Tag Archives: general

#437707 Video Friday: This Robot Will Restock ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Online Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online Conference]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nev., USA
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online Event]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Tokyo startup Telexistence has recently unveiled a new robot called the Model-T, an advanced teleoperated humanoid that can use tools and grasp a wide range of objects. Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart plans to test the Model-T to restock shelves in up to 20 stores by 2022. In the trial, a human “pilot” will operate the robot remotely, handling items like beverage bottles, rice balls, sandwiches, and bento boxes.

With Model-T and AWP, FamilyMart and TX aim to realize a completely new store operation by remoteizing and automating the merchandise restocking work, which requires a large number of labor-hours. As a result, stores can operate with less number of workers and enable them to recruit employees regardless of the store’s physical location.

[ Telexistence ]

Quadruped dance-off should be a new robotics competition at IROS or ICRA.

I dunno though, that moonwalk might keep Spot in the lead…

[ Unitree ]

Through a hybrid of simulation and real-life training, this air muscle robot is learning to play table tennis.

Table tennis requires to execute fast and precise motions. To gain precision it is necessary to explore in this high-speed regimes, however, exploration can be safety-critical at the same time. The combination of RL and muscular soft robots allows to close this gap. While robots actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles generate high forces that are required for e.g. smashing, they also offer safe execution of explosive motions due to antagonistic actuation.

To enable practical training without real balls, we introduce Hybrid Sim and Real Training (HYSR) that replays prerecorded real balls in simulation while executing actions on the real system. In this manner, RL can learn the challenging motor control of the PAM-driven robot while executing ~15000 hitting motions.

[ Max Planck Institute ]

Thanks Dieter!

Anthony Cowley wrote in to share his recent thesis work on UPSLAM, a fast and lightweight SLAM technique that records data in panoramic depth images (just PNGs) that are easy to visualize and even easier to share between robots, even on low-bandwidth networks.

[ UPenn ]

Thanks Anthony!

GITAI’s G1 is the space dedicated general-purpose robot. G1 robot will enable automation of various tasks internally & externally on space stations and for lunar base development.

[ Gitai ]

The University of Michigan has a fancy new treadmill that’s built right into the floor, which proves to be a bit much for Mini Cheetah.

But Cassie Blue won’t get stuck on no treadmill! She goes for a 0.3 mile walk across campus, which ends when a certain someone ran the gantry into Cassie Blue’s foot.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Some serious quadruped research going on at UT Austin Human Centered Robotics Lab.

[ HCRL ]

Will Burrard-Lucas has spent lockdown upgrading his slightly indestructible BeetleCam wildlife photographing robot.

[ Will Burrard-Lucas ]

Teleoperated surgical robots are becoming commonplace in operating rooms, but many are massive (sometimes taking up an entire room) and are difficult to manipulate, especially if a complication arises and the robot needs to removed from the patient. A new collaboration between the Wyss Institute, Harvard University, and Sony Corporation has created the mini-RCM, a surgical robot the size of a tennis ball that weighs as much as a penny, and performed significantly better than manually operated tools in delicate mock-surgical procedures. Importantly, its small size means it is more comparable to the human tissues and structures on which it operates, and it can easily be removed by hand if needed.

[ Harvard Wyss ]

Yaskawa appears to be working on a robot that can scan you with a temperature gun and then jam a mask on your face?

[ Motoman ]

Maybe we should just not have people working in mines anymore, how about that?

[ Exyn ]

Many current human-robot interactive systems tend to use accurate and fast – but also costly – actuators and tracking systems to establish working prototypes that are safe to use and deploy for user studies. This paper presents an embedded framework to build a desktop space for human-robot interaction, using an open-source robot arm, as well as two RGB cameras connected to a Raspberry Pi-based controller that allow a fast yet low-cost object tracking and manipulation in 3D. We show in our evaluations that this facilitates prototyping a number of systems in which user and robot arm can commonly interact with physical objects.

[ Paper ]

IBM Research is proud to host professor Yoshua Bengio — one of the world’s leading experts in AI — in a discussion of how AI can contribute to the fight against COVID-19.

[ IBM Research ]

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Professor Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, the Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, of the Department of Systems Innovation, in the Graduate School of Engineering Science, at Osaka University, Japan.

