Image from the South China Morning Post

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Karl Weaver (魏卡爾), formerly the Original Equipment Manufacturer Business Development Director for Oasis Smart SIM. Weaver discusses how wearable technology is growing as a form of payment system in China. He speaks about wireless technology, including Near-Field Communications (NFC) and Embedded SIM cards (eSIM), in wearable technology and in other applications, such as bike rental.

Karl Weaver (魏卡爾)

Since the recording of this interview, Karl has begun working for ARM promoting eSIM and iUICC to Greater China and Asia.

Karl Weaver (魏卡爾) previously worked as the Original Equipment Manufacturer Business Development Director (North America and Northeast Asia) for Oasis Smart SIM. Prior to Oasis, Karl worked for Rivetz Corp, a Massachusetts-based start-up to promote developer tools for design-in of TEE-enables applications on Smartphones for payment and security. Karl also spent 5 years working in China for Gemalto (and Trustonic) as liaison and evangelist of embedded Mobile Near-Field Communications Payments & TEE security technologies to the OEM Smartphone/Tablet PC ecosystem. Weaver has a B.S degree in Business Management from Salve Regina University and a Certification in Mandarin Chinese Language, Customs, and Culture from National Taiwan Normal University.

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A Lucie micro drone takes off from a performer’s hand as part of a drone show. Photo: Verity Studios 2017

2017 was the year where indoor drone shows came into their own. Verity Studios’ Lucie drones alone completed more than 20,000 autonomous flights. A Synthetic Swarm of 99 Lucie micro drones started touring with Metallica (the tour is ongoing and was just announced the 5th highest grossing tour worldwide for 2017). Micro drones are now performing at Madison Square Garden as part of each New York Knicks home game — the first resident drone show in a full-scale arena setting. Since early 2017, a drone swarm has been performing weekly on a first cruise ship. And micro drones performed thousands of flights at Changi Airport Singapore as part of its 2017 Christmas show.

Technologically, indoor drone show systems are challenging. They are among the most sophisticated automation systems in existence, with dozens of autonomous robotic aircraft operating in a safety-critical environment. Indoor drone shows require sophisticated, distributed system control and communications architectures to split up and recombine sensing and computation between aircraft and their off-board infrastructure. Core challenges are not unlike those found in modern systems for manned aviation (e.g., combining auto-pilots, GPS, and air traffic control) and in creating tomorrow’s smart cities (e.g., combining semi-autonomous cars with intelligent traffic lights in a city).

These technological challenges are compounded by another: At least for permanent show installations, these systems need to be operated by non-experts. Two years ago, in one of the first major indoor drone shows, a swarm of micro drones flew over the audience at TED 2016. That system was operated by Verity Studios’ expert engineers. Creating a system that is easy enough to use, and reliable enough, to be operated by show staff is a huge technical challenge of its own. All of Verity’s 2017 shows mentioned above were fully client-operated, which speaks to the maturity that Verity’s drone show system has achieved.

Selection of Verity Studios’ indoor drone shows, from the drone swarm at TED 2016 to 20,000 autonomous indoor drone show flights in 2017 alone.

For my colleagues and me, it is these technological challenges, together with the visual impact of indoor drone shows, that makes these systems so much fun and hugely rewarding to work with.

Creative potential

Creatively, the capabilities of today’s indoor drone show systems barely scratch the surface of the technology’s potential. For centuries, show designers were restricted to static scenes. Curtains were required to hide scene changes from the audience, lest stage hands rushing to move set pieces destroy the magic created by a live show. The introduction of automation to seamlessly move backdrops and other stage elements, followed by the debut of automated lighting to smoothly pan and tilt traditional, stationary illumination were revolutionary.

Drones hold the potential for pushing automation further. The Lucies shown in the images above give a first inkling of the creative potential of flying lights that can be freely positioned in 3D space, appearing at will. Larger drones allow to extend that concept to nearly any object, including the creation of flying characters.

Safety

The most critical challenge for indoor drone show systems is safety. Indoor drone shows feature dozens of drones flying simultaneously and in tight formations, close to crowds of people, in a repeated fashion, in the high-pressure environment of a live show. For example, as part of the currently running New York Knicks drone show, 32 drones perform above 16 dancers, live in front of up to 20,000 people in New York’s Madison Square Garden arena, 44 times per season.

There are really only three ways to safely fly drones at live events.

The first way to achieve safety is the same that keeps commercial aviation safe: System redundancy. Using this approach, Verity Studios’ larger, Stage Flyer drones performed safely on Broadway, completing 398 shows and more than 7,000 autonomous flights, flying 8 times a week, in front of up to 2,000 people for a year, without safety nets. The Stage Flyer drones are designed around redundancy. At least two of each components are used (e.g., two batteries, two flight computers, and a duplicate of each sensor) or existing redundancies are exploited. For example, the Stage Flyer drones have only four propellers and motors, like any quadcopter. However, advanced algorithms that exploit the physics of flight allow these multi-rotor vehicles to fly with less than 4 propellers. The overall design allows these drones to continue to fly in spite of any individual component failure. For example, in one of the last Broadway shows, a Stage Flyer experienced a battery failure. The drone switched into its safety flight mode and landed, and the show continued with 7 instead of 8 drones. This approach to drone safety remains highly unusual — all drones available for purchase today have single points of failure.

Verity Studios drone show, 2017 Event Safety Summit, Rock Lititz. Photo: Event Safety Alliance 2017

The second approach to safety is physical separation. This is how safety is usually achieved for outdoor drone shows: Drones perform over a body of water or some roads are temporarily closed to create a large-enough area without people. For example, the Intel drone show at the Super Bowl was recorded far away from the NRG stadium. In fact, for the Super Bowl, safety went even a step further, also adding “temporal separation” to the physical separation (the drone show was actually pre-recorded days ahead of time, and viewers in the stadium and on TV were only shown a video recording). For indoor drone lightshows, physical separation can be achieved using safety nets.

The third approach to safely flying drones at live events is to make the drones so small that they have high inherent safety. Verity Studios’ Lucie micro drones weigh less than 1.8 ounces or 50 grams (including their flexible hull).

As the continuing string of safety incidents involving drones at live events attests, not everyone takes drone safety seriously. This is why my colleagues and I have worked with aviation experts and leading creatives to summarize best practices in an overview paper: Drone shows – Creative potential and best practices.

So, what’s in store for 2018? The appetite for indoor drone shows is huge, which is why Verity Studios is growing its team. And given the 2017 track record, there is a lot to look forward to — your favorite venue’s ceiling is the limit!

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Katsu Yamane, Senior Research Scientist at Disney, about robotics in Disney. Yamane discusses Disney’s history with robots, how Disney currently uses Robots, how designing robots at Disney is different than in academia or industry, a realistic robot simulator used by Disney’s animators, and on becoming a Disney Research “Imagineer.”

Katsu Yamane

Katsu received his PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Tokyo in 2002. Following postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2003, he was a faculty member at University of Tokyo until he joined Disney Research, Pittsburgh, in October 2008. His main research area is humanoid robot control and motion synthesis, in particular methods involving human motion data and dynamic balancing. He is also interested in developing algorithms for creating character animation. He has always been fascinated by the way humans control their bodies, which led him to the research on biomechanical human modeling and simulation to understand human sensation and motor control.

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Here are the slides I gave recently as member of panel Sci-Fi Dreams: How visions of the future are shaping the development of intelligent technology, at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence 2017 conference. I presented three short stories about robot stories.

Slide 2:

The FP7 TRUCE Project invited a number of scientists – mostly within the field of Artificial Life – to suggest ideas for short stories. Those stories were then sent to a panel of writers, who chose one of the stories. I submitted an idea called The feeling of what it is like to be a robot and was delighted when Lucy Caldwell contacted me. Following a visit to the lab Lucy drafted a beautiful story called The Familiar which – following some iteration – appeared in the collected volume Beta Life.

Slide 3:

More recently the EU Human Brain Project Foresight Lab brought three Sci Fi writers – Allen Ashley, Jule Owen and Stephen Oram – to visit the lab. Inspired by what they saw they then wrote three wonderful short stories, which were read at the 2016 Bristol Literature Festival. The readings were followed by a panel discussion which included myself and BRL colleagues Antonia Tzemanaki and Marta Palau Franco. The three stories are published in the volume Versions of the Future. Stephen Oram went on to publish a collection called Eating Robots.

Slide 4:

My first two stories were about people telling stories about robots. Now I turn to the possibility of robots themselves telling stories. Some years ago I speculated on the idea on the idea of robots telling each other stories (directly inspired by a conversation with Richard Gregory). That idea has now turned into a current project, with the aim of building an embodied computational model of storytelling. For a full description see this paper, currently in press.

Happy International World Book and Copyright Day! It’s a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and reading, held annually on 23 April—a symbolic date coinciding with the anniversary of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. By celebrating, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of copyright, and will be hosting a series and events and conferences over the coming days.

Here at Robohub, we’re celebrating by sharing our list of 20 robot related books (in no particular order) aimed at engaging kids and/or teens with everything robotics. Ranging from funny fictional narratives to DIY drone building and coding, these books are sure to stoke the imaginations of budding innovators and creators.

If you can think of any other books that deserve inclusion, we’d love to hear about them!

Robot Building for Teens (2014), by Behnam Salemi.

Robot Building for Teens will teach you how to get started in this fascinating hobby. The projects in this book include the “Digital Brain Robot,” the “Bug Bot,” and even a robot on wheels! You will learn how to design your robot, how to create a prototype, where to buy parts, how to program your finished robot to perform tasks, and more. You’ll be led step-by-step through the projects in the book. Along the way, you’ll learn about advanced robotic systems that use the same principles you’re learning, and you’ll get a glimpse into the future of robotics. This book’s companion website includes software program files, parts lists for each project, and links to online parts suppliers. Robot Building for Teens is a fun, easy-to-understand, hands-on guide that will have you building your own robots in no time.

The Wild Robot (2016), by Peter Brown.

When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is–but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island’s unwelcoming animal inhabitants. As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home–until, one day, the robot’s mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

From bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator Peter Brown comes a heartwarming and action-packed novel about what happens when nature and technology collide.

Cinder (2012), by Marissa Meyer.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

Robots in Space (2015), by Jenny Fretland VanVoorst.

In Robots in Space, early fluent readers learn about the many ways robots have expand what’s possible in the field of space exploration. Vibrant, full-color photos and carefully leveled text will engage young readers as they learn about the fascinating world of robots.

Medical Robots (2016), by Daniel Faust.

Can robots save lives? Medical robots save lives every day, and theyre sure to save more as their technology advances. This book describes the amazing work done by medical robots, from surgical robots to nano-robots. Readers will learn about the medical breakthroughs performed by robots, the latest models, and the future of robots in medicine. Accessible descriptions of how medical robots work will engage readers and give them a deep understanding of this burgeoning technology. Color photographs of each robot are provided to give readers an inside look into the operating room and beyond.

How to Build Robots (2017), by Louise Derrington.

How to Build Robots instructs readers on how to make useable robots, including one that will scrub a table! Featuring easy-to-follow instructions, vivid photographs, easily accessible materials, and a handy template, readers will delight in watching their creations come to life!

So, You Want to Be a Coder? (2016), by Jane Bedell.

Covering everything from navigating the maze of computer languages to writing code for games to cyber security and artificial intelligence, So, You Want to Be a Coder? debugs the secrets behind a career in the diverse and state-of-the-art industry.

In addition to tips and interviews from industry professionals, So, You Want to Be a Coder? includes inspiring stories from kids who are working with code right now, plus activities, a glossary, and helpful resources to put you on the path to a fun and rewarding career with computer code today!

The Robot Book: Build & Control 20 Electric Gizmos, Moving Machines, and Hacked Toys (2014), by Bobby Mercer.

Author and physics teacher Bobby Mercer will show you how to turn common household objects and repurposed materials into 20 easy-to-build robots for little or no cost. Turn a toothbrush, an old cell phone or pager, and scrap wire into a Brush Bot, or hack a toy car to hotwire a Not-So-Remote Bot. A small electric fan, several craft sticks, and rubber bands make a Fan-Tastic Dancing Machine, and drinking straws, string, tape, and glue can be used to construct a working model of the human hand.

Every hands-on project contains a materials list and detailed step-by-step instructions with photos for easy assembly. Mercer also explains the science and technology behind each robot, including concepts such as friction, weight and mass, center of gravity, kinetic and potential energy, electric circuitry, DC vs. AC current, and more. These projects are also perfect for science fairs or design competitions.

If You’re a Robot and You Know It (2015), by Musical Robot.

It’s the classic version of If You’re Happy and You Know It as you’ve never seen (or heard!) it before. Sing along to the free downloadable song by the dynamic Musical Robot team, then turn the pages as David Carter’s clever pop-ups show the robot characters going through all of the call-out movements, from clapping hands to shooting laser beams out of your eyes!

Making Simple Robots: Exploring Cutting-Edge Robotics with Everyday Stuff (2015), by Kathy Ceceri.

Written in language that non-engineers can understand, Making Simple Robots helps beginners move beyond basic craft skills and materials to the latest products and tools being used by artists and inventors. Find out how to animate folded paper origami, design a versatile robot wheel-leg for 3D printing, or program a rag doll to blink its cyborg eye. Each project includes step-by-step directions as well as clear diagrams and photographs. And every chapter offers suggestions for modifying and expanding the projects, so that you can return to the projects again and again as your skill set grows.

Everything Robotics: All the Photos, Facts, and Fun to Make You Race for Robots (2016), by Jennifer Swanson.

They fix spacecraft, dance, tell jokes, and even clean your carpet! From the tiniest robo-bees to gigantic factory machines, robotics is all around you. This technology isn’t just for science-fiction anymore — it’s real and more relevant than ever. With stunning visuals and energetic, impactful design, readers won’t stop until they’ve learned everything there is to know about robotics.

Robo-Sauce (2016), by Adam Rubin.

Robots never have to eat steamed beans or take baths, or go to bed. If only there were some sort of magical “Robo-Sauce” that turned squishy little humans into giant awesome robots… Well, now there is. Giggle at the irreverent humor, gasp at the ingenious fold-out surprise ending, and gather the whole family to enjoy a unique story about the power of imagination. It’s picture book technology the likes of which humanity has never seen!

Getting Started with Drones: Build and Customize Your Own Quadcopter (2016), by Terry Kilby and Belinda Kilby.

Want to make something that can fly? How about a flying robot? In this book, you’ll learn how drones work, how to solve some of the engineering challenges a drone presents, and how to build your own–an autonomous quadcopter that you can build, customize, and fly. Your drone will be your eyes in the sky and in places where a human could never get to-much less fit!

Boy and Bot (2012), by Ame Dyckman and Dan Yaccarino.

One day, a boy and a robot meet in the woods. They play. They have fun. But when Bot gets switched off, Boy thinks he’s sick. The usual remedies—applesauce, reading a story—don’t help, so Boy tucks the sick Bot in, then falls asleep.

Bot is worried when he powers on and finds his friend powered off. He takes Boy home with him and tries all his remedies: oil, reading an instruction manual. Nothing revives the malfunctioning Boy! Can the Inventor help fix him? Using the perfect blend of sweetness and humor, this story of an adorable duo will win the hearts of the very youngest readers.

Popular Mechanics Robots: A New Age of Bionics, Drones & Artificial Intelligence (2015), by Popular Mechanics and Daniel H. Wilson.

