignty concerns, and the like, drones have saturated the national discourse and are here to stay on the battlefield, and there is little doubt we will begin to see remote-controlled and semi-autonomous UAVs in domestic surveillance and commercial applications as soon as 2015 in the United States. For these reasons, they take the number one spot.

Have another top story we didn’t list? We’d love to hear them! Let us know in the comments section.

Released yesterday by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization, the report Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots (herein: the report) and associated press release and video (below), warn of the increasing governmental interest in autonomous, “killer” robots, and the dangers that such technology would pose if ever allowed onto the battlefield.

As mentioned on Robohub before (Rise of the robots: The robotization of today’s military), today’s military is becoming increasingly robotic. In its current iteration, all military strikes carried out by robots are authorized by a human operator, meaning that military decisions – decisions to end human lives – are supported by and traceable through a human chain of accountability.

However as documented by the HRW, governments are showing increasing interest in automating this decision process, thus removing the accountable human from the chain. This line of thought raises the question: who is liable if an autonomous robot kills someone? The HRW argues that autonomous robots “would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians”. We’ve discussed some of these ethical issues with Noel Sharkey (also featured in the above video) and Ronald Arkin before in our two part series on robot ethics (part 1, part 2).

Precursor technologies (discussed in detail on page 4 of the report) are already being developed and in some cases, deployed on the battlefield. These technologies have the ability to identify and target a threat, but will wait upon human permission before engaging. These technologies include South Korea’s sentry turrets (with a similar installation being carried out by Israel); the US Military’s missile defense systems; and various autonomous aircraft currently in development.

The US Government has confirmed its interest in autonomous military robots, through the release of military development roadmaps. The Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036 released by the US Department of Defense states that the department “envisions unmanned systems seamlessly operating with manned systems while gradually reducing the degree of human control and decision making required for the unmanned portion of the force structure”.

Similar visions are expressed by the US Army, who state a “current goal of supervised autonomy, but with an ultimate goal of full autonomy”; the US Navy, who state that “while admittedly futuristic in vision, one can conceive of scenarios where UUVs sense, track, identify, target, and destroy an enemy – all autonomously”; and the US Airforce, who foresee that:

Increasingly humans will no longer be “in the loop” but rather “on the loop” – monitoring the execution of certain decisions. Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.

These excerpts, all taken directly from unclassified military development roadmaps, show a clear governmental interest in reducing the dependence on humans, with a final goal of autonomous decision making and execution. Thankfully, these roadmaps do question the legal, ethical and political ramifications of fully autonomous “lethal systems”, which have “not yet been fully addressed and resolved”.

The report addresses these legal and ethical questions and calls for the following two resolutions to be made:

To All States:

• Prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.
• Adopt national laws and policies to prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.
• Commence reviews of technologies and components that could lead to fully autonomous weapons. These reviews should take place at the very beginning of the development process and continue throughout the development and testing phases.

To Roboticists and Others Involved in the Development of Robotic Weapons:

• Establish a professional code of conduct governing the research and development of autonomous robotic weapons, especially those capable of becoming fully autonomous, in order to ensure that legal and ethical concerns about their use in armed conflict are adequately considered at all stages of technological development.

In closing, I would like to leave you with an extract from page 8 the report:

In training their troops to kill enemy forces, armed forces often attempt “to produce something close to a ‘robot psychology,’ in which what would otherwise seem horrifying acts can be carried out coldly.” This desensitizing process may be necessary to help soldiers carry out combat operations and cope with the horrors of war, yet it illustrates that robots are held up as the ultimate killing machines.

I personally believe we are at the beginning of the era of robotics, during which robots will become increasingly present in our everyday lives. I only hope that this era and that the robots we develop, will be remembered for more than simply being the ultimate killing machines.

2012 Robotdalen Innovation Award winners Bioservo Technologies SEM-Glove

Robotdalen is accepting submissions for their International Innovation Award 2013, aimed at innovators with commercially viable robotics solutions. The Innovation Award replaced the previous Robotdalen Scientific Award in 2012 and offers up to € 12000, including development and manufacturing assistance, for the winners.