[ ideaXme ]

A CVPR talk from Stanford’s Chelsea Finn on “Generalization in Visuomotor Learning.”

[ Stanford ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437624 AI-Powered Drone Learns Extreme ...

Quadrotors are among the most agile and dynamic machines ever created. In the hands of a skilled human pilot, they can do some astonishing series of maneuvers. And while autonomous flying robots have been getting better at flying dynamically in real-world environments, they still haven’t demonstrated the same level of agility of manually piloted ones.

Now researchers from the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, in collaboration with Intel, have developed a neural network training method that “enables an autonomous quadrotor to fly extreme acrobatic maneuvers with only onboard sensing and computation.” Extreme.

There are two notable things here: First, the quadrotor can do these extreme acrobatics outdoors without any kind of external camera or motion-tracking system to help it out (all sensing and computing is onboard). Second, all of the AI training is done in simulation, without the need for an additional simulation-to-real-world (what researchers call “sim-to-real”) transfer step. Usually, a sim-to-real transfer step means putting your quadrotor into one of those aforementioned external tracking systems, so that it doesn’t completely bork itself while trying to reconcile the differences between the simulated world and the real world, where, as the researchers wrote in a paper describing their system, “even tiny mistakes can result in catastrophic outcomes.”

To enable “zero-shot” sim-to-real transfer, the neural net training in simulation uses an expert controller that knows exactly what’s going on to teach a “student controller” that has much less perfect knowledge. That is, the simulated sensory input that the student ends up using as it learns to follow the expert has been abstracted to present the kind of imperfect, imprecise data it’s going to encounter in the real world. This can involve things like abstracting away the image part of the simulation until you’d have no way of telling the difference between abstracted simulation and abstracted reality, which is what allows the system to make that sim-to-real leap.

The simulation environment that the researchers used was Gazebo, slightly modified to better simulate quadrotor physics. Meanwhile, over in reality, a custom 1.5-kilogram quadrotor with a 4:1 thrust to weight ratio performed the physical experiments, using only a Nvidia Jetson TX2 computing board and an Intel RealSense T265, a dual fisheye camera module optimized for V-SLAM. To challenge the learning system, it was trained to perform three acrobatic maneuvers plus a combo of all of them:

Image: University of Zurich/ETH Zurich/Intel

Reference trajectories for acrobatic maneuvers. Top row, from left: Power Loop, Barrel Roll, and Matty Flip. Bottom row: Combo.

All of these maneuvers require high accelerations of up to 3 g’s and careful control, and the Matty Flip is particularly challenging, at least for humans, because the whole thing is done while the drone is flying backwards. Still, after just a few hours of training in simulation, the drone was totally real-world competent at these tricks, and could even extrapolate a little bit to perform maneuvers that it was not explicitly trained on, like doing multiple loops in a row. Where humans still have the advantage over drones is (as you might expect since we’re talking about robots) is quickly reacting to novel or unexpected situations. And when you’re doing this sort of thing outdoors, novel and unexpected situations are everywhere, from a gust of wind to a jealous bird.

For more details, we spoke with Antonio Loquercio from the University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception Group.

IEEE Spectrum: Can you explain how the abstraction layer interfaces with the simulated sensors to enable effective sim-to-real transfer?

Antonio Loquercio: The abstraction layer applies a specific function to the raw sensor information. Exactly the same function is applied to the real and simulated sensors. The result of the function, which is “abstracted sensor measurements,” makes simulated and real observation of the same scene similar. For example, suppose we have a sequence of simulated and real images. We can very easily tell apart the real from the simulated ones given the difference in rendering. But if we apply the abstraction function of “feature tracks,” which are point correspondences in time, it becomes very difficult to tell which are the simulated and real feature tracks, since point correspondences are independent of the rendering. This applies for humans as well as for neural networks: Training policies on raw images gives low sim-to-real transfer (since images are too different between domains), while training on the abstracted images has high transfer abilities.

How useful is visual input from a camera like the Intel RealSense T265 for state estimation during such aggressive maneuvers? Would using an event camera substantially improve state estimation?