Thanks to film and literature, the idea of robots and artificial intelligence has long intrigued us. The fascination continues with Popular MechanicsRobots, which gathers the very best of the magazine’s fantastic robotic coverage and examines the way we live with these machines today—and how we will continue to exist with other advanced technologies in the future. Readers can now discover all varieties of robot, including ones that recognize our faces, gestures, and emotions; drive our cars; serve as highly intelligent personal assistants and medical diagnosticians; go into space; and even become embedded in our architecture and homes. Although robots can inspire both fear and wonder, author David H. Wilson shows how they’re an integral part of a wonderful new world.

DIY Drones for the Evil Genius: Design, Build, and Customize Your Own Drones (2016), by  Ian Cinnamon, Romi Kadri and Fitz Tepper.

This fun guide shows, step-by-step, how to construct powerful drones from inexpensive parts, add personalized features, and become a full-fledged pilot. DIY Drones for the Evil Genius: Design, Build, and Customize Your Own Drones not only covers safety, mechanics, drone design, and assembly, but also teaches the basics of Aerospace Engineering. You will discover how to add video transmitters, GPS, first-person view, and virtual reality goggles to your creations. The book walks you through the FAA licensing process and takes a look at advanced concepts, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous flight.

DK Workbooks: Coding with Scratch Workbook (2015), by DK.

Perfect for beginner coders ages 6–9, this highly visual workbook builds basic programming skills using Scratch, a free computer coding programming language, and will take kids from browsing to building. DK Workbooks: Coding with Scratch Workbook explains how computer coding works and teaches kids how to complete simple coding actions with clear, step-by-step instructions and fun pixel art. From conditionals to math equations to animating characters who walk, talk, and dance, young coders will put all these pieces together at the end of the lesson to create a simple “dodge the dragon” game

Sometimes I Forget You’re a Robot (2013) by Sam Brown.

For a little boy who’s always dreamed of having his own robot, actually getting one isn’t what he expected at all. The robot can’t fly, or swim, or even talk. All he does is beep beep beep like a toy. But his robot does have some hidden talents—and one of them is being a great friend. In this unexpectedly poignant story about adjusting expectations, Sam Brown shows that while no one is perfect, a good friend sure comes close.

New Hands, New Life: Robots, Prostheses and Innovation (2017), by  Jan Andrysek and Alex Mihailidis.

Available for pre-order, New Hands, New Life offers young readers the opportunity to learn how our bodies work during physical activity and what happens when they don’t work properly. It shows how exciting advances in technology and science have allowed us to create assistive technologies — from artificial limbs and wheelchairs to exoskeletons and robots — that make it possible for someone with a disability to make new abilities. Assistive technologies are especially life-changing for a child who can overcome the challenges of a missing limb or reduced motor function to enjoy a life of learning and play that would be otherwise out of reach.

Soft Robots: Paper, Silicone, Cloth, and Rubber Bots for All Ages (2017), by Matthew Borgatti.

Popularized by Baymax in the hit movie Big Hero 6, soft robotics is a big, fun field. More than just cloth or silicone robots, soft robotics is all about getting motion out of soft things–paper, silicone, cloth, springs, rubber hoses–all these and more can be combined in different ways to come up with comfortable, friendly, and familiar-feeling solutions to interesting problems. And they can be fun to play with, too. This book is about taking different materials, combining them, and remixing them with 3d printing, laser cutting, mold making, casting, and sewing to create soft robots. You can pre-order your copy now.

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

• 25 holiday gift ideas for RoboGeeks (2014)
• Reading for robot fans: 24 books to inspire, educate and provoke
• 20 great books to hook kids and teens on robotics
• Still looking for last-minute holiday gifts? 15 ideas for robot fans (2013)
• 8 Robotic Gifts for the 2013 Holiday Season

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

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bradley Knox, founder of bots_alive. Knox speaks about an add-on to a Hexbug, a six-legged robotic toy, that makes the bot behave more like a character. They discuss the novel way Knox uses machine learning to create a sense character. They also discuss the limitation of technology to emulate living creatures, and how the bots_alive robot was built within these limitations.

Brad Knox

Dr. Bradley Knox is the founder of bots_alive. He researched human-robot interaction, interactive machine learning, and artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and at UT Austin. At MIT, he designed and taught Interactive Machine Learning. He has won two best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences, was awarded best dissertation from UT Austin’s Computer Science Department, and was named to IEEE’s AI’s 10 to Watch in 2013.

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bots_alive Gotcha

Modern character AI could be better.

I’m unaware of any NPCs or electronic toy characters that can sustain an illusion of life over more than an hour. They suffer from predictability, simplicity, and inauthentic verbal and nonverbal behavior.

This post is about a new form of character AI. Much like motion capture for scripted animation, this new technique may revolutionize how interactive characters are created, through observation of authentic human-generated behavior.

I’ll explain via a product on which we’re pioneering this technique.

Bots_alive! A robot that plays and finds its way

We launched bots_alive last week on Kickstarter (campaign here). Here’s a 1-minute teaser video with mostly scripted motion.

The product is a smartphone kit that gives simple but lifelike autonomy to a popular RC toy, the Hexbug® Spider.

That video shows the product as we envision it at shipping time. Here you can see how it acts now, with this new character AI technique driving its core functionality already.

Training data to build a character

The character AI for these robots is created in a new way. Here’s how it works.

A human teleoperates the robot through many different scenarios. The teleoperator acts as an improvising puppeteer; he or she follows heuristics yet also empathizes with the robot and authentically responds to what happens, whether it be with curiosity, fear, jubilation, or another emotion.

For bots_alive, the teleoperator watches a screen display of what the system sees and pushes buttons to send commands of forward, back, left, right, forward-right, forward-left, back-right, or back-left. We also consider not pushing a button to be a no-action command.

From these teleoperation sessions, we gather training data containing (a) teleoperation commands and (b) information about the context in which each command was given. A category of machine learning called supervised learning is applied to create a model of the puppeteer, which effectively answers the question: In context X, what is the probability that the teleoperator would have given command Y?

Creating a behavioral model

All of that happens during development. In the end user’s hands, the robot is autonomously controlled by the model. The model of the puppeteer is the character AI.

Let’s assume that the contextual information in the training data is sufficient to justify why the teleoperator chooses one action over another. Then the data contains the spontaneity, uncertainty, and social authenticity* expressed by the human puppeteer. And the autonomous robot retains these qualities if the machine learning is effective.

Why go to the trouble of using machine learning?

We expect this process to create character AI that feels more organic and alive than traditional character AI.

Traditional methods consist of imagining and writing rules for behavior or a finite state machine. It’s much more of an abstract exercise than immersing someone in a situation as the puppeteer.

If you play video games, imagine how much you sometimes empathize with the character you’re controlling. You may even forget the separation between the two of you, experiencing the world as that character. Consider whether your control in these moments is different, both at a high level and in tiny movements, than what the character would do if you had simply written down a set of rules for it to act by.

In that difference lies the promise of this method for developing character AI.

In psychology research methodology, there’s a broad consensus that if you want to know what someone would do in a situation, you don’t ask them what they would do. You put them in the situation and observe. Traditional character AI development is like asking the human developer or designer. Our method is instead analogous to observing a human immersed in the experience of the character. That’s why we expect it to create more authentic characters.

Our method is an application of what’s called learning from demonstration.** For times the teleoperation needs to include human interaction with the character, we keep the teleoperation secret to keep the human interaction partner from changing his or her behavior from what would be done with an autonomous character. We coined this secret version learning from the wizard (or LfW) when it was a research project at the MIT Media Lab. The name combines learning from demonstration with the Wizard of Oz experimental paradigm.

Training as interactive machine learning

In our development, I act as the teleoperator and machine learning programmer. The training process is not simply a bunch of demonstration. Rather, it’s an iterative process of:

• demonstrate
• apply machine learning on the demonstration data set
• observe behavior from the learned model
• create more demonstrations in those contexts the robot isn’t acting satisfactorily
• apply machine learning, and so on.

A general representation of interactive machine learning. From Amershi et al., 2015. Power to the People: The Role of Humans in Interactive Machine Learning. In AI Magazine.

Throughout these iterations, the teleoperator and algorithm designer also reflect on what contextual information still needs to be encoded to improve learning, determine what context cannot be encoded and therefore should be ignored by the teleoperator, and find fun and more delightful behavior than originally puppeteered.

How can we know that it’s better?

We can’t. Not with 100% confidence. But we have already seen that it can make compelling character AI.

We saw it in our study at MIT. In a relatively large randomized experiment, kids interacted either with a human-teleoperated robot or one with autonomous behavior learned from previous teleoperation. Compared to a no-robot condition, the teleoperated robot and the autonomous robot programmed by machine learning elicited similar behavior from their human interaction partners. Curiously, when children were asked whether the robot was human-controlled or autonomous, approximately half in each condition thought it was human-controlled. If you’re familiar with the Turing Test, the popularly known test of the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence, you might recognize that the MIT study constitutes passing a certain narrow and social Turing Test.

Compelling character AI was achieved in another such Turing test, using a technique similar to learning from demonstration, in Unreal Tournament 2004. BotPrize is a yearly academic competition for the bot that best passes as human. The 2012 winner was a bot by Jacob Schrum, Igor Karpov, and Risto Miikkulainen. It combined algorithmic optimization—which can result in markedly unnatural behavior that still achieves the specified goal— of its combat effectiveness with selective replay of recorded human behavior. Twenty-five human judges played alongside the Unreal-playing bots, repeatedly judging whether the other characters were human or artificial during combat. The bot by Schrum and colleagues was judged human more than 51.9% of the time. That percentage was just below the two human characters who were judged most human, at 53.3% and 52.2%. The algorithm is described here.

Lastly, we see compelling character AI now, in our playtesting of bots_alive.

The limitations of this approach are (1) sensing and encoding contextual information and (2) applying machine learning effectively. Both academia and industry are intensely researching how to improve those two limitations. Major strides have been made in the past 10 years, most notably through deep learning, and so it seems likely that further improvement is yet to come.

Our ability to write down behavioral rules that encode authentic behavior with an illusion of life? If there’s a reason why that will improve meaningfully, I don’t see it.

Image: Eunike Nugroho

What might the first western explorer have thought upon encountering whales, flamingos and iguanas? What would have they thought of these strange near-fantastical creatures?

What is it like for 21st-century people to encounter robots for the first time? Are they friend or foe? Where do they come from and what controls them? If we saw one for the first time tomorrow, what would we tell our friends?

This is the thinking behind Robot Life Survey – an alternative history series from design company After the flood that visualises Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog, Prox Dynamics’ Black Hornet Nano, and Harvard University’s Kilobot Swarm as if witnessed by an early explorer. What is our relationship with these strange, futuristic creations?

Max Gadney, After the flood director, comments: “In this series, mechanical intelligence is discovered for the first time by a mystery character and recorded for posterity and science. This explorer records their wonder, alluding to a wider picture of and cast of players. It was a fantastic project to work on at After the flood, combining the passion for art and complex mechanics that underpins much of what we do.”

This series of the Survey is available in three prints – each presenting a record of the explorer’s experiences along with snatches of field notes. A larger book based on Robot Life Survey and its explorer will follow in 2017. This will visualise more robots, notes and thinking around this new world of physical, connected intelligence.

The voice of the explorer is provided by Lloyd Shepherd, author of historical thrillers The English Monster, The Poisoned Island and Savage Magic published by Simon and Schuster. Lloyd has spent many years studying the age of enlightenment, and with a background in the tech industry he is the best person to breathe life into the world of Robot Life Survey. The art itself is by Indonesia-based artist named Eunike Nugroho, who specialises in botanical and animal life illustrations and paintings.

Enjoy the “Explorer Notes” by Lloyd Shepherd below:

Big Dog

Image: Eunike Nugroho

“Of all the creatures I’d encountered on my voyages, this was the one that most disturbed me. It stepped silently through the trees, its queasily familiar legs quick-stepping through the snow, as it sought to self-correct its balance at each contact with the ground. On its back was an enormous hessian sack, tied to its body with rope, the property, no doubt, of some Siberian tribesman who had captured this thing and adapted its programming for his own banal ends. It would have come up to above my waist, had I not been sitting in a tree watching it pass, and it was the biggest single machine I had yet seen. But this is not what disturbed me about it. What gave me pause was the memory of Lovelace’s wolf-hound, a great grey beast of enormous gentleness which had plodded this changing Earth with the exact same care as this silent machine. The dog must have been long-dead by that time, but my heart softened at the memory of it, as I watched this machine make its considered way through those deep, silent, freezing woods.”

Nano UAV

Image: Eunike Nugroho

The noise made by one of these tiny machines must be almost inaudible, but the little swarm we encountered down in the valley made an angry sound in its buzzing aggregate. I had seen plans for machines such as these in Lovelace’s study, and had marvelled at how the elegant lines had been squeezed and folded into such tiny mechanisms. Each was barely five centimetres in length, and they must be light indeed to hover in the air so effortlessly, though it is some time since anyone has caught one. Their yellow-and-silver sides reflected the harsh Afghan sun, and as they moved away from us their buzz mellowed, putting me in mind of English summer gardens, though no bee I ever saw cast a shadow such as these machines did on the orange rock, and no singular purpose guides a bee’s flight in the way it seemed to hold these little things in check, as they flew away from us, in inscrutable formation, for a destination at which I could only guess.

Kilobot Swarm

Image: Eunike Nugroho

There were too many of the little machines to count, but there may have been as many as a thousand. The herd moved like oil gliding down a steel ramp, slowly and with its only apparent purpose being adjacency, a need to hold itself together, to cohere into a shape that was a circle, then a triangle, then a square, a puddle of technology which could not make up its mind. Each of the little machines was five centimetres across, and moved on little feet which tapped on the concrete, making a sound like light rain. All each of them knew of the world was the location of its neighbours, and a simple task held in the code of no more than a dozen of them. So was this a single organism, a slime-mold made of plastic and silicon, its intention rippling across tiny invisible networks? Was each device’s awareness of its neighbours the beginnings of a kind of consciousness? And if Lovelace were standing with me now, watching these little machines ripple across the ground, would those machines detect a presence, and stop, and turn to their Creator? No answer came, and on the mechanistic puddle slid, aware only of itself.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in:

• When robots become art: Interview with Yi-Wei Keng
• SOCIAL ROBOTICS JAPAN: Robot Town Sagami’s strange, yet surprisingly hopeful, anime promo
• Why watching Westworld’s robots should make us question ourselves
• The new Westworld: Humanizing the un-human, or dehumanizing humankind?
• Ex Machina: When Turing meets Bechdel test
• President Obama discusses artificial intelligence with Media Lab Director Joi Ito

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

In this roundtable edition, we watched the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” and asked our Robohub team members: with many institutions focused on developing aerial drone technology, and in light of the pressing reality of climate change and bee colony collapse, do we see robotic bees in our future? Would swarms of artificial insects even be desirable?

In her book “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, Alice Calaprice asserted that Einstein probably never said anything close to: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Still. Whoever said it, it’s a haunting prophecy. With climate change thought to be forcing colony collapse disorder and threatening the existence of many pollinators, might swarm robotics hold the key to humanity’s survival? Could these robot bees ever be hacked to spy and become weaponised? In our roundtable we discussed the technology in the Black Mirror episode “Hate the Nation” and some of the pitfalls.

Swarms of autonomous, 3D printed drone bees pollinating the nation. Hackable AI, vulnerable to attack. Flying tools turned aerial enemy. Do our experts think any of this could happen? Is this type of technology likely or even feasible?

Our team share their thoughts:

Sabine: What’s interesting is that not everything in the episode is entirely crazy. We do want to create technology that addresses a specific need. If there are fewer pollinators, we might want to create artificial pollinators, though not necessarily artificial bees, to help us along the path to addressing the issue. But I think the technology in Black Mirror is very far from something we can do today.

