Tag Archives: better
#439804 How Quantum Computers Can Be Used to ...
Using computer simulations to design new chips played a crucial role in the rapid improvements in processor performance we’ve experienced in recent decades. Now Chinese researchers have extended the approach to the quantum world.
Electronic design automation tools started to become commonplace in the early 1980s as the complexity of processors rose exponentially, and today they are an indispensable tool for chip designers.
More recently, Google has been turbocharging the approach by using artificial intelligence to design the next generation of its AI chips. This holds the promise of setting off a process of recursive self-improvement that could lead to rapid performance gains for AI.
Now, New Scientist has reported on a team from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai that has applied the same ideas to another emerging field of computing: quantum processors. In a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server, the researchers describe how they used a quantum computer to design a new type of qubit that significantly outperformed their previous design.
“Simulations of high-complexity quantum systems, which are intractable for classical computers, can be efficiently done with quantum computers,” the authors wrote. “Our work opens the way to designing advanced quantum processors using existing quantum computing resources.”
At the heart of the idea is the fact that the complexity of quantum systems grows exponentially as they increase in size. As a result, even the most powerful supercomputers struggle to simulate fairly small quantum systems.
This was the basis for Google’s groundbreaking display of “quantum supremacy” in 2019. The company’s researchers used a 53-qubit processor to run a random quantum circuit a million times and showed that it would take roughly 10,000 years to simulate the experiment on the world’s fastest supercomputer.
This means that using classical computers to help in the design of new quantum computers is likely to hit fundamental limits pretty quickly. Using a quantum computer, however, sidesteps the problem because it can exploit the same oddities of the quantum world that make the problem complex in the first place.
This is exactly what the Chinese researchers did. They used an algorithm called a variational quantum eigensolver to simulate the kind of superconducting electronic circuit found at the heart of a quantum computer. This was used to explore what happens when certain energy levels in the circuit are altered.
Normally this kind of experiment would require them to build large numbers of physical prototypes and test them, but instead the team was able to rapidly model the impact of the changes. The upshot was that the researchers discovered a new type of qubit that was more powerful than the one they were already using.
Any two-level quantum system can act as a qubit, but most superconducting quantum computers use transmons, which encode quantum states into the oscillations of electrons. By tweaking the energy levels of their simulated quantum circuit, the researchers were able to discover a new qubit design they dubbed a plasonium.
It is less than half the size of a transmon, and when the researchers fabricated it they found that it holds its quantum state for longer and is less prone to errors. It still works on similar principles to the transmon, so it’s possible to manipulate it using the same control technologies.
The researchers point out that this is only a first prototype, so with further optimization and the integration of recent progress in new superconducting materials and surface treatment methods they expect performance to increase even more.
But the new qubit the researchers have designed is probably not their most significant contribution. By demonstrating that even today’s rudimentary quantum computers can help design future devices, they’ve opened the door to a virtuous cycle that could significantly speed innovation in this field.
Image Credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay Continue reading
#439127 Cobots Act Like Puppies to Better ...
Human-robot interaction goes both ways. You’ve got robots understanding (or attempting to understand) humans, as well as humans understanding (or attempting to understand) robots. Humans, in my experience, are virtually impossible to understand even under the best of circumstances. But going the other way, robots have all kinds of communication tools at their disposal. Lights, sounds, screens, haptics—there are lots of options. That doesn’t mean that robot to human (RtH) communication is easy, though, because the ideal communication modality is something that is low cost and low complexity while also being understandable to almost anyone.
One good option for something like a collaborative robot arm can be to use human-inspired gestures (since it doesn’t require any additional hardware), although it’s important to be careful when you start having robots doing human stuff, because it can set unreasonable expectations if people think of the robot in human terms. In order to get around this, roboticists from Aachen University are experimenting with animal-like gestures for cobots instead, modeled after the behavior of puppies. Puppies!