Our end-to-end controller does not require a state estimation module. It shares however some components with traditional state estimation pipelines, specifically the feature extractor and the inertial measurement unit (IMU) pre-processing and integration function. The input of the neural networks are feature tracks and integrated IMU measurements. When looking at images with low features (for example when the camera points to the sky), the neural net will mainly rely on IMU. When more features are available, the network uses to correct the accumulated drift from IMU. Overall, we noticed that for very short maneuvers IMU measurements were sufficient for the task. However, for longer ones, visual information was necessary to successfully address the IMU drift and complete the maneuver. Indeed, visual information reduces the odds of a crash by up to 30 percent in the longest maneuvers. We definitely think that event camera can improve even more the current approach since they could provide valuable visual information during high speed.

“The Matty Flip is probably one of the maneuvers that our approach can do very well … It is super challenging for humans, since they don’t see where they’re going and have problems in estimating their speed. For our approach the maneuver is no problem at all, since we can estimate forward velocities as well as backward velocities.”
—Antonio Loquercio, University of Zurich

You describe being able to train on “maneuvers that stretch the abilities of even expert human pilots.” What are some examples of acrobatics that your drones might be able to do that most human pilots would not be capable of?

The Matty Flip is probably one of the maneuvers that our approach can do very well, but human pilots find very challenging. It basically entails doing a high speed power loop by always looking backward. It is super challenging for humans, since they don’t see where they’re going and have problems in estimating their speed. For our approach the maneuver is no problem at all, since we can estimate forward velocities as well as backward velocities.

What are the limits to the performance of this system?

At the moment the main limitation is the maneuver duration. We never trained a controller that could perform maneuvers longer than 20 seconds. In the future, we plan to address this limitation and train general controllers which can fly in that agile way for significantly longer with relatively small drift. In this way, we could start being competitive against human pilots in drone racing competitions.

Can you talk about how the techniques developed here could be applied beyond drone acrobatics?

The current approach allows us to do acrobatics and agile flight in free space. We are now working to perform agile flight in cluttered environments, which requires a higher degree of understanding of the surrounding with respect to this project. Drone acrobatics is of course only an example application. We selected it because it makes a stress test of the controller performance. However, several other applications which require fast and agile flight can benefit from our approach. Examples are delivery (we want our Amazon packets always faster, don’t we?), search and rescue, or inspection. Going faster allows us to cover more space in less time, saving battery costs. Indeed, agile flight has very similar battery consumption of slow hovering for an autonomous drone.

“Deep Drone Acrobatics,” by Elia Kaufmann, Antonio Loquercio, René Ranftl, Matthias Müller, Vladlen Koltun, and Davide Scaramuzza from the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab, was presented at RSS 2020. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437590 Why We Need a Robot Registry


I have a confession to make: A robot haunts my nightmares. For me, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot is 32.5 kilograms (71.1 pounds) of pure terror. It can climb stairs. It can open doors. Seeing it in a video cannot prepare you for the moment you cross paths on a trade-show floor. Now that companies can buy a Spot robot for US $74,500, you might encounter Spot anywhere.

Spot robots now patrol public parks in Singapore to enforce social distancing during the pandemic. They meet with COVID-19 patients at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital so that doctors can conduct remote consultations. Imagine coming across Spot while walking in the park or returning to your car in a parking garage. Wouldn’t you want to know why this hunk of metal is there and who’s operating it? Or at least whom to call to report a malfunction?

Robots are becoming more prominent in daily life, which is why I think governments need to create national registries of robots. Such a registry would let citizens and law enforcement look up the owner of any roaming robot, as well as learn that robot’s purpose. It’s not a far-fetched idea: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration already has a registry for drones.

Governments could create national databases that require any companies operating robots in public spaces to report the robot make and model, its purpose, and whom to contact if the robot breaks down or causes problems. To allow anyone to use the database, all public robots would have an easily identifiable marker or model number on their bodies. Think of it as a license plate or pet microchip, but for bots.

There are some smaller-scale registries today. San Jose’s Department of Transportation (SJDOT), for example, is working with Kiwibot, a delivery robot manufacturer, to get real-time data from the robots as they roam the city’s streets. The Kiwibots report their location to SJDOT using the open-source Mobility Data Specification, which was originally developed by Los Angeles to track Bird scooters.

Real-time location reporting makes sense for Kiwibots and Spots wandering the streets, but it’s probably overkill for bots confined to cleaning floors or patrolling parking lots. That said, any robots that come in contact with the general public should clearly provide basic credentials and a way to hold their operators accountable. Given that many robots use cameras, people may also be interested in looking up who’s collecting and using that data.