There was a project called RoboBees, that was Harvard-based, that was all about creating artificial bees for pollination—so exactly this scenario.  There were multiple parts and problems: how do you make very small flyers; how do you drive them in a controlled way; and how do they sustain enough energy. All these things are extremely hard to address. They’ve managed to make some of the world’s best miniature flyers that can flap their wings and take off, and are making some great steps in controlling them. But when I say control, I really mean turning left and right in a laboratory setting. If you were to put them outside in a windy environments, it’d be a completely different story, and they don’t really have the energy to go very far.

And then there’s the algorithms. It’s not just the bees in this episode, they’re all connected to hives and they have all these control algorithms implemented that allow them to find flowers and people with image processing. How do you get such large numbers of drones to communicate with each other and their hubs? There are multiple communication issues that are very hard to address. What is interesting is that [Black Mirror] put together these bees with the swarm approach, and the pollinate in a way that’s very bio-inspired.

Kassie: Does anyone think that this episode did a disservice to swarm robotics in that someone was able to hack into the mainframe and essentially attack and kill people? That’s a very real fear that people have with regards to robotics and AI.

Sabine: For years we had to answer the question: Have you read “Prey”? Is this likely to happen? And now it’s: Have you seen “Dark Mirror”?

Ioannis: In fairness, there is some justification for this, as opposed to questions about terminators and things.

Sabine: And it’s not the technology [in Black Mirror] that’s the problem, it’s the humans. The technology starts by being portrayed as a real positive. All the tech in this episode, like the autonomous cars, is actually really cool and helpful. It’s the people who screwed up, ultimately, and the system got hacked. So I think the key message is that we need to make the technology secure.

Ioannis: Did you think it was a little short-sighted in the way it portrayed swarm robotics? It sounds very inefficient to me to have a central control that’s required to monitor the flight of every bee. All the bad guy needed to do was hack the central control to manipulate every bee. A swarm is something different than a million drones. In the episode, it looks like a swarm, but in reality it’s actually a lot of remotely operated robots.

Sabine: That’s right. And if it was properly decentralised, it would have been harder to hack because you wouldn’t be downloading massive amounts of code on every one of these bees.

Ioannis: To make the swarm go from controlled to bad, the hacker could have introduced some kind of memory or code to enable the swarm to evolve rapidly, and from that point on it’s out of control. That would have been interesting. Instead, the hacker just uses the bees as lots of tele-operated robots. I found the episode a little disappointing in this aspect.

Kassie: If you’re doubting robotics in any way, this episode is perhaps something you could look at and think: “Oh my God, this is something that could happen.” But I took some positives from this [with robotics] then only negatives.

Sabine: I felt the autonomous cars were positive; similar to what you’d expect them to be like in 30 years or so.

Ioannis: They portray autonomous cars as being cool, also, which is one aspect. But the fact that the cars are autonomous is nothing [to the story], the characters just use them, which I think is quite cool actually. They ignore the fact that these could be anything futuristic which I think is good.

Kassie: It was almost a precursor to something that could actually happen soon, in that some people were still driving, but the people with money had autonomous systems. And it wasn’t portrayed as scary! So I agree that that was a good aspect.

Sabine: I think the point of Black Mirror is very often not the technology but that people misuse it, and they make a very good point about online bullying [in this episode].

Ioannis: Yes, and they do not portray online bullies in a stereotypical way. For example, there is a teacher character who is a very nice lady in reality, but online is something completely different. Sabine, I’d like to ask you what you think about the potential of a weaponized swarm for defense purposes?

Sabine: I think it’s a very bad idea to weaponize swarms. You have to think about such things as stability and payload, accounting for wind and conditions etc. How would you do that? And why use a swarm as opposed to another type of robot with another type of payload?

Ioannis: I don’t have any specific examples for swarm robotics, but in nature a lion is dangerous, and so is a mosquito. Both in different way. So there could be an application.

Sabine: In that sense, you can weaponize anything. It’s just so much harder to weaponize a swarm than a more capable system, at least today.

Ioannis: What did you think of the robo-bee design?

Sabine: I think it was pretty cool, but too complex. If you were to design a robo-bee you would design something like a mini-copter that would sit on a plant, rather than something that looked like a bee. Or you might have an agriculture robot that simply goes across fields and does the pollination. Although the nice thing about the bee design is that the infrastructure is still already in place—plants etc.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read our other Roundtables:

• Robohub roundtable: Public perceptions of robotics and AI, what’s your pet peeve?
• Robohub roundtable: Why do robotics crowdfunding projects fail?
• Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics
• Robohub roundtable: Job loss through automation, Foxconn controversy
• Robohub roundtable: Why is it so difficult to define ‘robot’?

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

Hiroshi Ota and Minako Inoue with 2 Robovie R3 robots in Oriza Hirata’s “I, Worker”

How can robotics help to enhance the development of the modern arts? Japan’s famous playwright, stage director Oriza Hirata and leading roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro launched the “Robot Theater Project” at Osaka University to explore the boundary between human-robot interactions through robot theater. Their work includes renditions of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, and their own play “I, Worker”. Their work has spread internationally to Paris, New York, Toronto and Taipei.

For this interview, we would like to invite their collaboration partner Yi-Wei Keng, director of Taipei Arts Festival, to share his insights on the intersection of robotics and the arts.

Interviewee: Mr. Yi-Wei Keng, Artistic Director of Taipei Arts Festival (TAF)

Interviewer: Dr. Yueh-Hsuan Weng, Co-founder of ROBOLAW.ASIA Initiative and Fellow at CLAST AI & Law Research Committee (Beijing) and Tech and Law Center (Milan)

Interviewer: Ms. Diane Chiang, Guest Editor at ROBOLAW.ASIA Initiative

WENG: Thank you for agreeing to an interview. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

KENG: I have diverse backgrounds. I studied civic engineering in my first year at university and changed my focus to philosophy in my second year. After graduation and military service, I went to Prague to study non-verbal theater. I dedicated myself to disabled theater when I came back from Europe at the beginning of 2000s’. This multi-discipline experience helped me to think of arts in broader sense.

WENG: Can you introduce Taipei Arts Festival to our readers? What are the collaborations between Taipei Arts Festival and Robot Theatre project in recent years?

KENG: Taipei Arts Festival is the city’s festival, and was established in 1998. TAF gets its entire budget from the Taipei city government. I became the artistic director in 2012 and invited “Three Sisters, Android version” by Oriza Hirata and Hiroshi Ishiguro in 2013. Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro also visited TAF and gave public talks about his robotics work. Then in 2015 we invited their “La Metamorphose version Androide” to TAF.

WENG: What caused you to collaborate with Mr. Oriza Hirata? Did you face any challenges in implementing the piece into Taipei Arts Festival?

KENG: Well, it was really an accident. My wife read an article about the Robot Theatre Project in Monthly Art Magazine Bijutsu Techo. She told me about this and I did some research. I thought it was an interesting project, then I found Seinendan through my connections in Japan. Oriza Hirata gave a very positive response about our invitation. Everything went well during the festival, that is why we decided to invite Seinendan again in 2015.

WENG: Taiwan’s choreographer Yi Huang had used his KUKA robot companion to design his “Huang Yi & KUKA” robot choreography. Can you introduce more examples of robot choreography to us?

KENG: For example, French company Cie 111 made the “Sans Objet” in 2009, it was also a dance show with 2 dancers and an industrial robot, like Yi Huang’s KUKA project in 2013. French choreographer Blanca Li made the “Robot” in 2013 where the NAO Robot by Aldebaran Robotics to dance with real dancer.

WENG: In Japan, an art theater in Tokyo performed a theatrical rendition of Osamu Tezuka’s “Black Jack”. The character “Pinoko” was played by a robot created by Waseda University’s Takanishi Laboratory. The arms, legs, and body of the Takanishi Laboratory developed robot are detachable and equipped with 25 motors, so the robot can vividly resemble the Black Jack character. With your experience and expertise in performance art, what are your thoughts on this?

KENG: What surprises people most about robots or puppets is that we know they are objects but they act like they have soul inside. But if there were many robots in our life, then robots on stage would not be such a surprise. What matters is when the robot looks like a human being, then robot theater loses its meaning too because people can’t tell the difference from appearance. There are more and more animation films, but there is a psychological need to see real humans in films. That is what happens in animation film, we don’t want to see the animation, which shoots like the real movie, we want to experience the pleasure of difference and surprise.

CIANG: Is there a correlation between robotic theater and anthropology? If so, what is it? Can you share your insights from a puppetry aesthetics perspective?

KENG: As I say, if a robot looks like the real people on stage, then it loses its attraction for the audience. It is the same for puppet theater: the movement and design should remain dumpy and eccentric. In the future, androids in everyday life may confuse people if we can’t tell the difference between robots and human beings. We might kill someone which we declare as a robot, but in fact is a human being. Why is robot theater important? Because we could use theater to show the fictional situation which may happen in the future and discuss its meaning and possibility through story.

CIANG: In the 2016 Taipei Film Festival, there is a movie featuring a robot called “Sayonara”. This movie is an extension of Hirata and Ishiguro’s Robot Theater Project. They use an android as an actress in the movie. To human actors, what is the difference between 3D robotic theater and a 2D movie when they play with the android?

KENG: When you see the robot in a theater you confront the reality, and the statement from story becomes stronger than in the movie. There is a life event in theater but film is an illusion made by projecting lights on a screen.

CIANG: Can you tell us something about ethics debates in robot theater? Why do ethics matter to robot theater?

KENG: The main issue is the role of actors in theater. In 1908, theorist Gordon Craig declared that the Über-Marionette should replace the real actor in the future. But acting is not only imitation but also a creative process. Ethics about robot theater can help us to understand more about the essence of theater, robots and humanity.

CIANG: Do you think that it is possible to improve the performance of robots in society by borrowing experiences from performance theory?

KENG: If a robot wants to become human, they must look like a human and act like a human. So “act” has something to do with acting. According to the theory of mirror neuron, the audience can react with the acting from the stage, because their body acts the same way when similar situations happen, so the audience reacts. Acting technique divides from inside-out like Stanislavky system and outside-in like the Delsarte method. The performance theory of François Delsatre might help better than the inside-out technique since robots don’t act by feeling.

WENG: Researchers at the University of Oxford found that 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of AI and automation in the next two decades. Do you agree that in the field of arts and drama, many future job opportunities will be replaced by robots? Or do you rather believe that new technology will create more opportunities for humans?

KENG: There are many puppet theaters in different cultures, and there exist theaters with real actors in these cultures too. There is no contradiction between having a robot actor and real actor. The emergence of robot actors could create a revolution in acting theory. The problem is not technology, but how we treat them.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in:

• A European perspective on robot law: Interview with Mady Delavaux
• Art meets robotics in Patrick Tresset’s OPLINE Prize entry
• Robots Podcast #171: Robotics in theatre, film and television, with Grant Imahara and Richard McKenna
• Flying robots perform 100th show on Broadway, using new localization technology and algorithms
• RoboThespian gets its own YouTube channel

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

HBO’s latest offering (on SkyAtlantic here in the UK) is an update of Michael Crichton‘s 1973 film Westworld; this time brought to us as a ten-part television series by sci-fi re-booter extraordinaire J.J. Abrams and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (yes, brother and frequent collaborator of Christopher). The new Westworld comes with much hope (for HBO as a potential ‘new Game of Thrones’) and hype, understandably with the talent behind it having given us so much terrific science-fiction of late, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Interstellar.

As with Channel 4’s series Humans, broadcast last June (news on forthcoming series 2 here), Dreaming Robot’s offered a live Twitter commentary while the show was being broadcast in the UK, and I’ll take some time afterwards to write some reflective pieces on what we see in the show. (The Twitter ‘Superguide’ from @ShefRobotics can be seen here; my own @DreamingRobots Superguide can be seen here.)

Unsurprisingly, many of the themes in the Westworld reboot could also be seen in Humans. It seems, for example, that both shows express a certain anxiety, that as our machines become more human we humans seem to become less human, or humane. But this isn’t a new idea original to either show – this anxiety as been around as long as robots themselves, from the very invention of the term robot in the 1920s. And if we trace the history of robots in science fiction, we see a history of monsters that reflect this same fear, time and again, in slightly different contexts. Because the robot – which, remember, was invented in the popular imagination long before they were built in labs – is above all else exactly that, a perfect way of expressing this fear.

So, what are we looking at in this new, improved Westworld? (because frankly, the original film lacked the depth of even the first hour of this series, being just a very traditional Frankenstein narrative and rough draft for Crichton’s Jurassic Park, made 20 years later). First – as this nifty graphic on the right illustrates – we do see the robots in Westworld becoming more human. The programme starts with a voice asking the humanoid (very humanoid) robot, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), ‘Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?’ The questioner is exploring whether Dolores has become sentient, that is, aware of her own existence. The echo here with Descartes is clear. We all know about cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. But Descartes proposition isn’t just about thinking, it is about doubt.  He begins with the proposition that the act of doubting itself means that we cannot doubt, at least, our existence . So we would better understand Descartes’s proposition as dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum: I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. If Dolores is found to be questioning the nature of her reality then that would be evidence for self-awareness and being, according to the Cartesian model.

The robots in Westworld are depicted as falling in love, maintaining strong family bonds, appreciating beauty, and consider the world in philosophical, reflective contexts. How much of this is merely programming and how much exceeds the limits imposed upon them by their human masters is the key question that the show teases its audience with, I suspect, though certainly, it occupies much of our attention in the first few hours. But if these moments – described as ‘reveries’ – are in any way genuine moments of creativity, then this is another category, beyond the notion of the cogito, that we might say the robots are becoming ‘alive’.

For many thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century (for example, the post-Freudian psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott), it is only in such moments of creativity, or enjoying genuine moments of spontaneous being, that we truly discover the self and come alive. (The Freudian and post-Freudian influences on the narrative become even more apparent in subsequent episodes.) As response to late industrial capitalism (and the shock of fascism to the human self-conception as a rational animal), this idea emerged of human beings coming ‘alive’ only when we are not acting compliantly, that is, when we are acting spontaneously, or creatively, and not according to the laws or dictates (or ‘programming’) of another individual, organisation or group consciousness. We see this trend not only in a post-Freudian psychotherapy (e.g. Eric Fromm and the Frankfurt School, R. D. Laing) and other philosophical writings but also in the popular post-war subculture media, including advertising – the sort satirised in the ad for Westworld that opens the original film.

Other perspectives give us a glimpse into the robot’s moments of becoming human. Peter Abernathy, looking at a picture that offers a peek at the world outside, says: “I have a question, a question you’re not supposed to ask.” This is an allusion to Adam and Eve and the fruit of forbidden knowledge when humankind became self-aware of the difference between right and wrong. (Peter, after this, is consumed with rage at how he and his daughter have been treated.) And like Walter, the robot that goes on a psychotic killing spree, pouring milk over his victims, Peter is determined to ‘go off script’ and reclaim for himself a degree of agency and self-determination, acting according to his own, new-found consciousness instead of according to what others have programmed for him.

MEANWHILE, the human beings (‘newcomers’) in Westworld seem less ‘humane’ than their robot counterparts. The newcomers are shown to be sadistic, misogynist, psychopathic in the indulgence of their fantasies. One could argue that this behaviour is morally justifiable in the unreal world designed solely for the benefit of paying customers – that a ‘rape’, for example, in Westworld isn’t really ‘rape’ if it is done to a robot (who, by definition, cannot give nor deny consent), but this clearly is not how the audience is being invited to see these actions.

