Robohub team members just returned from an exciting trip to Tokyo, where we attended the 2013 IROS conference and the concurrent iREX robot expo. With so many excellent projects, so many insightful lectures, and so many innovative robots — not to mention the many consecutive tracks! — it was hard for any one person to take it all in.

This month we asked our Robotics by Invitation experts to tell us about what stood out for them at this year’s event. Here’s what they have to say …

Andra Keay on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

For me, the highlight of IROS was the Uncanny Valley special session, although the sheer size of the IROS conference and the parallel iRex industrial and service robot expo also gave much food for thought. In particular, the new coworking robots from Kaweda and ABB look very interesting, but it’s clear that it still takes a long time for research to transition into robust applied robotics …

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Lynne Parker on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

I found the plenary speeches at IROS to be especially interesting.  Marc Raibert gave an entertaining talk on the robots being developed at Boston Dynamics. It’s encouraging to see that robots are becoming more and more robust, even for very challenging domains. Marc emphasized his company philosophy of pushing robots until they break, and then learning from those breakdowns to improve robot performance and reliability. Learning from failure is often overlooked in robotics, but is critically important for achieving usable systems.It’s also a good life lesson!

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Frank Tobe on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

Two images remain in my mind from IROS 2013 last week in Tokyo. The respect for Professor Emeritus Mori and his charting of the uncanny valley in relation to robotics, and the need for a Watson-type synthesis of all the robotics-related scientific papers produced every year. Let me explain …

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Have your own IROS highlights you’d like to share? Leave a comment below!

Masayuki Yamato gave an inspiring talk on transplantable cell sheets, and how they can help speed the recovery from many different diseases and surgeries. He showed, complete with surgery videos (not for the faint of heart!), how his cell sheet therapy technology can address many medical problems in the eye, heart, esophagus, etc.  While robotics isn’t a main part of the research, it is clear that robotics is an important tool for enabling these clinical applications that can change people’s lives.

In the third plenary, Tim Lüth challenged the audience to not automate for the sake of automation, but to show how automation can improve the outcome in people’s lives. He showed a variety of successful devices that his team has developed for medical applications, and made a compelling argument that new technologies can be more readily accepted if they are quickly designed and close in nature to the non-automated medical approaches. He argued that simpler robots that are custom designed and manufactured for a specific patient and/or procedure might revolutionize medicine in the future.

One last highlight to mention from IROS is the iREX robot exhibition. The sheer number of industrial and automation robots on display was so impressive. The robots were fast, precise, and made excellent use of advanced vision technologies. And that massive FANUC arm with a 1300+ kg payload capacity was a sight to behold! It puts a whole new twist on the issue of robot safety!

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Let me explain.

Almost all of the presentations at IROS were abstract and technical except for the discussion about Prof. Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory. First of all, he was there and described how he came to observe the uncanny valley under different situations and circumstances. Secondly, all of the presenters and audience were respectful of Prof. Mori’s work, his theory, and him as a person. Third, and most interesting to me, each of the other speakers in this special lecture session described how the uncanny valley theory was relevant in different settings and disciplines. In art, philosophy, psychology — in the works of David Hanson and Hiroshi Ishiguro (both of whom were there) — as well as in medicine, prosthetics and in robotics in general. To me it was a reminder that robotics crosses sciences and connects with humans in many different forms, and this tribute presentation at IROS brought the personal relationships and the breadth of their reach to the forefront, and away from the abstract, theoretical and mechanical side of IROS.

In this video by IEEE/Spectrum, filmed outside the door of the room where the session was held, one can clearly see the multi-science and psychological/philosophical aspects of the theory:

Worse, 90% of scientists don’t even know whether their research is “new” or not.

Ever since I learned of the IBM Watson Jeopardy project my mind has been fascinated with possibilities for practical applications. IBM is on that trail as well and is using Watson to help with medical diagnoses and legal research and briefing. My idea is to get the NSF and IEEE (and other organizations) to commission a Watson project to synthesize robotics and AI-related science papers into a meaningful resource for all to use. At present, there are so many papers published that a researcher cannot possibly read them all. Consequently we don’t even know what we already know. But with Watson, we could know — and we could redirect research activities truly into the unknown without reinventing things over and over.

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The Uncanny Valley Revisited was a special tribute to Emeritus Professor Masahiro Mori, organized by co-chairs Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley and Minoru Asada, Osaka U. Masahiro Mori’s 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, described a phenomenon of unease that is felt as animated beings become more similar to real beings.

Labelled the ‘uncanny valley‘ in reference to Freud’s concept of the Uncanny (Unheimlich), Mori’s work first appeared in translation in 1978 and proceeded to be broadly adopted in the art world and cultural/social sciences. Astonishingly, Mori believes that robotics only noticed his concept in the mid 2000s, when papers citing the uncanny valley were presented at HRI conferences. Elizabeth Jocum from Aarlsberg U was one of several to speakers to point to the early and deep impact of Mori’s idea in other disciplines, including the arts.

It’s apt that the art world was first to appreciate the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, as Freud himself said that the uncanny is the only thing more strongly felt in art than in life. It’s also a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon, as other speakers attested. Marek Michalowski discussed the impact that animators have had on the field of human robot interaction. After all, animation has been a strong field for over 100 years and is primarily concerned with creating a compelling imitation of life. In the process, animators utilize much more than just the static superficial appearance of a character. Sound, perspective, staging, background, color and timing all enhance or destroy the illusion of life.

Freud’s original concept of the uncanny is also more closely aligned to general anthropomorphism, where the impact is less on the closeness of appearance to human and more on the human ability to ascribe emotion, agency and symbolism to logical, mechanical events or objects.

Mori intended for his theory to be a simple warning for robot designers to consider the possible affect of their constructions, and he calls for robots to be made less life-like or human-like, as he wishes for technology to have positive and not negative contributions to the world.

Robots are already out there in the world, and I think we are frequently unprepared for the range of anthropomorphism that even unlikely looking robots can attract. This is well described in the work of Nass and Reeves in The Media Equation and leads to the ‘new ontological status’ hypothesis put forward by Kahn Jr, Reichardt, Kanda and Ishiguro. Generally speaking, I find that roboticists oversimplify the uncanny valley hypothesis. Mori himself describes it as a clue rather than a theory, so it was refreshing to hear so many great speakers give it much needed dynamism and depth.

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