I starting thinking about robot registries after Spot became available in June for anyone to purchase. The idea gained specificity after listening to Andra Keay, founder and managing director at Silicon Valley Robotics, discuss her five rules of ethical robotics at an Arm event in October. I had already been thinking that we needed some way to track robots, but her suggestion to tie robot license plates to a formal registry made me realize that people also need a way to clearly identify individual robots.

Keay pointed out that in addition to sating public curiosity and keeping an eye on robots that could cause harm, a registry could also track robots that have been hacked. For example, robots at risk of being hacked and running amok could be required to report their movements to a database, even if they’re typically restricted to a grocery store or warehouse. While we’re at it, Spot robots should be required to have sirens, because there’s no way I want one of those sneaking up on me.

This article appears in the December 2020 print issue as “Who’s Behind That Robot?” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437564 How We Won the DARPA SubT Challenge: ...

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent positions of IEEE or its organizational units.​

“Do you smell smoke?” It was three days before the qualification deadline for the Virtual Tunnel Circuit of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Track, and our team was barrelling through last-minute updates to our robot controllers in a small conference room at the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) offices in Ann Arbor, Mich. That’s when we noticed the smell. We’d assumed that one of the benefits of entering a virtual disaster competition was that we wouldn’t be exposed to any actual disasters, but equipment in the basement of the building MTRI shares had started to smoke. We evacuated. The fire department showed up. And as soon as we could, the team went back into the building, hunkered down, and tried to make up for the unexpected loss of several critical hours.

Team BARCS joins the SubT Virtual Track
The smoke incident happened more than a year after we first learned of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. DARPA announced SubT early in 2018, and at that time, we were interested in building internal collaborations on multi-agent autonomy problems, and SubT seemed like the perfect opportunity. Though a few of us had backgrounds in robotics, the majority of our team was new to the field. We knew that submitting a proposal as a largely non-traditional robotics team from an organization not known for research in robotics was a risk. However, the Virtual Track gave us the opportunity to focus on autonomy and multi-agent teaming strategies, areas requiring skill in asynchronous computing and sensor data processing that are strengths of our Institute. The prevalence of open source code, small inexpensive platforms, and customizable sensors has provided the opportunity for experts in fields other than robotics to apply novel approaches to robotics problems. This is precisely what makes the Virtual Track of SubT appealing to us, and since starting SubT, autonomy has developed into a significant research thrust for our Institute. Plus, robots are fun!

After many hours of research, discussion, and collaboration, we submitted our proposal early in 2018. And several months later, we found out that we had won a contract and became a funded team (Team BARCS) in the SubT Virtual Track. Now we needed to actually make our strategy work for the first SubT Tunnel Circuit competition, taking place in August of 2019.

Building a team of virtual robots
A natural approach to robotics competitions like SubT is to start with the question of “what can X-type robot do” and then build a team and strategy around individual capabilities. A particular challenge for the SubT Virtual Track is that we can’t design our own systems; instead, we have to choose from a predefined set of simulated robots and sensors that DARPA provides, based on the real robots used by Systems Track teams. Our approach is to look at what a team of robots can do together, determining experimentally what the best team configuration is for each environment. By the final competition, ideally we will be demonstrating the value of combining platforms across multiple Systems Track teams into a single Virtual Track team. Each of the robot configurations in the competition has an associated cost, and team size is constrained by a total cost. This provides another impetus for limiting dependence on complex sensor packages, though our ranging preference is 3D lidar, which is the most expensive sensor!

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

The teams can rely on realistic physics and sensors but they start off with no maps of any kind, so the focus is on developing autonomous exploratory behavior, navigation methods, and object recognition for their simulated robots.

One of the frequent questions we receive about the Virtual Track is if it’s like a video game. While it may look similar on the surface, everything under the hood in a video game is designed to service the game narrative and play experience, not require novel research in AI and autonomy. The purpose of simulations, on the other hand, is to include full physics and sensor models (including noise and errors) to provide a testbed for prototyping and developing solutions to those real-world challenges. We are starting with realistic physics and sensors but no maps of any kind, so the focus is on developing autonomous exploratory behavior, navigation methods, and object recognition for our simulated robots.