That human beings are becoming more like machines is an anxiety for which there is a long history of evidence, and even pre-dates the cultural invention of robots in the 1920s. We can see this anxiety in the Romantic unease with the consequences of Enlightenment that gave birth to the new, rational man, and of the industrial revolution, that was turning humans into nothing more than cogs in the steam-powered machines that so transformed the economy. This has been addressed in the Gothic tale of Frankenstein, still the basis for so many narratives involving robots, including the original Westworld film and, more recently, even our most contemporary stories such as Ex_Machina, and, to a lesser extent, in this manifestation of Westworld (which will be subject of a future post). (I have written and spoken on this theme myself many times, for example here and here).

So in Westworld, we meet Dr Ford – the mad scientist who creates the machines that will, inevitably, be freed upon the world. Dr Ford immediately reminds us of another Ford, the man whose name is synonymous with the assembly lines and a mode of production in the late industrial revolution that has done so much to dehumanise modern workforces. We see these methods of production and workers in the iconic film, which was contemporary with Henry Ford’s factories, Metropolis. (Though, as we shall see, this Ford is rather more complex…).

This dehumanisation of human beings in the industrial age has been looked at in robot films since Metropolis #Westworld pic.twitter.com/NkoBH7mlD2

— Dreaming Robots Blog (@DreamingRobots) October 4, 2016

This fear reflects, too, that as post-Enlightenment humans become more rational, they become more like machines, acting in predictable, programmed ways, having lost the spontaneity and creativity of an earlier age. The humans of Westworld are exaggerations of the humans of our ‘Western’ world of rationalism, science and alienation. We don’t have to agree with this Romantic notion, that rationalism and science are negative forces in our world to accept that there is a great deal of anxiety about how rationalism and science are transforming individual human beings and our societies.

Rational dehumanisation is something personified in the actions of the corporation, which has replaced the mad-scientist as the frequent villain of the sci-fi Frankenstein-robot-twist (more to come on this in a future post) and we see hints in Episode 1 of what is to follow in Westworld, along the lines of film’s such as 2013’s The Machine, where the slightly misguided and naive actions of a scientist are only made monstrous when appropriated by a thoroughly evil, inhumane military-industrial complex.

This theme to address so succinctly in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a major influence on the new Westworld, where the Tyrell Corporation boasts that their replicants are More Human Than Human. And in Blade Runner, too, we see humanoid robots behaving more humanely that the people that ruthlessly, rationally hunt down the machines. It is unclear, however, from the Tyrell slogan whether the robots are more human than the human because the technology has become so sophisticated, or because humans have fallen so low.

On Westworld as a whole, it is too early to tell if it will maintain its initial promise and be as monumentally successful as Game of Thrones, or as iconic as Blade Runner. But already this first episode has given us more to think about than the original, and undoubtedly the success and failure of the programme will be instructive.

If you liked this post, you may also want to read:

• Robots can successfully imitate human motions in the operating room
• The dark side of ethical robots
• Law-abiding robots? What should the legal status of robots be?
• Beyond Asimov: how to plan for ethical robots

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

Most of D’Andrea’s work shown at this latest demonstration is dedicated to pushing the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight. One key ingredient is localization: To function autonomously, robots need to know where they are in space. Previously his team has relied on an external high-precision motion capture system available in his Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich for positioning. In his previous TED talk on robot athletes for example, you can clearly see the reflective markers required by the motion capture system. This meant that most algorithms were difficult to demonstrate outside the lab. It also meant that the system had a single point of failure (SPOF) in the centralized server of the mocap system — a highly problematic point for any safety critical system.

In another world first, Raff and his team are now showing a newly developed, doubly redundant localization technology from Verity Studios, a spin-off from his lab, which gives flying machines, and robots in general, new levels of autonomy. For the live demonstrations, all flying machines use on-board sensors to determine where they are in space and on-board computation to determine what their actions should be. There are no external cameras. The only remote commands the flying robots receive are high level ones, such as “take-off” or “land”.

The nature of this performance was also unprecedented in that it did not use safety nets to separate the audience from the action, and in that it even saw dozens of vehicles fly directly above the audience.

The performance included demonstrations of various safety systems for flying machines, including a large, high-performance quadcopter that is fully redundant and that utilizes a state-of-the-art failsafe algorithm (see previous Robohub article) among its many other onboard and offboard safety features.

Following extensive technical discussions on the various failure modes of the positioning system and of each flying machine as well as on the systems’ numerous redundancies and safety features, the organizers of TED had full faith in the systems’ safety and reliability. So much so that they decided to indemnify the venue against any lawsuits to overcome its ban on drones.

Here is the video:

And here is a more in-depth breakdown of what you are seeing, based on a transcript of the presentation and information from Raff D’Andrea’s team:

Intro video – Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC), ETH Zurich

The video shows some of the previous work of D’Andrea’s group on aerial construction: A 6-meter tall tower built out of 1500 foam bricks by four autonomous quadcopters over a three day period in front of a live audience and a rope bridge built by three autonomous quadcopters in the Flying Machine Arena.

Live demo 1: Tail-Sitter – IDSC, ETH Zurich

The Tail-sitter. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“This is a so-called tail-sitter. It’s an aircraft that tries to have its cake and eat it: Like other fixed wing aircraft, it is efficient in forward flight, much more so than helicopters and variations thereof. Unlike most other fixed wing aircraft, however, it can hover, which has huge advantages for take-off, landing, and general versatility. There is no free lunch, unfortunately, and one of the challenges with this type of aircraft is its susceptibility to disturbances, such as wind-gusts, while hovering. We are developing control architectures and algorithms that address this limitation. [Pushes the vehicle, then grabs it and throws it] The idea is to allow the aircraft to autonomously recover no matter what situation it finds itself in. [Second throw] And through practice, improve its performance over time. [Third throw, violently spinning the vehicle]”

Demo 2 (video of demo the night before): Monospinner – IDSC, ETH Zurich

The Monospinner. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

“When doing research we often ask ourselves abstract, fundamental questions that try to get at the heart of a matter. One such question: What is the minimum number of moving parts necessary for controlled flight? This line of exploration may have practical ramifications; take helicopters, for example, which are affectionately known as “machines with over 1000 moving parts all conspiring to cause bodily harm”. Turns out that decades ago skilled pilots were flying RC airplanes with only 2 moving parts: a propeller and a tail rudder. We recently discovered that it could be done with only 1.”

“This is the monospinner, the world’s mechanically simplest, controllable flying machine, invented just a few months ago. It has only one moving part, a propeller. There are no flaps or hinges, no control surfaces or valves, no other actuators. Just one propeller. Even though it is mechanically simple, there is a lot going on in its electronic brain to keep it stable and move through space in a controllable fashion. Even so, it does not yet have the recovery algorithms of the tail-sitter, which is why I have to throw it just right.”

Live demo 3: Omnicopter – IDSC, ETH Zurich:

The Omnicopter. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality, this machine here, the omnicopter, with its 8 propellers, is an exercise in excess. What can you do with this surplus? The thing to notice is that it is highly symmetric, and as a result it is ambivalent to orientation. This gives it an unprecedented capability: It can move anywhere in space, independently of where it is facing, and even of how it is rotating. It has its own complexities, mainly due to the complex, interacting flows of its 8 propellers. Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly. [Omnicopter takes off, manoeuvres around the stage, lands]”

Live demo 4: Fully redundant multicopter – Verity Studios

Fully redundant quadcopter. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

“If flying machines are going to find their way into our daily lives, they will need to become extremely safe. This machine here is a prototype being developed by Verity Studios. It actually consists of two separate, two propeller flying machines, each capable of controlled flight. One wants to rotate clockwise, the other one counter clockwise. When all systems are operational, it behaves like a high-performance, 4 propeller quadrocopter. [Quadcopter takes off and flies an arc across the stage] If anything fails, however – propeller, motor, electronics, even a battery pack – it is still able to fly, albeit in a degraded way [One half of the quad is de-activated, the quadrocopter starts to spin and fall, the failsafe mode kicks in and the quadrocopter recovers, flies to the back of the stage, and performs a controlled landing at the takeoff spot].”

Live demo 5: Synthetic swarm, 33 small flying machines – Verity Studios

Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“This last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms. The large number of coordinated autonomous entities offers a radically new palette for aesthetic expression. We have taken commercially available micro-quadrocopters, each weighing less than a slice of bread, and equipped them with our localization technology and custom algorithms. Because each unit knows where it is in space and is self-controlled, there really is no limit to their number. [Swarm performance]”

Raffaello D’Andrea wrapped up with: “Hopefully these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines. For example, the ultra-safe flying machine [points to the fully redundant multicopter] has aspirations to become a flying lampshade on Broadway. The reality is that it is difficult to predict the impact of nascent technology. And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey, and act of creation. It is also a continual reminder of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is; that it permits clever, creative creatures to sculpt it in such spectacular ways. The fact that this technology has huge commercial potential is just icing on the cake.”

More photos for your viewing pleasure:

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Steven Rosenbaum / Waywire

Callan McAuliffe in Robot Overlords

In the low-budget British sci-fi adventure, Robot Overlords, alien automatons rule the streets and ordinary citizens are locked under curfew in their homes. Just by stepping outside, you risk being vaporised by a hulking Sentry, or picked off by a lethal Sniper.

Amid the ruins of civilisation, Sean Flynn (Callan McAuliffe) leads his group of young friends on a quest to join the resistance forces that are standing against the robot invaders. Hot on their heels, however is their old teacher – now treacherous robot collaborator – Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley) and his captive Kate (Gillian Anderson). Who will prevail? Man or machine?

Directed by Jon Wright, Robot Overlords features some 265 visual effects shots delivered by Soho-based Nvizible, supervised by the company’s founder and co-owner, Paddy Eason. The film’s complex tracking requirements were fulfilled by Peanut FX, with additional compositing support being provided by Boundary VFX, under the supervision of Nick Lambert.

Watch a wide selection of Nvizible’s VFX shots in the official video for Robots Never Lie, written by Matt Zo for the Robot Overlords end credits

Origins of the Overlords

The original story concept for Robot Overlords came to director and co-writer, Jon Wright, in a dream. “I dreamed that I was playing cowboys and Indians with a little boy,” Wright recalled. “A huge two-storey robot came marching up the street and swung its laser cannon arm towards him, and a voice boomed out, ‘Citizen, drop your weapon immediately!’ I assumed I was just recycling a movie that I’d already seen, but eventually, I came to the conclusion that maybe it was an original idea.”

After expanding the dream concept into a two-page treatment, Wright began developing a script with co-writer Mark Stay. “Jon and I are both big fans of those 1980s Amblin movies like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies,” said Stay. “But those films were always set in American suburbia – we wondered why nobody had ever set a film like that in the UK.”

“It came together very quickly, especially for a British film,” Stay continued. “Our elevator pitch was, ‘It’s like The Goonies, but with robots blowing stuff up!’ We took Jon’s treatment to Piers Tempest – one of the producers from Jon’s previous film, Grabbers. The BFI put us under their wing, and before we knew it we had some development money.”

VFX supervisor Paddy Eason was also consulted at this early stage. “I knew Jon because we did the effects for his first two films – Tormented, and an Irish monster movie called Grabbers.” Eason commented. “The first thing I received was the treatment, and the next throw of the dice for me was getting invited to be part of a group that critiqued the script – Jon calls it the ‘Tiny Think Tank’.”

The Tiny Think Tank

The Tiny Think Tank is an initiative conceived by Wright as a means by which a group of filmmakers can gather together periodically, in order to review scripts in development. “It’s a gang of writers, actors, directors, visual effects people,” Wright explained. “There aren’t any producers or financiers involved – it’s purely creatives. We come together, read a script completely cold, then have a round-table discussion. It was inspired by Pixar. They have their team of creatives – who are also shareholders – who come together and critique each other’s films. The Tiny Think Tank is our low-budget UK version of that, and I think it’s one of the reasons Robot Overlords got made. Our script accelerated in terms of quality much more quickly than it would have done had we been writing it in isolation.”

Nvizible’s VFX breakdown for a key sequence in “Robot Overlords”

As part of the Tiny Think Tank, Paddy Eason was able to offer a level of opinion and criticism not commonly afforded people in the visual effects profession. “I had some suggestions from my own visual effects point of view,” Eason remarked. “But I also put some story ideas out to Jon and Mark. As a visual effects person, that’s not normally part of your remit. In fact, on many shows, to put forward story ideas would be viewed as a breach of etiquette. So it was delightful to be invited to give that kind of feedback.”

Nvizible’s association with Robot Overlords developed further when the company became a production partner on the project. Nevertheless, they were still required to bid for the work. “Robot Overlords was a regular production with a bond company and other financiers, so it had to be seen not only that our bid was value for money, but also that our costs weren’t unrealistically low,” Eason pointed out. “Also that, if the unthinkable happened and we dropped the ball, there would be somewhere else to go to get the work done. Obviously it didn’t come to that!”

How to Design a Robot

Key to the success of Robot Overlords was the convincing creation of the alien machines that have descended from outer space to occupy planet Earth. Design concepts for the mechanical marauders developed naturally alongside the story.

“The Robot Empire is stretched across the galaxy,” explained Stay. “If you compare it to the Roman Empire, the Earth is like Caledonia – it’s the last place any of them want to be. Resources are stretched thin. So the Sentries, for example, are quite sorry figures. They walk with a kind of stoop, and they’ve got chips and dents and dinks in their armour, because they’ve been here for three years and survived a war.”

According to the storyline, the Robot Empire studies the inhabitants of each planet they plan to subjugate, and designs an automated invasion force specifically to tap into the psychological profiles of that planet’s inhabitants. This bespoke engineering approach is evident in the design of the Sentries: two-storey, bipedal robots with small heads and enormous, hulking arms.

According to co-writer Mark Stay, the robot Sentries are designed to tap into our instinctive fear of “people with tiny brains and big muscles”.

“In studying us, the robots have discovered that we’re frightened of people with tiny brains and big muscles,” explained Stay. “That informed the design of the Sentry. Our other robots – like the Snipers and Air Drones – are very functional, each with a specific purpose. ”

A different psychological insight led to the design of the Mediator – a kind of robot diplomat that acts as an interface between human beings and their automated oppressors. “The Mediator is made to resemble a child, because they’ve observed that, on the whole, adults don’t behave aggressively towards children,” Jon Wright remarked. “But it’s been designed by an alien species who aren’t familiar with the minutiae of how we react, how our culture is organised. So they’ve got it a bit wrong. They’ve attempted to make something likeable, but they’ve actually made something that’s extremely creepy.”

Early conceptual designs for the robots were developed by storyboard and concept artist, Gabriel Schucan. “Jon and I sat with Gabriel,” Stay recalled. “We scribbled ideas, and he would develop them and send drawings back to me and Jon. That was still very early on in the writing of the script.”

“Robot Compendium” concept document – Sentry illustration by Jack Dudman

Also at this early stage, the team created the “Robot Compendium”, a manual containing a piece of key art for each robot, drawn by Jack Dudman, along with a description of the machine’s capabilities. “The Robot Compendium, helped us to sell in the script to investors,” remarked Stay. “So it was a really important document for us.”

During the story development process, visual effects constraints influenced what might be achievable, both practically and financially. “While we were still talking about the script, we started doing visual effects breakdowns in a very loose, back-of-an-envelope way,” said Eason. “Some scenes would turn out to be looking very expensive, and that was fed back into the writing process. For example, there was a scene in the woods with our heroes being chased by robots called Octobots. That was quite heavy-duty in terms of visual effects, and wasn’t particularly important in the story. So it was elbowed fairly early on.”

“Robot Overlords” concept art by Paul Catling.

The Overlords Become Real

Once Robot Overlords was greenlit, the initial robot concepts were handed over to designer and illustrator Paul Catling, known for his work on films including Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The First Avenger and the Harry Potter series.