The aim of the Robotdalen Scientific Award was to find new and untried methods for robot technology and automation. That goal is still valid but the new award has a stronger emphasis on the innovation and commercialization aspects. [Robotdalen SE]

Competitions, challenges and awards have a great track record for driving technological innovation. Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs for a new method of preserving food in 1795, a prize eventually claimed by Nicolas Appert in 1810 after several years of testing the canning process. The Rainhill Trials for steam engines in 1829 offered prize money and business contracts, rewarding entrepreneur inventors.

As well as fostering innovation, competitions respond to socio-economic challenges, inspire collaboration, communication and standardize benchmarks. [Del Pobil 2006]

Robotics has a rich history of competitions and challenges, starting with Alan Turing’s proposed test for artificial intelligence in 1950, which has continued with the Loebner Prize. Other competitions, challenges and awards at the moment include:

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), has the goal of developing ground robots capable of doing complex tasks in dangerous human environments. With both a software and hardware track, the DRC aims to advance supervised autonomy in perception and decision-making, mounted and dismounted mobility, dexterity, strength, and platform endurance.  Success with supervised autonomy, in particular, could allow control of robots by non-expert operators, lower the operator’s workload, and allow effective operation even with low-fidelity (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent) communications.

In the NASA-WPI Sample Return Challenge, teams will compete for up to $1.5 million in prizes by demonstrating a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control. The objective of the competition is to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies. Innovations stemming from this challenge may improve NASA’s capability to explore a variety of destinations in space, as well as enhance the nation’s robotic technology for use in industries and applications on Earth.

RoboCup also combines research robotics competition with STEM or student competitions. RoboCup Soccer aims to create cooperative robotic soccer players who can match or exceed humans. RoboCup Rescue promotes socially significant research and development in dangerous domains. The RoboCup@Home league aims to develop service and assistive robot technology with high relevance for future personal domestic applications. It is the largest international annual competition for autonomous service robots. A set of benchmark tests is used to evaluate the robots’ abilities and performance in a realistic non-standardized home environment setting.

The IGV competition for ground vehicles is in its 21st year and is a multidisciplinary project for engineering students who must design a vehicle capable of autonomous navigation through obstacles. Trinity College offers both a Firefighting and a Robowaiter competition.

The UAV Outback Rescue Challenge focuses on airborne delivery in search and rescue. Teams have 60 minutes to find ‘Outback Joe’, drop emergency supplies and return the correct GPS coordinates to the judges, all without leaving the safe search corridor.

The list goes on! Major conferences such as ICRA have new challenges each year.

* Del Pobil, A. (2006). ‘Benchmarks for Robotics Research’. Workshop IROS 2006 Beijing China

In early March, Boston Dynamics posted a video (shown below) showing the Cheetah robot they are developing for DARPA running at 18 miles per hour (a new record for a robot running on legs), without any stabilization straps attached. More recently the MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab has posted videos of their version of the Cheetah, first walking (no longer public, as of 08Aug2012), then trotting, with some stabilization (shown above). The MIT version appears to be more complex than the Boston Dynamics version, particularly in the way the legs are jointed, but also in the way the rear legs connect to the rest of the body, although it’s impossible to tell whether what appear to be vertebrae, in the MIT version, are actually functional as such, from the video alone.

Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah running at 18 mph…

The above video, by Erico Guizzo and Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum, and shows Patrick Rowe, of RE2 (RE-squared), the firm hired by DARPA to build the standard platform for their ARM program, putting a completed unit through its paces at ICRA.

A small omni-roller suitable for use as one or more fingers of a robotic hand…

An autonomous robotic fish for detecting and finding the source of pollution…
http://youtu.be/z-XI9MrU1iM

MIT 6.141 Robotics Class Final Challenge for 2012…

Back to ICRA to watch an Adept mobile robot navigating the show floor…

Another Adept robot being used in research at Cornell…

And finally, Georgia Tech’s Travis doing a little dance…

The participating agencies are:

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), (http://www.defenselink.mil/)
• National Science Foundation (NSF) (http://www.nsf.gov/)
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Each agency’s interest in the initiative is described within the document.

I noted the presence of USDA on the list with extreme interest, as you might expect, and am pleased to report that an effort to develop the sort of system I’ve previously described (replacing traction with dextrous manipulation) should be fundable within their guidelines.

Found on Danger Room.

Reposted from Cultibotics.