Though the simulation is more like real life than a video game, it is not real life. Due to occasional software bugs, there are still non-physical events, like the robots falling through an invisible hole in the world or driving through a rock instead of over it or flipping head over heels when driving over a tiny lip between world tiles. These glitches, while sometimes frustrating, still allow the SubT Virtual platform to be realistic enough to support rapid prototyping of controller modules that will transition straightforwardly onto hardware, closing the loop between simulation and real-world robots.

Full autonomy for DARPA-hard scenarios
The Virtual Track requirement that the robotic agents be fully autonomous, rather than have a human supervisor, is a significant distinction between the Systems and Virtual Tracks of SubT. Our solutions must be hardened against software faults caused by things like missing and bad data since our robots can’t turn to us for help. In order for a team of robots to complete this objective reliably with no human-in-the-loop, all of the internal systems, from perception to navigation to control to actuation to communications, must be able to autonomously identify and manage faults and failures anywhere in the control chain.

The communications limitations in subterranean environments (both real and virtual) mean that we need to keep the amount of information shared between robots low, while making the usability of that information for joint decision-making high. This goal has guided much of our design for autonomous navigation and joint search strategy for our team. For example, instead of sharing the full SLAM map of the environment, our agents only share a simplified graphical representation of the space, along with data about frontiers it has not yet explored, and are able to merge its information with the graphs generated by other agents. The merged graph can then be used for planning and navigation without having full knowledge of the detailed 3D map.

The Virtual Track requires that the robotic agents be fully autonomous. With no human-in-the-loop, all of the internal systems, from perception to navigation to control to actuation to communications, must be able to identify and manage faults and failures anywhere in the control chain.

Since the objective of the SubT program is to advance the state-of-the-art in rapid autonomous exploration and mapping of subterranean environments by robots, our first software design choices focused on the mapping task. The SubT virtual environments are sufficiently rich as to provide interesting problems in building so-called costmaps that accurately separate obstructions that are traversable (like ramps) from legitimately impassible obstructions. An extra complication we discovered in the first course, which took place in mining tunnels, was that the angle of the lowest beam of the lidar was parallel to the down ramps in the tunnel environment, so they could not “see” the ground (or sometimes even obstructions on the ramp) until they got close enough to the lip of the ramp to receive lidar reflections off the bottom of the ramp. In this case, we had to not only change the costmap to convince the robot that there was safe ground to reach over the lip of the ramp, but also had to change the path planner to get the robot to proceed with caution onto the top of the ramp in case there were previously unseen obstructions on the ramp.

In addition to navigation in the costmaps, the robot must be able to generate its own goals to navigate to. This is what produces exploratory behavior when there is no map to start with. SLAM is used to generate a detailed map of the environment explored by a single robot—the space it has probed with its sensors. From the sensor data, we are able to extract information about the interior space of the environment while looking for holes in the data, to determine things like whether the current tunnel continues or ends, or how many tunnels meet at an intersection. Once we have some understanding of the interior space, we can place navigation goals in that space. These goals naturally update as the robot traverses the tunnel, allowing the entire space to be explored.

Sending our robots into the virtual unknown
The solutions for the Virtual Track competitions are tested by DARPA in multiple sequestered runs across many environments for each Circuit in the month prior to the Systems Track competition. We must wait until the joint award ceremony at the conclusion of the Systems Track to find out the results, and we are completely in the dark about placings before the awards are announced. It’s nerve-wracking! The challenges of the worlds used in the Circuit events are also hand-designed, so features of the worlds we use for development could be combined in ways we have not anticipated—it’s always interesting to see what features were prioritized after the event. We test everything in our controllers well enough to feel confident that we at least are submitting something reasonably stable and broadly capable, and once the solution is in, we can’t really do anything other than “let go” and get back to work on the next phase of development. Maybe it’s somewhat like sending your kid to college: “we did our best to prepare you for this world, little bots. Go do good.”

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

The first SubT competition was the Tunnel Circuit, featuring a labyrinthine environment that simulated human-engineered tunnels, including hazards such as vertical shafts and rubble.

The first competition was the Tunnel Circuit, in October 2019. This environment models human-engineered tunnels. Two substantial challenges in this environment were vertical shafts and rubble. Our team accrued 21 points over 15 competition runs in five separate tunnel environments for a second place finish, behind Team Coordinated Robotics.