“Paul is incredibly productive,” Eason remarked. “He did lots and lots of pen-and-ink designs, just exploring how the robots might look. Early on, some of them were much more organic-looking, and skeletal, and frightening in a slightly Satanic kind of way. Ultimately, we decided the robots should be slightly crude-looking. We wanted to avoid comparisons with Transformers – Jon wanted our robots to look much more industrial. We also wanted them to be slightly reminiscent of WWII Nazi technology.

Paul Catling’s concept designs for the Sentry.

Although the design of the Sentry was inspired directly by Wright’s inspirational dream, it nevertheless went through a lengthy development process. “One of the original tests we did for the Sentry was a lot more like Robby the Robot,” Wright revealed. “Then he developed into more of an Iron Giant character – we just pushed that design to make it slightly more peculiar. He’s slightly lop-sided, and made up of different geometric shapes. That was partly driven by the plot device of having them fold up into cubes, which was our way of showing that they’ve been deactivated.”

The Mediator robot was played by Craig Garner, whose appearance was enhanced in post-production to give the actor’s skin an unsettling plastic sheen. For some scenes, frames were removed to create staccato movements.

The Mediator, in contrast, was conceived from the beginning as a machine that looked like a human – but not too much like a human. “Right from the beginning, we wanted deliberately to put the Mediator in the uncanny valley, rather than try to avoid it,” Wright noted. “We gave the actor, Craig Garner, perfect false teeth, trimmed his hairline to a perfectly straight line, gelled his hair rock-solid, and tried to remove all of his imperfections and blemishes with make-up. Then that was enhanced in post-production with clean-up, skin glows, making his eyes uniform. Sometimes we’d take out every other frame to give him a kind of clockwork, staccato movement.”

“The bulk of the Mediator work was done in the grade by the colourist, Gareth Spensley, on his Baselight,” Eason elaborated. “However, the software we use at Nvizible for skin work is a suite of NUKE tools that we use as part of our ‘Nhance’ service. These allow us to selectively filter out features of a certain size – for example, wrinkles or spots – while retaining everything else, like image grain, shadows and regular skin texture.”

Robots at Nvizible

With the exception of the Mediator, Nvizible further developed the robot designs in their CG workspace. This process was facilitated by initial 3D work done by Paul Catling. “As Paul progresses his designs, he starts working in 3D,” explained Eason. “He’ll do a render, then go on top of it in Photoshop and paint lighting effects and so on to turn it into an illustration. But the underlying geometry is there. He even rigs it a little so he can move the arms and legs around to come up with certain key poses. So he ended up with some pretty well-realised CG models, which he then gave to us. We had to rebuild them, but they gave us a head-start.”

Early 3D concept for “Robot Overlords”

Nvizible’s robot models were built, rigged and animated primarily using Maya, with additional sculpting work done using ZBrush. “The Sentry ended up being a very complicated rig, with hundreds of moving parts,” Eason noted. “But it does play the biggest part in the film.”

Texturing was applied in MARI, using photographic reference chosen to support the story point that the robots have been operating in a hostile environment for many years, and are therefore both weathered and battle-worn. “There was no decoration on the robots – no painted symbols or information; it was all slabby, raw, metal, moving parts,” Eason noted. “We took photographs of similar unadorned, mechanical things, like old steam engines, big industrial lifts, big heavy things made out of cast iron. Part of the fun was making them nice and weathered – chipped and broken – which also helped to give them scale.”

Ncam and the Air Drone

Many key scenes featuring the robots were shot using a real-time camera-tracking system provided by Nvizible’s sister company, Ncam. The Ncam system allows a camera operator to view pre-visualised CG assets through the viewfinder, adjusted to conform to the parameters of the lens and superimposed in the correct position over the live-action.

“Ncam works without any tracking markers. It lets you see a previs version of your visual effects assets through the camera, or at video village,” Eason explained. “Ncam combines the live video feed from the camera with a render from a workstation, all in real-time, showing your VFX asset in situ. It could be anything from a set extension to a creature.”

Ncam was used during the film’s opening sequence, in which a crazed man runs down a suburban street shouting defiance at his robot oppressors. An Air Drone flies down, warning the man to return to his home; when the man ignores the robot, it vaporises him.

“My view with visual effects is to say, ‘Go ahead and do everything practically that you can, and we’ll deal with it in post.’ Rain? No problem!” – Paddy Eason, Nvizible.

The sequence was shot on location in Bangor, on the outskirts of Belfast, Northern Ireland, using primarily hand-held cameras. Following Wright and Schucan’s storyboards, Nvizible created previs for the sequence, using survey data of the location gathered by members of their Belfast office.

During the night shoot, interactive lighting was coordinated by Fraser Taggart, director of photography, to simulate the glow from the Air Drone’s blue hover-jets, while practical rain simulated a torrential downpour. “Rain gives you a huge amount of visual texture, so it’s a lovely thing to have,” observed Eason. “Generally speaking, my view with visual effects is to say, ‘Go ahead and do everything practically that you can, and we’ll deal with it in post.’ Hand-held cameras? No problem! Rain? No problem! We’ll add CG rain, and we’ll make sure it’s composited behind your rain. But there were a couple of shots where the camera was looking up into the sky, where it would have been too much of a nightmare to have rain falling into the lens, so I did ask them to shoot dry versions to give us the option.”

Practical pyrotechnics were used for the moment when the man is blown up by the robot, somewhat in the manner of a human firework. “We shot the plate with the actor, a clean plate with no actor, and a third plate with the pyro going off,” Eason revealed. “We used a similar camera move each time, but there was no motion control – which is fine as long as everyone’s on the same page. The practical pyro gave us real interactive lighting, and a good clue of how the rain is lit up. We enhanced it with additionally-shot bluescreen pyro elements afterwards.”

For the shots featuring the Air Drone, Ncam was used extensively to aid the shooting of the live-action plates. “It was exciting to see the reaction of the camera operator,” Eason recalled. “Like a lot of people, he was a bit sceptical about Ncam – sometimes people view it as a bit of an encumbrance. But when he realised he was actually able to see the hovering Drone through his viewfinder, and walk around it and choose angles, he was really excited and impressed.”

In one close-up shot, the camera executes a 180° move around the muzzle of the Air Drone’s gun, with the camera racking focus on the barrel. “I don’t think you’d have shot that plate without Ncam,” Eason asserted.

While the live-action plates were used for most scenes featuring the flying robot, Nvizible created some backgrounds using 360° HDRI panoramas shot on location by VFX assistant Erran Lake, using a DSLR camera. “Sometimes the plate done with the movie camera might be nice, but technically very difficult,” Eason explained. “So we would create our own version of that using my stitched stills, and put the rain in ourselves.”

Ncam was used for a scene in which a giant robot Sentry pursues Connor (Milo Parker) down a suburban street.

As director, Jon Wright appreciated the freedom afforded by Ncam, notably during a sequence in which a gigantic Sentry chases a boy down a suburban street. “You’re able to shoot something as if it was actually there, so it unlocks your shooting style,” he commented. “We were able to imbue those shots with a hand-held quality, and be quite cavalier about the way we shot. Normally when you shoot a visual effect like that, and there’s nothing there, you’re worried about not framing it up properly.”

“It was quite difficult to set up, positioning the robot and getting good tracks on the camera,” Wright continued, “but it meant we were able to do a running hand-held shot backwards with the boy, framing up the robot above him. The Sentries are massive, so they tend to go out of frame. If there’s nothing there, it makes the operator nervous and they tend to err on the side of caution and give you a slightly peculiar, lop-sided frame. If they can see the thing, they frame it much more naturally, and you get a much more interesting shot.”

NCam workflow – final composite (before grading)

“I imagine in years to come this will be fairly standard practice,” Wright concluded. “The days of tennis balls on sticks are numbered.”

Watch a video of the live NCam feed as seen by the camera operator:

By the time post-production began, Robot Overlords already existed in rough-cut form, since editor Matt Platts-Mills had been present on location throughout production, cutting each day’s rushes together into a rough assembly. “It was very helpful to have Matt with us, cutting as we went,” Eason observed. “By the time the shoot was done, we were in a good position to hit the ground running on certain key visual effects scenes.”

Since much of the film had been shot hand-held using anamorphic lenses, one of the first challenges for the visual effects team was tracking. Peanut FX handled all the film’s tracking requirements, delivering 3D layouts for roughly 115 shots, mostly with 3D camera and/or object tracks for set extensions and robot integration.

“We mainly used 3DEqualizer,” commented Amelie Guyot, matchmove supervisor at Peanut. “We find it great for solving anamorphic camera tracks when lens distortion grids and camera info are available. We were provided with a lidar scan model for scenes involving a castle, which we used to perfectly match the plates – 3D scans are always very helpful, especially with anamorphic shots. We also used Autodesk’s Matchmover to calibrate sets; it’s still one of our favourite tools for image-based 3D reconstruction.”

“Tracking was a concern early on,” Eason admitted, “but the guys at Peanut absolutely rocked it and did a brilliant job.”

Tracking for “Robot Overlords” was handled by Peanut FX, who worked meticulously to deal with director Wright’s extensive use of hand-held cameras, and some challenging sequences in which the robots interact directly with humans and their technology.

During post-production, Jon Wright made himself available to the Nvizible team on a regular basis. “I made a point of remaining on the film throughout the time that Nvizible were working on the visual effects, so I could go in and out of their offices at my leisure,” the director stated. “It saves a lot of work if you’re seeing updated shots regularly – you tend to have less waste. I don’t know how to run Nuke or anything, but I think I’m quite geeky, and have a good understanding of how effects work. I can tell if something’s going to be quick to do, or time-consuming. I think maybe some directors don’t have that.”

With regard to the animation of the robots, Wright paid particular attention to the way the movement of the metal invaders expressed their character – or rather, their lack of it. “There’s a tendency to anthropomorphise robots,” Wright observed. “Our robots are quite implacable, so it was important to strip out emotion.”

Even given this direction, nevertheless Wright found that individual animators inevitably had their own take on how the robots should move. “After a bit I could guess quite accurately who’d animated what, because they bring their own personality to it,” he commented. “It got to a point where I would say, ‘I know this shot would be great for this animator,’ on the basis of what they’d done before.”

Lighting the CG robots brought its own set of challenges, due to the difficulty of making metallic objects look both highly reflective and convincingly three-dimensional. “It’s a bit of a double-edged sword,” Eason remarked. “If you’ve got good HDRIs for everything, you get good reflections, but because most of what you see with metal is based on reflections, it’s hard to make stuff that’s physically juicy, with a nice keylight and a nice fill light. You’re always fighting that chrome robot thing, where it all looks a bit floaty and unlit.”

Skyship concept art by Paul Catling.

Riding the Skyship

One of the most difficult visual effects sequences occurs at the film’s climax, when Sean finds himself riding through the skies on the front of the enormous robot Skyship.

“They were really hard shots, because they were extremely ambitious,” Wright admitted. “I’d imagine that even the likes of ILM working for J.J. Abrams would have found those shots tough to get right.”

Once again, NCam was used to combine a previs version of the Skyship with the live-action as it was being shot on a small studio set. “The set had a slight bounce, which made things interesting,” Eason recalled. “We ended up replacing all the practical set with CG, although it was useful to have it there for reference, shadow catching and so on.”

The film’s ambitious climactic scenes, during which Sean (Callan McAuliffe) rides on the exterior of the massive Skyship, proved particularly challenging.

In post-production, the low-resolution Skyship model was replaced by its high-resolution counterpart. “The main challenges with the Skyship came in look-dev, working out how to make a big shiny collection of metal blocks look big and scary and cool,” Eason commented. “In reality, large steel things tend to look like concrete, so we had to cheat the physics of the renders quite a bit. We had a lot of fun with the Skyship engines – big jets of dirty orange and blue fire. Our FX lead, Wayde Duncan Smith, did a great job of simulating all that stuff in Houdini.”

Because the sequence featured multiple camera angles, with moves that were very specific to the animation of the various characters and craft, it was deemed unfeasible to shoot live-action background plates. Instead, generic aerial plates of landscapes were shot using an array of DSLR cameras.

“We flew the route in a chopper several times, shooting 160° panoramas using three Canon 5Ds, shooting stills at 3fps,” Eason revealed. “We fed these image sequences through a pipeline of undistortion, stitching, stabilising, optical flow and re-projection, to make beautiful background plates of moving land for all the flying Skyship shots. It was hard work, but our Nuke artist, Antoine Jannic, absolutely nailed it.”

Watch a video of a completed shot from the Skyship sequence:

Enter the Spitfire

Also featured during the film’s finale is that most British of icons – a Supermarine Spitfire. The old-school technology of the WWII fighter plane proves pivotal in the battle against the robots, whose jamming devices have grounded more sophisticated jet aircraft.

The production shot live-action of the historic plane on the ground using a mock-up provided by Gateguards UK. An authentic Spitfire was also made available for one day of the shoot by The Aircraft Restoration Company, Duxford. In addition, Nvizible built a CG Spitfire which they used for additional aerial shots.

Jon Wright (right) directs the action around the museum-piece Supermarine Spitfire, on location in the Isle of Man.

“We used the mock-up Spitfire in a remote, disused quarry location on the Isle of Man,” explained Eason. “Then we also had the real Spitfire fly out to us for the day. We positioned it on the airfield and dressed it similar to how the mock-up had been in the quarry. It was a huge privilege to have a real museum-piece there, and a dream for us in terms of creating our CG Spitfire for the flying shots, because we were able to get perfect reference, taking thousands of photographs, right down to every rivet.”

Eason was doubly delighted when he found himself booked in for a flight in a two-seat Spitfire. “The producer, Piers Tempest, knew I was a big fan of Spitfires, and he made a casual comment: ‘We’ll get you a flight in it.’ I didn’t believe it would ever happen, but a couple of months later it was arranged for me to go to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. I got to fly around, and control the Spitfire, and everything. Ostensibly it was to record audio inside the plane – I was wired for sound – but also it was just a marvellous day out.”

Robot Reflections

Looking back at his experience of working on Robot Overlords, Mark Stay noted the benefits brought by the collaborative process: “I’ve been involved in the whole procedure in a way that many other writers aren’t usually. I was writing the novelisation at the same time, so I would email Paddy to ask questions like, ‘What colour are the engines?’ He would invite me over to Nvizible so I could sit in on VFX test screenings, and I would be there furiously scribbling all this stuff down for the novel. I’ve been really blessed with the access that I’ve had.”

“It was a delightful experience, because of our creative involvement from beginning to end,” Paddy Eason added. “I love the fact that it’s quite an unusual British film – very charming and quirky, starting at a very small personal scale and ending up quite epic and extraordinary.”

The film’s ambition is something that Jon Wright is proud of. However, he remains sanguine about the challenges involved in bringing such a film to the screen.

“It’s a bit of a shame that we aren’t really making these kinds of movies in Britain and Ireland, and that British cinemagoers almost prefer to go and see American films over British films. And we’ve got all our best filmmakers going across the water to do remakes,” Wright commented. “But the truth is, when you make a movie like this, you go up against massive Hollywood blockbusters, and it’s difficult to deliver in the way that they deliver. So we tried to focus on character, and give the film a different tone to a typical Hollywood movie at the moment – not dark and moody, but kind of light-hearted and optimistic. Our kids swear a lot and are playful, rather than being the earnest, soul-searching types you get in typical American YA movies.”

Echoing Wright’s thoughts, Eason recalled, “I remember one meeting we had early on, where we pitched the project to quite a well-known film producer. This producer said, ‘If you pull it off, I’ll eat my hat.’ So now we’re going to get a nice hat-shaped cake made for him!”