For robots that are low-cost and appearance-constrained, animal-inspired (zoomorphic) gestures can be highly effective at state communication. We know this because of tails on Roombas:
While this is an adorable experiment, adding tails to industrial cobots is probably not going to happen. That’s too bad, because humans have an intuitive understanding of dog gestures, and this extends even to people who aren’t dog owners. But tails aren’t necessary for something to display dog gestures; it turns out that you can do it with a standard robot arm:
In a recent preprint in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), first author Vanessa Sauer used puppies to inspire a series of communicative gestures for a Franka Emika Panda arm. Specifically, the arm was to be used in a collaborative assembly task, and needed to communicate five states to the human user, including greeting the user, prompting the user to take a part, waiting for a new command, an error condition when a container was empty of parts, and then shutting down. From the paper:
For each use case, we mirrored the intention of the robot (e.g., prompting the user to take a part) to an intention, a dog may have (e.g., encouraging the owner to play). In a second step, we collected gestures that dogs use to express the respective intention by leveraging real-life interaction with dogs, online videos, and literature. We then translated the dog gestures into three distinct zoomorphic gestures by jointly applying the following guidelines inspired by:
Mimicry. We mimic specific dog behavior and body language to communicate robot states.
Exploiting structural similarities. Although the cobot is functionally designed, we exploit certain components to make the gestures more “dog-like,” e.g., the camera corresponds to the dog’s eyes, or the end-effector corresponds to the dog’s snout.
Natural flow. We use kinesthetic teaching and record a full trajectory to allow natural and flowing movements with increased animacy.
A user study comparing the zoomorphic gestures to a more conventional light display for state communication during the assembly task showed that the zoomorphic gestures were easily recognized by participants as dog-like, even if the participants weren’t dog people. And the zoomorphic gestures were also more intuitively understood than the light displays, although the classification of each gesture wasn’t perfect. People also preferred the zoomorphic gestures over more abstract gestures designed to communicate the same concept. Or as the paper puts it, “Zoomorphic gestures are significantly more attractive and intuitive and provide more joy when using.” An online version of the study is here, so give it a try and provide yourself with some joy.
While zoomorphic gestures (at least in this very preliminary research) aren’t nearly as accurate at state communication as using something like a screen, they’re appealing because they’re compelling, easy to understand, inexpensive to implement, and less restrictive than sounds or screens. And there’s no reason why you can’t use both!
For a few more details, we spoke with the first author on this paper, Vanessa Sauer.
IEEE Spectrum: Where did you get the idea for this research from, and why do you think it hasn't been more widely studied or applied in the context of practical cobots?
Vanessa Sauer: I'm a total dog person. During a conversation about dogs and how their ways of communicating with their owner has evolved over time (e.g., more expressive face, easy to understand even without owning a dog), I got the rough idea for my research. I was curious to see if this intuitive understanding many people have of dog behavior could also be applied to cobots that communicate in a similar way. Especially in social robotics, approaches utilizing zoomorphic gestures have been explored. I guess due to the playful nature, less research and applications have been done in the context of industry robots, as they often have a stronger focus on efficiency.
How complex of a concept can be communicated in this way?
In our “proof-of-concept” style approach, we used rather basic robot states to be communicated. The challenge with more complex robot states would be to find intuitive parallels in dog behavior. Nonetheless, I believe that more complex states can also be communicated with dog-inspired gestures.
How would you like to see your research be put into practice?
I would enjoy seeing zoomorphic gestures offered as modality-option on cobots, especially cobots used in industry. I think that could have the potential to reduce inhibitions towards collaborating with robots and make the interaction more fun.
Photos, Robots: Franka Emika; Dogs: iStockphoto
Zoomorphic Gestures for Communicating Cobot States, by Vanessa Sauer, Axel Sauer, and Alexander Mertens from Aachen University and TUM, will be published in
RA-L. Continue reading
#438285 Untethered robots that are better than ...
“Atlas” and “Handle” are just two of the amazing AI robots in the arsenal of Boston Dynamics. Atlas is an untethered whole-body humanoid with human-level dexterity. Handle is the guy for moving boxes in the warehouse. It can also unload … Continue reading