The next phase of the SubT virtual competition was the Urban Circuit. Much of the difference between our Tunnel and Urban Circuit results came down to thorough testing to identify failure modes and implementations of checks and data filtering for fault tolerance. For example, in the SLAM nodes run by a single robot, the coordinates of the most recent sensor data are changed multiple times during processing and integration into the current global 3D map of the “visited” environment stored by that robot. If there is lag in IMU or clock data, the observation may be temporarily registered at a default location that is very far from the actual position. Since most of our decision processes for exploration are downstream from SLAM, this can cause faulty or impossible goals to be generated, and the robots then spend inordinate amounts of time trying to drive through walls. We updated our method to add a check to see if the new map position has jumped a far distance from the prior map position, and if so, we threw that data out.

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

In open spaces like the rooms in the Urban circuit, we adjusted our approach to exploration through graph generation to allow the robots to accurately identify viable routes while helping to prevent forays off platform edges.

Our approach to exploration through graph generation based on identification of interior spaces allowed us to thoroughly explore the centers of rooms, although we did have to make some changes from the Tunnel circuit to achieve that. In the Tunnel circuit, we used a simplified graph of the environment based on landmarks like intersections. The advantage of this approach is that it is straightforward for two robots to compare how the graphs of the space they explored individually overlap. In open spaces like the rooms in the Urban circuit, we chose to instead use a more complex, less directly comparable graph structure based on the individual robot’s trajectory. This allowed the robots to accurately identify viable routes between features like subway station platforms and subway tracks, as well as to build up the navigation space for room interiors, while helping to prevent forays off the platform edges. Frontier information is also integrated into the graph, providing a uniform data structure for both goal selection and route planning.

The results are in!
The award ceremony for the Urban Circuit was held concurrently with the Systems Track competition awards this past February in Washington State. We sent a team representative to participate in the Technical Interchange Meeting and present the approach for our team, and the rest of us followed along from our office space on the DARPAtv live stream. While we were confident in our solution, we had also been tracking the online leaderboard and knew our competitors were going to be submitting strong solutions. Since the competition environments are hand-designed, there are always novel challenges that could be presented in these environments as well. We knew we would put up a good fight, but it was very exciting to see BARCS appear in first place!

Any time we implement a new module in our control system, there is a lot of parameter tuning that has to happen to produce reliably good autonomous behavior. In the Urban Circuit, we did not sufficiently test some parameter values in our exploration modules. The effect of this was that the robots only chose to go down small hallways after they explored everything else in their environment, which meant very often they ran out of time and missed a lot of small rooms. This may be the biggest source of lost points for us in the Urban Circuit. One of our major plans going forward from the Urban Circuit is to integrate more sophisticated node selection methods, which can help our robots more intelligently prioritize which frontier nodes to visit. By going through all three Circuit challenges, we will learn how to appropriately add weights to the frontiers based on features of the individual environments. For the Final Challenge, when all three Circuit environments will be combined into large systems, we plan to implement adaptive controllers that will identify their environments and use the appropriate optimized parameters for that environment. In this way, we expect our agents to be able to (for example) prioritize hallways and other small spaces in Urban environments, and perhaps prioritize large openings over small in the Cave environments, if the small openings end up being treacherous overall.

Next for our team: Cave Circuit
Coming up next for Team BARCS is the Virtual Cave Circuit. We are in the middle of testing our hypothesis that our controller will transition from UGVs to UAVs and developing strategies for refining our solution to handle Cave Circuit environmental hazards. The UAVs have a shorter battery life than the UGVs, so executing a joint exploration strategy will also be a high priority for this event, as will completing our work on graph sharing and merging, which will give our robot teams more sophisticated options for navigation and teamwork. We’re reaching a threshold in development where we can start increasing the “smarts” of the robots, which we anticipate will be critical for the final competition, where all of the challenges of SubT will be combined to push the limits of innovation. The Cave Circuit will also have new environmental challenges to tackle: dynamic features such as rock falls have been added, which will block previously accessible passages in the cave environment. We think our controllers are well-poised to handle this new challenge, and we’re eager to find out if that’s the case.