Having enjoyed limited theatrical release across the UK through Signature, Robot Overlords may also be gaining momentum as a TV series. “We have strong interest from two big broadcasters, in the US and the UK,” Wright revealed. “In 2015, television is probably the way to go with this sort of project. We could really explore into the human politics of the situation – life under enemy occupation. Obviously, the occupation is going on across the entire planet, so there’s a million different directions you could expand the story into. And ten hours of television is probably more exciting than another 90-minute film. It could be very good – watch this space.”

Robot Overlords is now available on DVD. 

• Robot Overlords on Facebook
• Nvizible
• Peanut FX
• Boundary VFX
• Jon Wright at IMDb
• Paddy Eason at IMDb
• Mark Stay – Unusually Tall Stories
• Amelie Guyot at IMDb
• The Foundry – NUKE, MARI
• Autodesk – Maya, Mudbox, Matchmover
• Pixologic – ZBrush
• Side Effects – Houdini

Special thanks to Marek Steven, Alex Coxon, Piers Tempest and Phil Guest. “Robot Overlords” photographs and video copyright © 2015 and courtesy of Tempo Productions and Nvizible.

• The robots in Ex Machina: VFX Q&A with Andrew Whitehurst
• True AI, or clever simulation? Transcendence movie has Johnny Depp crossing the Singularity
• 12 favorite robot movies – new and old
• The real soft robots that inspired Baymax, with Chris Atkeson

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

Thymio is a playful robot designed to help children discover programming, motors, light and motion sensors, and ultimately, logical and inventive thinking – right out of the box. Earlier versions of Thymio are already in use at home or school by tens of thousands of children worldwide. Now Thymio’s development team is crowdfunding to bring you a wireless version of this loveable educational robot. If you’ve always wanted a Thymio, this is a great opportunity to get one; and if you already own a Thymio and bought it after May 2012, this is your chance to upgrade to a wireless version. No more USB cables! This is the same Thymio you know and love, only better.

Why go wireless? Thymio is known for working right out of the box, and for its easy to use visual programming interface. The new wireless version makes programming the Thymio with behaviours even simpler because you can update its behaviours on the fly.

Development for the wireless module is almost finished, and the crowdfunding campaign will support production of the new wireless Thymio. The campaign is run by Mobsya, a non-profit association whose mission is to promote technology education through fun and accessible robotics.

Want to learn more about the Thymio?

• Kidbotics review: Thymio II
• Robots Podcast interview with Thymio team members Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat
• Taking your first steps in robotics with the Thymio II

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Hunter Lloyd, who is a Professor of Robotics at Montana State University and a comedian. Hunter performs a comedy act for all ages with partner Looney, a NAO Humanoid Robot from Aldebaran Robotics. Lloyd discusses making people laugh with his robot partner, why he does it, and how what he’s learned as a comedian relates to robotics.

Hunter Lloyd

Hunter Lloyd is an award winning Professor, business owner, inventor, author, comedian, and family man. While Hunter was an undergraduate student studying accounting, he postponed his college career to start stand-up comedy. For six years Hunter toured the country working with acts such as Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen. Hunter headlined his first comedy show at Laffs in Tucson, Arizona; at the age of 23, he appeared on television networks such as MTV, VH1 and The Comedy Channel. After touring for several years, Hunter went back to complete his undergraduate degree and graduate school where he studied engineering and computer science, which eventually led him to the field of robotics. Hunter is now a Professor of Robotics at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. Hunter and his students have excelled in a number of competitions including the NASA Robotics Championship, the Robot Olympic Games, and Robogames.

Hunter is also a robotics entrepreneur: founding a robotics company in 2005 that helped develop the RangeWatcher and WatchKeeper technologies for the Predator Unmanned Aircraft Group. Today, Hunter combines his skills as a robotics engineer and comedian to perform to audiences of students, inspiring them to follow their dreams in the fields of math and science.

Links:

• Download mp3 (16.3 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Looney the Robot website
• Hunter Lloyd’s website

Happy Birthday!! Clearpath is officially 5 years old and what better way to celebrate than let all of our fans drive a robot. No matter where you are in the world, you can experience what it’s like to drive Husky – well, a very mini, hacked-together Husky that is. We’ve put together ‘twit-bot’ for your enjoyment so you can move our bot around all from the convenience of your smartphone using Twitter.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Mention Clearpath’s Twitter handle (@ClearpathRobots)
Step 2: Hash tag #MoveRobot
Step 3: Write the action you’d like it to take (examples are below)
Step 4: Watch it move on the live feed: http://www.twitch.tv/twitbot_cpr
Step 5: Share with your friends!

How does it move?

This little twit-bot can go just about anywhere and in any direction using the commands below (case insensitive).  The delay between the tweet and the streaming is about 30 seconds:

• “forward” or “fwd”
• “backward” or “bck”
• “right” or “rght”
• “left” or “ft”
• “stop” or “stp”

You can also tweet colors to change the colors of the LED lights: blue, red, white, etc.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in Clearpath’s ROS 101 Tutorials:

• ROS 101: Intro to the Robot Operating System
• ROS 101: A practical example
• ROS 101: Drive a Husky!

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

The People’s Bot is a project by Chelsea Barabas and Nathan Mathias from MIT’s Center for Civic Media that uses telepresence robots for the public good.

“Our telepresent bots broaden inclusion at events & support public interest media-making, through scholarships, media fellowships, and auctions.”

And by public good, they mean for example sneaking into purchasing participant registration for The People’s Bot at the highly popular Computer-Human-Interaction Conference and letting people apply for slots. If you’re interested in CHI, but like many people can’t afford to attend, it looks like you can still bid for a much cheaper telepresence opportunity on eBay. And you don’t even have to put on pants. Bid on Ebay to attend the History of Wearables & Google Glass exhibit at CHI (proceeds go to the CHI student travel grants).

Rumor has it The People’s Bot is currently wandering around the Theorizing the Web conference in New York City.

While not everyone here at Robohub agrees that a telepresence device is technically a robot, this is a pretty cool project. We hope with all of our hearts that they don’t get sued.

What’s with all the quadrotors in auto advertising these days? And what do quadrotor swarms have to do with cars? Probably not much at all, but apparently associating your auto brand with high-performance quads is de rigeur. Subaru is following the lead of Lexus (which launched its quadrotor ad last November), upping the ante by having the driver of the new WRX STI engage in a pas de deux (or should we say, ‘pas de plusieurs?’) with a swarm of 300 LED-lit quadrotors. It makes for some pretty stunning footage, but before you get too excited, unlike the original Lexus ad (which had at least a decent portion of real footage from Kmel’s impressive quads) almost all of the quadrotor eye-candy in the new Subaru ad is CGI. The automaker’s desire to associate themselves with cutting edge technology may be a sign of just how popular quadrotors have become, but is hyper-realistic CGI enhancement inflating consumer’s expectations of what quadrotors can actually do? (see the video below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-e4RUrjW4I&amp

Quadrotors are famous for performing amazing stunts in the frontier of what we think is possible from a machine. DDB Canada/Tribal Worldwide, which is the ad agency behind this project, wanted to associate the performance and especially the maneuverability of the new Subaru WRX STi with the stunts performed in various quad videos-gone-viral.

The production used live action captured in the Hughes Airport Hangar in Los Angeles, California (which was purchased by Youtube and converted to a 41,000-square foot mega studio) along with Big Block’s Drive-a-tron system where a car is accurately modelled – both geometrically (with manufacturer’s CAD models) and dynamically (its physics and performance envelope). However the quadrotors (although modeled according to real drones) are all computer generated (note that none of the behind-the-scenes photos contain a quadrotor). The final footage is almost completely CGI and the process took 8 weeks.

By using real-life emulating models, the production ensures that what you see on the video could have been performed in real life. That is true for the car, which is accurately modelled, but it’s speculative for the quads, even if it’s not totally far-fetched based on what has already been done (but not at that scale) by several labs like the Flying Machine Arena, or even K-Mel, the robotics company behind the Lexus drone ad.

Just how far away are we from quadrotors actually being able to perform stunts like these? Raffaello D’Andrea, the lead researcher behind the Flying Machine Arena, says “With enough of a budget, this could be done by a few groups of people now. But it is much, much cheaper to do this with CGI.”

“It definitely changes people’s expectations and is no different than the portrayal of any advanced technology in technology in movies, television, and videos. But: seeing it live is completely different; even though people may be partially “desensitized” by CGI, this immediately disappears when they see it live,” added D’Andrea, who is no stranger to giving live demos that feature his quadrotor research. “As someone who thrives on doing live demonstrations, I don’t see this as being harmful in any way.”

We also asked Alan Winfield, Hewlett-Packard Professor of Electronic Engineering at UWE Bristol and expert of the portrayal of robotics in the media his thoughts on whether CGI will inflate people’s expectations of what quads can do, and he agreed that it’s a problem. But, he adds, “What I also find curious and interesting (in a geeky kind of way) is that the CGI in the Subaru ad faithfully reproduces the grey reflective spheres needed by the tracking system in labs – especially at ~44s. It’s ironic that the eye-candy drones include the very tracking tech that many people don’t realise is needed to make them do precision formation acrobatics.”

We can’t blame Subaru for wanting to jump on the quadrotor bandwagon … quadrotors are popular, cutting edge and hip (they are already making an entry into concept cars).  But while car enthusiasts will already have their opinions about the new Subaru WRX STi (it’s an evolution of a well-proven and popular model), we have to wonder how people’s expectations of drone technology will be shaped when they’re exposed to mostly CGI videos and advertisements rather than real footage.

In fact there is some astounding work being done with high-performance quads and aerial swarms. If you want to get a sense of what’s really doable, check out the following 2012 video, which was developed for the The Ars Electronica Futurelab with input from ETH-Zürich, the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASPlab, and the MIT-Medialab. You can find the full behind-the-scenes story about this project here.

PS. The Lexus ad mentioned above

Amazing in Motion – SWARM (Lexus Ad)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0v1BgzUdc

The making of “SWARM”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9SqJk5zSZM

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

• Video: Throwing and catching an inverted pendulum – with quadrocopters
• VIDEO UPDATE Quadrocopter failsafe algorithm: Recovery after propeller loss
• Three new quadrotor videos demonstrate agile control and the power of machine learning
• Quadrocopters learn from prior experience to improve slalom flying
• Quadcopters advertising new Star Trek movie

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

As of yesterday, you can get the adorable and versatile humanoid robot NAO from Aldebaran Robotics for yourself, even if you are not an academic or a hardcore developer. According to Génération Robots, a European partner of Aldebaran Robotics, they are selling NAO Next Gen (that’s the fourth of the four versions of NAOs out there) with the starting price of 5628 €. In North America, the RobotsLab is offering NAO for $7990 – down from $16,000.

If you are a roboticist (especially an academic), you’ve surely come across NAO before at your colleagues’ labs, conferences, and exhibition booths. It’s a 25-DOF platform that has been a definite friend to researchers studying human-robot interaction (HRI).

To give you an idea, NAO was at the 9th ACE/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction last week and helped host the voting of the best video awards. On behalf of the chair of the video session, it sat on the podium and instructed the audience to clap and cheer on for the video submissions to be selected for the awards.

Apart from the fact that it has two HD cameras, four microphones, 2 hi-Fi speakers, and has been on TED more than once, this beloved robot comes with fun applications such as “NAO plays soccer”. Although I couldn’t tell you how well the application works, you can check it out for yourself from March 18th to 22nd if you’ll be attending Innorobo this year.

It’s still too pricey to be purchased as the next Christmas present for a child in your family. But it looks like that’s not what Aldebaran and  Génération intends to sell it for anyway. It’s definitely not too expensive as a platform to do HRI research on, use it to start your own robots-at-home or robots-for-entertainment business, or have it as your own personal robot because you’re just that kind of a person.

So, would you buy it? What would you use it for?

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

• Rethink Robotics and Aldebaran both launch robots for research, teaching and custom development
• “A Paro walks into a club…” (or, Notes on the design of automated body language)
• ICRA 2013 robot photo essay: “Anthropomatics – Technologies for humans”
• ShanghAI Lectures 2012: Lecture 10 “How the body shapes the way we think”
• Robot choreographies
• Robot Companions: Flagship funding proposal for 1 billion euro submitted
• NAO, WALL-E, PackBot and BigDog inducted into Robot Hall of Fame

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

cy·borg  –  ˈsīˌbôrg/ – noun

a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body

This month we asked our Robotics by Invitation experts to tell how they would use robotics to enhance themselves. Here’s what they have to say …

There’s not much more about Sphero 2.0 on the Orbotix website other than this two-minute video, but Evan Ackerman of Automaton has a little more information. The following is from his article:

Today, Orbotix is introducing the Sphero 2.0, packed with new hardware that makes it faster, smarter, faster, brighter, and faster than ever. And did we mention it’s faster? Because it’s definitely faster.

The ready-made platform (kit) options just keep getting better. Here SparkFun shows off its new Redbot kit, which includes everything you need to put together a basic mobile robot.

The RedBot Kit is a robotic development platform capable of teaching two motor robotics and sensor integration! This kit comes with our new RedBot Mainboard, the Magician Chassis, a handful of sensors, and everything required for assembly.

We take you now to sunny, southern California, where a small group of enthusiasts has constructed a very realistic, Arduino-based replica of Pixar’s WALL-E, entirely from custom-fabricated parts.

The beloved Wall-E robot was just computer generated graphics in the Pixar movie, but fans have spent years trying to bring him to life. We visit Mike McMaster’s workshop to see his incredible life-size Wall-E, a remote controlled robot that lives among an R2-D2 droid and other pets on Mike’s orange farm.

This post is part of Robohub’s We Robot coverage.

To everyone’s delight, the first day wrapped up with a presentation by Patric Verrone, co-producer of the popular TV-show Futurama.

Presentation: Bender’s Law
Speaker: Futurama Co-Producer Patric Verrone

Anyone familiar with the show will know that it is a goldmine of commentary on politics and robots. Verrone, who has a legal background, spoke about the ways and various instances the show thematizes robots and the law. He is funny as hell and showed some great Futurama clips, which unfortunately are not visible in the video above. Presumably for legal reasons. Which generally speaking is sad, because how could this possibly be anything other than good promotion for Futurama? In any case, blame the system, not the players, and watch the show if you haven’t! It’s awesome.

See all the We Robot coverage on Robohub →

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

“People hate me because they say robots steal jobs.”
“What jobs?”
“Low paid, extremely dangerous, repetitive, physically demanding…”
*boggle*
“I know, right?”

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

So if you really think about it, today’s comic brings up several interesting issues regarding robots and war.  One that comes to mind that is certainly not anywhere near a reality, is what if robots are self-aware, does that change the morality of them fighting (I’m thinking Asimov).  If robots are used as soldiers, would they ever fight human soldiers?  If robot soldiers are fighting against other robot soldiers, then is anything really accomplished?  I guess you would be costing each other money, and that’s definitely something, but you’d think it’d be easier to just gamble at that point.  In some ways, I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode where the two countries determined casualties randomly, without ever fighting, and if you “lost” the lottery, you went to be killed.  Deep stuff!

Robots on Tour started off on Friday 8 March 2013 with a scientific symposium at café/bar Sphères in Zurich, Switzerland. Big names from the robotic community shared and discussed their research with the audience. The venue was packed, and many people sat on the floor as there weren’t enough chairs.

Just across the street, at the cool Puls 5 venue, 50 classes of youth (aged 13-17) and their teachers took guided tours of the robot exhibition, where they had the chance to directly interact with the robots and their constructors. Of particular interest were the soccer-playing and flying robots.

In the afternoon, after the school groups had left, Dean of the University of Zurich Andreas Fischer welcomed guests to the AI Lab‘s birthday party event, which featured presentations by Rodney Brooks, Rolf Pfeifer, former and current members of the AI Lab, and others. Roboy also had his public debut as an actor in the theater play “To be, or not to be humanoid” by 1visible Productions. And of course, the team that worked so hard to make Robots on Tour possible were thanked for their fantastic work.

From left to right: Tamar Tolcachier, Gina Paolini, Samantha O’Farrell, Martin Simon, Lilla Lukacs.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Organizers of Robots on Tour were initially skeptical of whether a robot exhibition would attract enough people, and were taken by surprise when on Saturday morning at 09:00 the doors opened to a massive number of visitors waiting to enter! It took only a few minutes to fill the exhibition venue …

… and admittance had to be temporarily halted for safety reasons. Soon, a long queue formed in front of the building …

… which, understandably, wasn’t much appreciated by all those who had to wait outside for two hours despite having bought a ticket ahead of time. Fortunately some of the robots went outside to entertain the the people standing in line, and drinks and chocolates were served. By early afternoon the line up was almost gone.

Despite the long wait, feedback from both exhibitors and the approximate 4000 visitors was very positive: many asked for the event to be extended, for it to return next year (perhaps in another city), and some even asked for the red Robots on Tour T-shirt. If there is enough interest, we might actually sell some.

Over 40 state-of-the-art robots from the US, Europe, and Asia were on display — or rather, interacting with visitors — at the event. The University of Zürich’s AI lab (which initiated Robots on Tour to celebrate its 25th anniversary) had a cool lounge area designed by Live your balcony featuring its own robots, a timeline poster created by Valerie Bugmann, movies from and about the AI Lab, and of course people explaining their research to the visitors.

Robots on Tour ended with the Swiss Artists-in-Labs event and a screening of the European premiere of the movie archipelago.ch by Adrianne Wortzel and Daniel Bisig. Afterwards the exhibitors started packing their robots so that they could be shipped back to all corners of the world.

Rodney Brooks, carrying Baxter with the help of Max Lungarella.

On Sunday morning the exhibition was already empty, with nothing to remind occasional passers-by of the huge crowd of people that filled Puls 5 the day before… and the robots were patiently waiting for their journey home in their cargo boxes …

Related links:

• Robots on Tour
• AI Lab, University of Zurich
• Puls 5
• sphères
• Live your balcony
• 1visible Productions
• Roboy
• Roboy on Youtube
• Swiss Artists-in-Labs

More important, Romotive just signed their single largest order for 10,000 Romos.

With 20 US employees, Romotive manufactures Romos in China.

Las Vegas’ Downtown Project, spearheaded by Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, invested $500,000 and provided mentoring and support as Romotiv, which started working out of rental condos, grew from 3 to 20 people.

Call of Duty : Robot Ops, sounds like a fun game, eh?

Hey everyone, I meant to get this strip drawn earlier, but I’m happy to start having Robohub as a second source to read my Nate the Robot comic strip! I hope it can add a bit of humor to your day and that you enjoy it. Nate the Robot is a comic about an ordinary robot trying to make it in a human world. Nate’s life seems to be plagued by misfortune and everyone dumping on him.

Tonight or tomorrow I will be uploading my first “theme focused” comic dealing with robots and war. If you enjoy reading Nate the Robot, remember to check out the regular comic on natetherobot.com. Check out my profile on here to find my facebook and twitter links if you enjoy my snarky humor.

The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, organizer of the ShanghAI Lectures, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a big robot festival on 8 and 9 March 2013 in Zurich.

Robots on Tour, 9 March 2013
From 9:00 until 20:00, “Puls 5” in Zurich will be hustling and bustling with dozens of robots: Armar, Baxter, Geminoid, iCub, Nao, and many more (also from Hollywood movies) have confirmed their attendance. Some of the attractions (see program):

• Cornell Ranger will attempt to break its previous world record and walk more than 65.2km on a single battery charge
• Davide Scaramuzza’s flying Quadrocopters
• Robot soccer: Nao Devils vs. Hamburg Bit-Bots
• Theater featuring Roboy, the AI Lab’s newest humanoid robot
• Swiss Artists-in-Labs special with European premiere of the movie “archipelago.ch” by Adrianne Wortzel and Daniel Bisig

This is a public event, get your tickets here.

Science Café — Robots & Cyborgs @ Sphères, 8 March 2013
On 8 March a scientific symposium takes place from 9:00 until 17:00 at “Science Café Sphères”, featuring Rodney Brooks, Giorgio Metta, Masayuki Inaba, Rüdiger Dillmann, Hiroshi Kobayashi, and many more (see program).



Robot dances are often the first demo made by roboticists eager to showcase their hardware, we’ve covered many robot moves in the past. The dance in this video is impressive because of the complex motions involved and difficult balancing acts, it’s also very artistic.

To make a robot dance, you usually pre-program a set of motor commands and timings, or a so-called choreography. To start the dance, press the robot’s “start” button and launch the music at the same time. When multiple robots are dancing together, you usually need a wireless signal to wake all the robots at the same time, so the dance seems synchronized. Here the maestro might be Bruno Maisonnier’s red NAO. In most cases, robots do not listen to the music or react to one another, although there is research being done (see paper by Xia and colleagues @ CMU) to make robot dancing fully autonomous. Here are some other examples of dancers that can actually feel the beat.

http://youtu.be/VTsUim_8q9g

Even if dancing robots can’t yet make you twirl on the dance floor, they are a great vector to get students excited about robotics. I vividly remember watching QRIO dance way back when Sony was still making it. Aldebaran, the company behind the NAO robot, is actually organizing a “Robotics Idol” dance competition in California, I would have loved to participate in that as a kid!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Robot Dragonfly from TechJect. Developed over four years by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the US Air Force, the researchers are now investigating commercial and consumer opportunities through their recently released campaign on the crowd-funding website, IndieGoGo.

True consumer (as opposed to military or hobbyist) UAV’s first truly “took to the skies” with the release of Parrot’s iPhone-controlled AR.Drone in 2010, which has, for the last two years, been relatively unchallenged. Now, with the help of crowd-sourced funding, new takes on consumer UAVs are emerging, some more playful, and some more hobbyist oriented.

Few however are as innovative as the Robot Dragonfly, whose patented and bio-inspired drive/flight system gives it the ability to hover like a helicopter, and dynamically switch to a “gliding mode”, more like a conventional fixed-wing craft. As with all crowd-sourced campaigns, the Robot Dragonfly is not yet a finished or proven product, however if product simulations and current prototypes are to be believed (both shown in following video), its four wings and light weight (25g) should offer an interesting array of dynamic movements and flight possibilities not achievable with conventional UAV designs.

The following promotional video was released by the group along with the crowd-funding campaign. This video gives an overview of the Robot Dragonfly’s development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, takes a look at the existing research prototypes and shows simulations of the final version performing in a number of different situations.

The group are targeting a broad range of markets with their initial release and have suggested applications in Augmented-Reality Gaming, Aerial Photography, Telepresence, Personal and Commercial Security, and in the Military. For more information, see the Robot Dragonfly IndieGoGo campaign, where team-members are actively answering questions and responding to suggestions.

The most famous humanoid robot, Honda’s ASIMO has a new version. A few days ago Honda presented a more advanced model and performed a small display of its new capabilities. Meanwhile the robotics sector of Honda is now an official entity under the name Honda Robotics.

The new ASIMO is lighter and faster. It weighs 48kg (6 less than the previous version), it can run faster, reaching 9km/h (instead of 6km/h) and it has improved dynamic stability. It can hop, move over uneven surfaces, kick a ball and even compensate to small perturbations like an accidental push. It may not be yet as stable as for example the robots of Boston Dynamics, but we shouldn’t forget that they are either tethered prototypes or multi-legged robots while ASIMO is a biped that moves freely.

Advancement of its intelligence capabilities allow it to acknowledges data from its surroundings and act autonomously. It takes into account other people’s movement and adjusts its path according to where they are and also where it predicts they go. Additionally it has advanced face and voice recognition and can interact when multiple persons address to it.

The new version has 57 degrees of freedom, 23 more than before. This increase is mostly due to the much more advanced fingers. As displayed in the photos above and in this video, ASIMO can perform elaborate movements and handle a variety of objects with advanced dexterity.

For the first time in its long history, ASIMO is available in three different colors. At first this looks like a minor detail (considering the color variations are very discreet) but it may well be the most important new feature as a hint to a future production version. With the establishment of Honda Robotics as a separate division that covers all robotic research, and product applications the day when ASIMO or other robotic products will be commercially available becomes closer. Honda has the resources to pursue this goal and can endure the extremely steep process of developing an elaborate product for consumer use.

You can read the official press release by Honda:http://world.honda.com/..All-new-ASIMO/..
Videos from the presentation:http://moriyama.com/archives/3122 (via PlasticPals)

(Images & Video : Honda )

Link to audio file (49:54)

Welcome to the second part of our 50th episode special! To celebrate 50 episodes of Robots, we’re doing a review of some of the greatest advances in robotics during the last 50 years, and predictions on what we can hope to see in the next half century. In last week’s episode we covered embodied AI, robot toys, androids, underwater robots, education robots and brain-machine interfaces.

In today’s episode we speak with Jean-Christophe Zufferey on flying robots, Dan Kara on the robotics market, Kristinn Thórisson on AI, Andrea Thomaz on human robot interactions, Terry Fong on space robotics and Richard Jones on nano robots.

Finally, don’t forget to check out all the new features of our website including episode browsing by topic, interviewee and tag or leaving comments under our blog posts or in the forum.

Jean-Christophe Zufferey

Jean-Christophe Zufferey is a researcher at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he works on cutting-edge research in Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). His latest advances have led him to create the startup SenseFly that specializes in small and safe autonomous flying systems for applications such as environmental monitoring and aerial photography.

Dan Kara

Dan Kara is President of Robotics Trends and the Robotics Business Review, which are web-portals and research firms specialized in the robotics markets. He’ll be telling us about the past products which have marked the minds and the future developments that will be gathering the buck in the future.

Kristinn R. Thórisson

Kristinn Thórisson is Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University in Iceland.  Active in the field of Artificial Intelligence for a couple decades, Thórisson is pioneering new approaches such as constructivist AI which he hopes will bring us towards more adaptive and complex artificial systems.

Andrea Thomaz

Andrea Thomaz is professor at Georgia Tech and the director of the Socially Intelligent Machines Research Laboratory. Lately, she’s been seen with her new humanoid Simon and his expressive traits. We were able to catch her at this year’s ICRA conference for a little chat on the past and future of human robot interactions.

Terry Fong

Terry Fong is the Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at the NASA Ames Research Center. As an expert in space robotics, he’ll be telling us about robots leaving the solar system to explore our universe and how humans and robots will work together towards this endeavor.

Richard Jones

Richard Jones is the author of the book Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life and a blog on the subject also named Soft Machines. From the University of Sheffield in the UK, where he is Professor of Physics, Jones has been looking at how to make nanoscale robots which can eventually be used in the body for medical applications.

Links:

• Download mp3 (24.4 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Jean-Christophe Zufferey’s Webpage
• Dan Kara’s Webpage
• Kristinn Thórisson’s Webpage
• Andrea Thomaz’s Webpage
• Terry Fong’s Webpage
• Richard Jones’s Webpage

Latest News:

For more information on this episode’s news, including a video of Kumagai’s balancing BallIP robots, McGill’s rapid ice sculpture prototyping system, and Stanford’s perching UAV as well as more coverage from the ICRA 2010 conference, visit the Robots Forum.

Link to audio file (41:35)

Today we celebrate the 50th episode of ROBOTS!

For the occasion we speak with 12 scientists about the most remarkable developments in robotics over the last 50 years and their prediction for the next half-century. This 50th special is split into two episodes with the second half airing in two weeks.

Today we’ll be talking to Rolf Pfeifer on robotics in general, Mark Tilden robot toys, Hiroshi Ishiguro on androids, Oscar Schofield on underwater robots, Steve  Potter on brain machine interfaces and Chris Rogers on eduction robots. Our next episode will give you a snapshot view on nano robots, AI, flying robots, human robot interactions, robot business, and space robots.

We’ve also upgraded our website so that you can easily browse through episodes by topic, interviewee, tag or just listen to one of our favorites, so have a look!

You can interact with the ROBOTS community by leaving comments directly under episode posts or on our new sleek forum. To do both, just log-in once in the top bar of the website.

Rolf Pfeifer

Rolf Pfeifer is Professor at the University of Zurich where he directs the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He pioneered a new approach to artificial intelligence (“New AI”), which emphasizes the role of embodiment and argues that thought is not independent of the body, but tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled by it.

Mark Tilden

Mark Tilden is a famous robot inventor who builds new robots on a daily basis. He pioneered a philosophy for making simple and reactive robots and tagged it BEAM robotics (which stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics). Lately, Tilden has been making famous products such as the Robosapien and Femisapien robots at WowWee.

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Hiroshi Ishiguro is professor at Osaka University in Japan where he directs the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Ishiguro is most know for his near-real Androids which closely resemble human models, including himself, his daughter and a famous news anchor. Geminoid F, his latest model, was recently featured in the blogosphere.

Oscar Schofield

Oscar Schofield is Professor of Bio-Optical Oceanography at the Rutgers Coastal Ocean Observation Lab or COOL lab at Rutgers University.

Schofield is an expert in underwater robots, taking part in recent projects such as the Scarlet Knight glider which crossed the Atlantic Ocean fully autonomously while dodging fishing nets, strong currents and even the occasional shark.

Steve Potter

Steve Potter is the Director of the Potter Group which is part of the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering, a collective research unit shared between Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Having interfaced robots to in-vitro neurons, Potter talks about the field of brain-machine interfaces and its potential impact in medicine and neuroscience

Chris Rogers

Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University in the US.

As director of the Center for Engineering Education Outreach, Rogers tours the elementary schools of the world trying to bring engineering and robotics to young children. He has also worked with LEGO to develop ROBOLAB, a robotic approach to learning science and math.

Links:

• Download mp3 (23.6 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Rolf Pfeifer’s Webpage
• Mark Tilden’s Webpage
• Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Webpage
• Oscar Schofield’s Webpage
• Steve Potter’s Webpage
• Chris Rogers’s Webpage

Latest News:

For more information on this episode’s news, including videos of the PR2 robot folding towels and Honda’s U3-X robot and links to the MIT Personal Robotics group’s Mars Escape game, have a look at the Robots Forum.

Link to audio file (45:19)

In today’s episode we speak with celebrity robot maker Fred Barton who is best known as ROBOTMAN. As an expert in the Sci-Fi genre, he’ll be giving us an overview of robots in the cinema from the first shoots to today with a special emphasis on his all time favorite, Robby the Robot from the 1956 Forbidden Planet. Finally, tell us who your favorite movie robot is for a chance to win a Sci-Fi DVD or Bluray of your choice!

Fred Barton

As a teenager in highschool, Fred Barton decided he needed to have his own full size version of Robby the Robot from the Forbidden Planet. After home-making all the parts he ended-up with his first celebrity robot and went on to restoring the original Robby movie prop. However, it is only in 1996 that he decided to make a living out of his childhood passion and build robot collectibles for museums and our fellow enthusiasts. His Hollywood company, Fred Barton Productions, is the exclusive manufacturer and licensee for some of the best known movie robots including Robby. He’s built many other life-size computerized replicas including those of the original Star Wars Trilogy droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, Robot Model B9 from Lost in Space, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Maria from Metropolis, the Target Earth robot, T2-Endoskeleton.

More generally, Fred Barton has become an expert in the Sci-Fi movie genre and is involved in many of the robot movies coming out of Hollywood. He is a member of the jury of the Robot Hall of Fame and his protegee, Robby, is a 2004 inductee.