As of now, the biggest worries for us are time and team composition. The Cave Circuit deadline has been postponed to October 15 due to COVID-19 delays, with the award ceremony in mid-November, but there have also been several very compelling additions to the testbed that we would like to experiment with before submission, including droppable networking ‘breadcrumbs’ and new simulated platforms. There are design trade-offs when balancing general versus specialist approaches to the controllers for these robots—since we are adding UAVs to our team for the first time, there are new decisions that will have to be made. For example, the UAVs can ascend into vertical spaces, but only have a battery life of 20 minutes. The UGVs by contrast have 90 minute battery life. One of our strategies is to do an early return to base with one or more agents to buy down risk on making any artifact reports at all for the run, hedging against our other robots not making it back in time, a lesson learned from the Tunnel Circuit. Should a UAV take on this role, or is it better to have them explore deeper into the environment and instead report their artifacts to a UGV or network node, which comes with its own risks? Testing and experimentation to determine the best options takes time, which is always a worry when preparing for a competition! We also anticipate new competitors and stiffer competition all around.

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

Team BARCS has now a year to prepare for the final DARPA SubT Challenge event, expected to take place in late 2021.

Going forward from the Cave Circuit, we will have a year to prepare for the final DARPA SubT Challenge event, expected to take place in late 2021. What we are most excited about is increasing the level of intelligence of the agents in their teamwork and joint exploration of the environment. Since we will have (hopefully) built up robust approaches to handling each of the specific types of environments in the Tunnel, Urban, and Cave circuits, we will be aiming to push the limits on collaboration and efficiency among the agents in our team. We view this as a central research contribution of the Virtual Track to the Subterranean Challenge because intelligent, adaptive, multi-robot collaboration is an upcoming stage of development for integration of robots into our lives.

The Subterranean Challenge Virtual Track gives us a bridge for transitioning our more abstract research ideas and algorithms relevant to this degree of autonomy and collaboration onto physical systems, and exploring the tangible outcomes of implementing our work in the real world. And the next time there’s an incident in the basement of our building, the robots (and humans) of Team BARCS will be ready to respond.

Richard Chase, Ph.D., P.E., is a research scientist at Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) and has 20 years of experience developing robotics and cyber physical systems in areas from remote sensing to autonomous vehicles. At MTRI, he works on a variety of topics such as swarm autonomy, human-swarm teaming, and autonomous vehicles. His research interests are the intersection of design, robotics, and embedded systems.

Sarah Kitchen is a Ph.D. mathematician working as a research scientist and an AI/Robotics focus area leader at MTRI. Her research interests include intelligent autonomous agents and multi-agent collaborative teams, as well as applications of autonomous robots to sensing systems.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. HR001118C0124 and is released under Distribution Statement (Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437477 If a Robot Is Conscious, Is It OK to ...

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man,” Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for research purposes unless Captain Picard can argue that Data deserves the same rights as a human being. Naturally the question arises: What is the basis upon which something has rights? What gives an entity moral standing?

The philosopher Peter Singer argues that creatures that can feel pain or suffer have a claim to moral standing. He argues that nonhuman animals have moral standing, since they can feel pain and suffer. Limiting it to people would be a form of speciesism, something akin to racism and sexism.

Without endorsing Singer’s line of reasoning, we might wonder if it can be extended further to an android robot like Data. It would require that Data can either feel pain or suffer. And how you answer that depends on how you understand consciousness and intelligence.

As real artificial intelligence technology advances toward Hollywood’s imagined versions, the question of moral standing grows more important. If AIs have moral standing, philosophers like me reason, it could follow that they have a right to life. That means you cannot simply dismantle them, and might also mean that people shouldn’t interfere with their pursuing their goals.

Two Flavors of Intelligence and a Test
IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine was successfully trained to beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov. But it could not do anything else. This computer had what’s called domain-specific intelligence.

On the other hand, there’s the kind of intelligence that allows for the ability to do a variety of things well. It is called domain-general intelligence. It’s what lets people cook, ski, and raise children—tasks that are related, but also very different.

Artificial general intelligence, AGI, is the term for machines that have domain-general intelligence. Arguably no machine has yet demonstrated that kind of intelligence. This summer, a startup called OpenAI released a new version of its Generative Pre-Training language model. GPT-3 is a natural language processing system, trained to read and write so that it can be easily understood by people.

It drew immediate notice, not just because of its impressive ability to mimic stylistic flourishes and put together plausible content, but also because of how far it had come from a previous version. Despite this impressive performance, GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything beyond how to string words together in various ways. AGI remains quite far off.

Named after pioneering AI researcher Alan Turing, the Turing test helps determine when an AI is intelligent. Can a person conversing with a hidden AI tell whether it’s an AI or a human being? If he can’t, then for all practical purposes, the AI is intelligent. But this test says nothing about whether the AI might be conscious.

Two Kinds of Consciousness
There are two parts to consciousness. First, there’s the what-it’s-like-for-me aspect of an experience, the sensory part of consciousness. Philosophers call this phenomenal consciousness. It’s about how you experience a phenomenon, like smelling a rose or feeling pain.

In contrast, there’s also access consciousness. That’s the ability to report, reason, behave, and act in a coordinated and responsive manner to stimuli based on goals. For example, when I pass the soccer ball to my friend making a play on the goal, I am responding to visual stimuli, acting from prior training, and pursuing a goal determined by the rules of the game. I make the pass automatically, without conscious deliberation, in the flow of the game.

Blindsight nicely illustrates the difference between the two types of consciousness. Someone with this neurological condition might report, for example, that they cannot see anything in the left side of their visual field. But if asked to pick up a pen from an array of objects in the left side of their visual field, they can reliably do so. They cannot see the pen, yet they can pick it up when prompted—an example of access consciousness without phenomenal consciousness.

Data is an android. How do these distinctions play out with respect to him?

The Data Dilemma
The android Data demonstrates that he is self-aware in that he can monitor whether or not, for example, he is optimally charged or there is internal damage to his robotic arm.

Data is also intelligent in the general sense. He does a lot of distinct things at a high level of mastery. He can fly the Enterprise, take orders from Captain Picard and reason with him about the best path to take.

He can also play poker with his shipmates, cook, discuss topical issues with close friends, fight with enemies on alien planets, and engage in various forms of physical labor. Data has access consciousness. He would clearly pass the Turing test.

However, Data most likely lacks phenomenal consciousness—he does not, for example, delight in the scent of roses or experience pain. He embodies a supersized version of blindsight. He’s self-aware and has access consciousness—can grab the pen—but across all his senses he lacks phenomenal consciousness.

Now, if Data doesn’t feel pain, at least one of the reasons Singer offers for giving a creature moral standing is not fulfilled. But Data might fulfill the other condition of being able to suffer, even without feeling pain. Suffering might not require phenomenal consciousness the way pain essentially does.

For example, what if suffering were also defined as the idea of being thwarted from pursuing a just cause without causing harm to others? Suppose Data’s goal is to save his crewmate, but he can’t reach her because of damage to one of his limbs. Data’s reduction in functioning that keeps him from saving his crewmate is a kind of nonphenomenal suffering. He would have preferred to save the crewmate, and would be better off if he did.

In the episode, the question ends up resting not on whether Data is self-aware—that is not in doubt. Nor is it in question whether he is intelligent—he easily demonstrates that he is in the general sense. What is unclear is whether he is phenomenally conscious. Data is not dismantled because, in the end, his human judges cannot agree on the significance of consciousness for moral standing.

Should an AI Get Moral Standing?
Data is kind; he acts to support the well-being of his crewmates and those he encounters on alien planets. He obeys orders from people and appears unlikely to harm them, and he seems to protect his own existence. For these reasons he appears peaceful and easier to accept into the realm of things that have moral standing.

But what about Skynet in the Terminator movies? Or the worries recently expressed by Elon Musk about AI being more dangerous than nukes, and by Stephen Hawking on AI ending humankind?

Human beings don’t lose their claim to moral standing just because they act against the interests of another person. In the same way, you can’t automatically say that just because an AI acts against the interests of humanity or another AI it doesn’t have moral standing. You might be justified in fighting back against an AI like Skynet, but that does not take away its moral standing. If moral standing is given in virtue of the capacity to nonphenomenally suffer, then Skynet and Data both get it even if only Data wants to help human beings.

There are no artificial general intelligence machines yet. But now is the time to consider what it would take to grant them moral standing. How humanity chooses to answer the question of moral standing for nonbiological creatures will have big implications for how we deal with future AIs—whether kind and helpful like Data, or set on destruction, like Skynet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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