Contest: Who’s your Favorite Celebrity Robot

Most of us robotics fans are Sci-Fi lovers, diving into futuristic stories for inspiration. That’s why we want to give you a chance to win your favorite Sci-Fi DVD or bluray. Just let us know, here on the forum, who your favorite movie robot is and motivate it with text, pictures, movie snippets or nothing. The winner will be the one who proves to be the most assiduous Sci-Fi lover. The competition will be open until the 2nd of July 2009.

Tell us who your favorite movie robot is here.

Links:

• Download mp3 (26MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Fred Barton’s Homepage

Latest News:

More information on and videos of Israel military’s new snake robot, Tokyo’s International Food Machinery and Technology Expo and Willow Garage’s PR2 in our forum.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (42:11)

In this week’s show we take a closer look at Robots, not the podcast but the play that has been playing to sold-out audiences in Switzerland over the last 3 weeks. We first speak with Christian Denisart, the director of the play, who describes what inspired him to do a play featuring robot actors. We then speak with Nicola Tomatis from Bluebotics, the company responsible for the robots themselves, who describes the technical challenges involved in creating 3 very different robot actors.

Christian Denisart

Christian Denisart is a Swiss theatre director who is very active in the french-speaking Swiss theatre scene. Born in France but with roots in Switzerland, Denisart’s career included singing and acting before he started directing his own plays. In 2001 Denisart founded a theatrical company named Les Voyages Extraordinaires to act as an umbrella under which he creates theatrical pieces.

Denisart’s most recent play, called Robots, has just finished a widely-successful three-week showing at the Barnabé Theatre. What makes Robots special and interesting to us is that 3 of the 5 main characters are mobile robots! It’s the story of a man so scared of human contact that he surrounds himself with robots, including Igor, a metallic butler, Bruno, a state-of-the art robotic dog, and Leila, a robotic recreation of a dancer. The man is in love with a woman, but discovers throughout the play that real relationships don’t quite work in the same way as his relations with his robots.

Robots has been widely covered in the press, including SwissInfo and Engadget. Plans are in the works to take the show on tour, so keep an eye out on your local theatre listings!

Nicola Tomatis

Nicola Tomatis is the CEO of the spin-off company Bluebotics SA based in Lausanne Switzerland. Their area of expertise includes ANT®, an innovative navigation solution based on laser scanners for mapping and moving an autonomous robot in its environment. Their portfolio includes tour guide robots, entertainment robots, robot butlers for parties, space robots and even robots that can bring you your coffee when you’re working hard at your desk. Their latest brainchildren are three robots developed for the play ROBOTS, an obedient robot dog, a distinguished servant and a sensual female. The robots are the result of a 10 year collaboration with the designers at the ECAL, automaton artist François Junod and Christian Denisart.

Nicolas Tomatis completed his PhD under the supervision of Roland Siegwart at the EPFL on “Hybrid, Metric – Topological, Mobile Robot Navigation”. He joined BlueBotics in 2001 and is CEO since year 2003.

Links:

• Download mp3 (26MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Les Voyages Extraordinaires
• Barnabé Theatre
• Nicola Tomatis’ Homepage
• Bluebotics SA

Latest News:

For more information on this week’s news, including Kawada Human Interactive Robot HIRO, as well as videos of ACE asking for directions to get around Munich and Metin Sitti’s micro-robots micro-robots playing soccer visit the Robots Forum.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (40:46)

Today we’ll be speaking about art, engineering and freedom with two robot-artists building gigantic robots. Our first guest is Theo Jansen, a physics major turned artist out of the Netherlands, about his walking beach creatures and how artists perceive robotics and build sculptures that can walk and sense their environments in a very different way than the robots we are used to. We then speak to Jaimie Mantzel who is an inventor in Vermont. Throughout his life, he’s been literally building his dreams with his own two hands, be it a home in the mountains or a giant 6-legged robot he plans to use to take him around.

Theo Jansen

Photo: Loek van der Klis

Theo Jansen is a “kinetic artist” best known for his Strandbeest, or beach animals, a new form of life that he is creating out of plastic yellow tubes. From their humble beginning as simple walking creatures with an ingenious leg system, Jansen has added an energy storage system made of plastic bottles, stakes that are hammered into the ground to protect them from the wind, and rudimentary water level sensors to protect the beach creatures from the sea. Jansen’s ultimate goal is to release his creations into the wild, to have them roam the beaches of his native Netherlands in herds and lead their own type of mechanical lives.

Words cannot describe Jansen’s work however, it is better to see it and experience it. Have a look at Loek van der Klis’s gallery of the beach animals or Jansen’s work featured in a BMW ad, shown below:

Jaimie Mantzel

Jaimie Mantzel’s adventures about building a giant 6-legged robot have been followed by the thousands on his website and youtube channel. He’s been building since he was a child, bringing his wildest inventions and dreams to life. Inspired by his talent, Mantzel started engineering at Brown University only to discover that math and physics were the rule rather than putting parts together. Instead of engineering, he diverted to art and unleashed his creativity. After university and years of work, he pursued his original vocation, building things. As a first step, he bought a piece of mountain in Vermont, USA and built a 4 story dome, his home. However, making small robots, and homes wasn’t enough and Mantzel is now building a giant spider-like robot which he can ride. Building this robot however seems to be a recursive process, since it requires building a workshop, which in turn brought him to dig a road. With all this finished, the robot is now 80% complete with an estimated finalization this summer. However, this interview is not only about making robots, but rather a different philosophy of life, freedom and art.

Links:

• Download mp3 (20.6MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Theo Jansen’s Homepage
• Strandbeest
• Loek van der Klis, Theo Jansen’s photographer
• Jamie Mantzel’s Homepage
• The Giant Robot Project

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for background information on this week’s news, including Pleo’s extinction, new inductees into CMU’s Robot Hall of Fame and the flying robot sniper system!

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (47:22)

In this episode we look at a subject that doesn’t always come to mind when you think of robots: love and relationships. Our first guest David Levy is the author of the book Love and Sex with Robots which has received wide media attention in the past year because it predicts that humans and robots will soon engage in genuine relationships, both physical and emotional.

We then speak to robot anthropologist Kathleen Richardson from Cambridge about her review of Levy’s book and her take on the meaning and likeliness of human-robot couples.

David Levy

David Levy is best known for his many years as a Scottish International Master of Chess, but it’s his recent doctoral thesis entitled “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners” at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands that has been getting him extensive media coverage lately. In an unusual combination of psychology, sociology and robotics Levy studied the dynamics of sex and relationships between humans and robots.
Levy tells us about his belief that robots will soon become a ubiquitous part of our society, and it will be common for people to have relationships and even marry their robotic partners. He explains the dynamics of relationships and sex as he sees them, and how they can be extended to relations with artificial partners or robots as they become more advanced and life-like. Finally he tells us in his own words what he hopes that people take away from his latest book Love and Sex with Robots.

Kathleen Richardson

Kathleen Richardson recently completed her doctoral studies in the department of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge during which she conducted fieldwork in robotic labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her thesis, “Annihilating Difference? Robots and Building Design at MIT”, examined the breakdown of boundaries between humans and non-humans through a study of robots. She has also given several talks on human-robot relationships and her work has been featured in the New York Times.

She’ll be presenting her review of David Levy’s book “Love + Sex with Robots” and will tell us why genuine love relationships between humans and robots are mostly unfounded speculations grounded in science fiction fantasies. She also discusses the attachment that humans can feel for “things” and the ambiguities that might raise.

Links:

• Download mp3 (25.2MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• David Levy on Wikipedia
• Love and Sex with Robots on Amazon
• Kathleen Richardson’s Webpage

Latest News:

For a video of the net launching security robot, a video of the MDS robot Nexi, and more on the functioning of the MCMS micro-grippers have a look at our forum!

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (32:45)

In this episode we talk to Raúl Ordóñez about his new Motoman Robotics Lab at the University of Dayton and the research he plans to do with his high profile industrial robots.

Raúl Ordóñez

Raúl Ordóñez is the director of the Nonlinear Control Lab and the newly created Motoman Robotics Lab at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

The Motoman Lab houses six state-of-the-art industrial robots, including a seven-axis, actuator-driven IA20 robot; a 15-axis, actuator-driven and human-like dual-arm DIA10 robot; a four-axis YS450 high-speed SCARA robot; two six-axis HP3 articulated robots and one HP3C six-axis, articulated robot with a compact controller.

Using these industrial robots, he will be looking to study visual servoing which would allow robots to control their movements based on visual feedback derived from cameras and maybe achieve tasks such as pole-balancing or even juggling. Such closed-loop control could lead to novel applications for the industry and robots that are able to perform in changing environments.

However, whenever the researchers have their backs turned, the robots come to life to perform multi-robot dances on the music of the Star Wars Movie or the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.

More generally, Ordóñez has been studying nonlinear control systems over the years, using several different test-beds including robot arms, helicopters, table top mobile robots and humanoids. He’ll be explaining what makes these systems non-linear and how this research allowed him to spend eight weeks this summer in the Boeing Welliver fellowship program, working on the control of planes.

Links:

• Download mp3 (20.1MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Raúl Ordóñez’ Homepage
• Motoman Robotics Lab
• Nonlinear Control Lab
• Motoman, Inc

Latest News:

For a summary of new robots at this year’s CES, a high-speed video of the flight of the .23 g ornithopter, and more information on the new exoskeleton have a look at our robot forum.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (36:53)

In the spirit of the holiday season, today’s episode is all about robots as toys. We speak to Mark Tilden, robot designer at WowWee Robotics, about designing robots for children, and what he thinks that scientists and researchers can learn from the toy industry. We are also holding a contest to give away his latest creation, the Femisapien, to one of our listeners, so read all about it below.

Mark Tilden

Mark Tilden is a true robotics lover, having built thousands of robots of all shapes and sizes in the last few decades. During the first part of his career he pioneered BEAM robotics (which stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics), a philosophy of building robots based on simple analog circuits and control instead of highly-complex systems, leading to low-cost and efficient systems. His bio-inspired bots manage to walk, crawl, roll or shake in complex environments using only a few transistors and basic sensors.

After working at the University of Waterloo in Canada and subsequently at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Tilden’s research eventually evolved into toy design when he was hired as a consultant for WowWee robotics in Hong Kong. His RoboSapien humanoid robot was controlled using only 28 transistors, and has sold in the millions. In our interview Tilden tells us about the difference between robotics in scientific research and in the toy industry. He also speaks about his latest creation, the Femisapien, and how he hopes to interest young girls in the field of robotics.

Christmas Contest: Win a WowWee FemiSapien

Guess what our Femisapien did on her first weekend in Switzerland for a chance to win one! Answers can be posted on our forum as a description, video, drawing or picture until Thursday the 1st of January noon (GMT). The closest guess wins and the most creative posts will be encouraged. A short video will be posted on the 2nd of January to reveal the winner and the correct answer.

Links:

• Download mp3 (19.8MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Mark Tilden on Wikipedia
• WowWee Robotics
• Robots Contest: Win a FemiSapien!

Further reading:

• JunkBots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels: Building Simple Robots With BEAM Technology by David Hrynkiw and Mark Tilden

Latest News:

Further information on the robots mentioned in this episode on the Robots robot forum, including robot actors, dancers and performers around the world, a web version of the “Japan: Robot Nation” show, and a list of our favorite last minute robot Christmas presents as well as other recommendations for the holiday season around the web.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (41:13)

This episode focuses on robot musicians, starting with our first guest Gil Weinberg who is the Director of Music Technology at Georgia Tech. With his wooden robot drummer Haile, he’s been evolving a new beat for the future of music. Our second guest, Atsuo Takanishi describes the Waseda Flutist, a robot that mimics human lungs, vocal chords, and lips to accurately play the flute.

Gil Weinberg

Prof. Gil Weinberg is the Director of Music Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his research has been bridging the musical and scientific worlds. From his PhD on, he’s been investigating the use of technology to expand musical expression, creativity, and learning and then bringing his ideas to the public with concerts, museum exhibitions and festivals. His most well know projects include the Beatbugs, electronic percussion instruments which when networked can allow newbie musicians, and even children, to collaborate and create living tunes. In another project, he’s working to create an Accessible Aquarium for the visually impaired to perceive the dynamics of life in a fish tank through auditory cues.

In this episode we concentrate on his latest compositions in music technology, Haile the robot drummer and Shimon the Marimba player.
Haile has also been touring the world, playing with human teachers and even evolving its own beats to reach robotic improvisation. Haile, is esthetically elegant with its wooden structure and can play faster than a human at a rate of 15 HZ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DYOqSTmGDA

Finally, Weinberg gives us his view on robot-musician interactions and the possible opening of a new music genre.

Atsuo Takanishi

Prof. Atsuo Takanishi has been designing robots for decades. From robots meant to help the medical industry, such as the Oral Rehabilitation Robot or the Clinical Jaw Movement Training Robot, to bio-mimetic robots such as the Emotion Expression Humanoid Robot or the Rat Robot, Takanishi’s lab excels in designing advanced and feature-rich platforms.

Takanishi Lab’s 15-year foray into musical robots has yielded the Anthropomorphic Flutist Robot, a robot capable of playing the flute at the level of an intermediate human flutist. Now in it’s 4th version, the robot mimics many of the mechanisms used by humans to play the flute, such as 3DOF lips, a vibrato and a complex mechanical tongue capable of advanced flute techniques such as the double tonguing technique. Check out the video below:

Links:

• Download mp3 (23.3MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Gil Weinberg’s homepage
• Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology
• Atsuo Takanishi’s homepage
• Takanishi Lab

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about
Evolution Robotics, iRobot’s Warrior 700 and the ethics of military robotics presented in the podcast.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

Link to audio file (32:40)

This episode covers android science and human-robot interactions with expert Hiroshi Ishiguro from Osaka. After the interview we feature the last installment of Jack Graham’s Selkies story, as well as a poll on the future of Androids.

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Hiroshi Ishiguro is Professor of the Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, and the group leader of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University.

If you’ve ever seen an Android robot in the news, it probably came out of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Starting from the robotic replicate of his then 5 year old daughter, Prof. Ishiguro then went on to model a female android after Ayako Fujii, the NHK news announcer. Finally, his latest robot Geminoid, which is a close copy of himself, is able to replace its creator in lectures and interviews.

His robots are highly actuated to give them human like facial expressions and reflexes. However, because the AI needed to interact in a human-like manner is not always advanced enough, Prof. Ishiguro has been looking to partially teleoperate his robots. Another approach investigated is to make his robots autonomous by having them perceive and react to their world thanks to networks of cameras and microphones.

Using these robots as a tool, Prof. Ishiguro has been exploring the field of Android Science, which looks at both the appearance and behavior of humanoid robots and their impact on human robot interactions. In particular, he is looking to verify the existence of the uncanny valley and to explore how to make androids which sufficiently resemble humans to be likable. On the more philosophical side, his androids open the door to understanding what human presence really means.

Survey

What is your take on androids? Will androids ever become indistinguishable from humans, both in looks and behaviour? Will they become unrecognizable like the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, or remain awkward like Data from Star Trek? Take the poll on the Robots forum!

Selkies

In this last installment of the Jack Graham’s Selkies story Mangan sets his Selkies free with a new schooling algorithm in a sea full of sharks. Will this new generation of robotic swimmers escape the jaws of the sharks? Tune in to find out…

Links:

• Download mp3 (22MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Hiroshi Ishiguro’s website
• Jack Graham’s website

Latest News:

As always, you can find more info on the robots mentioned in this episode on the robot forum, including what may be your future robot
housemaid, Australia’s anti IED robot SPIKER as well as videos and a slideshow of 25 years of CMU’s Field Robotics Center.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum