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#438807 Visible Touch: How Cameras Can Help ...

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Android

The dawn of the robot revolution is already here, and it is not the dystopian nightmare we imagined. Instead, it comes in the form of social robots: Autonomous robots in homes and schools, offices and public spaces, able to interact with humans and other robots in a socially acceptable, human-perceptible way to resolve tasks related to core human needs.

To design social robots that “understand” humans, robotics scientists are delving into the psychology of human communication. Researchers from Cornell University posit that embedding the sense of touch in social robots could teach them to detect physical interactions and gestures. They describe a way of doing so by relying not on touch but on vision.

A USB camera inside the robot captures shadows of hand gestures on the robot’s surface and classifies them with machine-learning software. They call this method ShadowSense, which they define as a modality between vision and touch, bringing “the high resolution and low cost of vision-sensing to the close-up sensory experience of touch.”

Touch-sensing in social or interactive robots is usually achieved with force sensors or capacitive sensors, says study co-author Guy Hoffman of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. The drawback to his group’s approach has been that, even to achieve coarse spatial resolution, many sensors are needed in a small area.

However, working with non-rigid, inflatable robots, Hoffman and his co-researchers installed a consumer-grade USB camera to which they attached a fisheye lens for a wider field of vision.

“Given that the robot is already hollow, and has a soft and translucent skin, we could do touch interaction by looking at the shadows created by people touching the robot,” says Hoffman. They used deep neural networks to interpret the shadows. “And we were able to do it with very high accuracy,” he says. The robot was able to interpret six different gestures, including one- or two-handed touch, pointing, hugging and punching, with an accuracy of 87.5 to 96 percent, depending on the lighting.

This is not the first time that computer vision has been used for tactile sensing, though the scale and application of ShadowSense is unique. “Photography has been used for touch mainly in robotic grasping,” says Hoffman. By contrast, Hoffman and collaborators wanted to develop a sense that could be “felt” across the whole of the device.

The potential applications for ShadowSense include mobile robot guidance using touch, and interactive screens on soft robots. A third concerns privacy, especially in home-based social robots. “We have another paper currently under review that looks specifically at the ability to detect gestures that are further away [from the robot’s skin],” says Hoffman. This way, users would be able to cover their robot’s camera with a translucent material and still allow it to interpret actions and gestures from shadows. Thus, even though it’s prevented from capturing a high-resolution image of the user or their surrounding environment, using the right kind of training datasets, the robot can continue to monitor some kinds of non-tactile activities.

In its current iteration, Hoffman says, ShadowSense doesn’t do well in low-light conditions. Environmental noise, or shadows from surrounding objects, also interfere with image classification. Relying on one camera also means a single point of failure. “I think if this were to become a commercial product, we would probably [have to] work a little bit better on image detection,” says Hoffman.

As it was, the researchers used transfer learning—reusing a pre-trained deep-learning model in a new problem—for image analysis. “One of the problems with multi-layered neural networks is that you need a lot of training data to make accurate predictions,” says Hoffman. “Obviously, we don’t have millions of examples of people touching a hollow, inflatable robot. But we can use pre-trained networks trained on general images, which we have billions of, and we only retrain the last layers of the network using our own dataset.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438769 Will Robots Make Good Friends? ...

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Android

In the 2012 film Robot and Frank, the protagonist, a retired cat burglar named Frank, is suffering the early symptoms of dementia. Concerned and guilty, his son buys him a “home robot” that can talk, do household chores like cooking and cleaning, and remind Frank to take his medicine. It’s a robot the likes of which we’re getting closer to building in the real world.

The film follows Frank, who is initially appalled by the idea of living with a robot, as he gradually begins to see the robot as both functionally useful and socially companionable. The film ends with a clear bond between man and machine, such that Frank is protective of the robot when the pair of them run into trouble.

This is, of course, a fictional story, but it challenges us to explore different kinds of human-to-robot bonds. My recent research on human-robot relationships examines this topic in detail, looking beyond sex robots and robot love affairs to examine that most profound and meaningful of relationships: friendship.

My colleague and I identified some potential risks, like the abandonment of human friends for robotic ones, but we also found several scenarios where robotic companionship can constructively augment people’s lives, leading to friendships that are directly comparable to human-to-human relationships.

Philosophy of Friendship
The robotics philosopher John Danaher sets a very high bar for what friendship means. His starting point is the “true” friendship first described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, which saw an ideal friendship as premised on mutual good will, admiration, and shared values. In these terms, friendship is about a partnership of equals.

Building a robot that can satisfy Aristotle’s criteria is a substantial technical challenge and is some considerable way off, as Danaher himself admits. Robots that may seem to be getting close, such as Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, base their behavior on a library of pre-prepared responses: a humanoid chatbot, rather than a conversational equal. Anyone who’s had a testing back-and-forth with Alexa or Siri will know AI still has some way to go in this regard.

Aristotle also talked about other forms of “imperfect” friendship, such as “utilitarian” and “pleasure” friendships, which are considered inferior to true friendship because they don’t require symmetrical bonding and are often to one party’s unequal benefit. This form of friendship sets a relatively very low bar which some robots, like “sexbots” and robotic pets, clearly already meet.

Artificial Amigos
For some, relating to robots is just a natural extension of relating to other things in our world, like people, pets, and possessions. Psychologists have even observed how people respond naturally and socially towards media artefacts like computers and televisions. Humanoid robots, you’d have thought, are more personable than your home PC.

However, the field of “robot ethics” is far from unanimous on whether we can—or should— develop any form of friendship with robots. For an influential group of UK researchers who charted a set of “ethical principles of robotics,” human-robot “companionship” is an oxymoron, and to market robots as having social capabilities is dishonest and should be treated with caution, if not alarm. For these researchers, wasting emotional energy on entities that can only simulate emotions will always be less rewarding than forming human-to-human bonds.

But people are already developing bonds with basic robots, like vacuum-cleaning and lawn-trimming machines that can be bought for less than the price of a dishwasher. A surprisingly large number of people give these robots pet names—something they don’t do with their dishwashers. Some even take their cleaning robots on holiday.

Other evidence of emotional bonds with robots include the Shinto blessing ceremony for Sony Aibo robot dogs that were dismantled for spare parts, and the squad of US troops who fired a 21-gun salute, and awarded medals, to a bomb-disposal robot named “Boomer” after it was destroyed in action.

These stories, and the psychological evidence we have so far, make clear that we can extend emotional connections to things that are very different to us, even when we know they are manufactured and pre-programmed. But do those connections constitute a friendship comparable to that shared between humans?

True Friendship?
A colleague and I recently reviewed the extensive literature on human-to-human relationships to try to understand how, and if, the concepts we found could apply to bonds we might form with robots. We found evidence that many coveted human-to-human friendships do not in fact live up to Aristotle’s ideal.

We noted a wide range of human-to-human relationships, from relatives and lovers to parents, carers, service providers, and the intense (but unfortunately one-way) relationships we maintain with our celebrity heroes. Few of these relationships could be described as completely equal and, crucially, they are all destined to evolve over time.

All this means that expecting robots to form Aristotelian bonds with us is to set a standard even human relationships fail to live up to. We also observed forms of social connectedness that are rewarding and satisfying and yet are far from the ideal friendship outlined by the Greek philosopher.

We know that social interaction is rewarding in its own right, and something that, as social mammals, humans have a strong need for. It seems probable that relationships with robots could help to address the deep-seated urge we all feel for social connection—like providing physical comfort, emotional support, and enjoyable social exchanges—currently provided by other humans.

Our paper also discussed some potential risks. These arise particularly in settings where interaction with a robot could come to replace interaction with people, or where people are denied a choice as to whether they interact with a person or a robot—in a care setting, for instance.

These are important concerns, but they’re possibilities and not inevitabilities. In the literature we reviewed we actually found evidence of the opposite effect: robots acting to scaffold social interactions with others, acting as ice-breakers in groups, and helping people to improve their social skills or to boost their self-esteem.

It appears likely that, as time progresses, many of us will simply follow Frank’s path towards acceptance: scoffing at first, before settling into the idea that robots can make surprisingly good companions. Our research suggests that’s already happening—though perhaps not in a way of which Aristotle would have approved.

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

Image Credit: Andy Kelly on Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438294 Video Friday: New Entertainment Robot ...

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Android

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!):

HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Engineered Arts' latest Mesmer entertainment robot is Cleo. It sings, gesticulates, and even does impressions.

[ Engineered Arts ]

I do not know what this thing is or what it's saying but Panasonic is going to be selling them and I will pay WHATEVER. IT. COSTS.

Slightly worrisome is that Google Translate persistently thinks that part of the description involves “sleeping and flatulence.”

[ Panasonic ] via [ RobotStart ]

Spot Enterprise is here to help you safely ignore every alarm that goes off at work while you're snug at home in your jammies drinking cocoa.

That Spot needs a bath.

If you missed the launch event (with more on the arm), check it out here:

[ Boston Dynamics ]

PHASA-35, a 35m wingspan solar-electric aircraft successfully completed its maiden flight in Australia, February 2020. Designed to operate unmanned in the stratosphere, above the weather and conventional air traffic, PHASA-35 offers a persistent and affordable alternative to satellites combined with the flexibility of an aircraft, which could be used for a range of valuable applications including forest fire detection and maritime surveillance.

[ BAE Systems ]

As part of the Army Research Lab’s (ARL) Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA), we are developing new planning and control algorithms for quadrupedal robots. The goal of our project is to equip the robot LLAMA, developed by NASA JPL, with the skills it needs to move at operational tempo over difficult terrain to keep up with a human squad. This requires innovative perception, planning, and control techniques to make the robot both precise in execution for navigating technical obstacles and robust enough to reject disturbances and recover from unknown errors.

[ IHMC ]

Watch what happens to this drone when it tries to install a bird diverter on a high voltage power line:

[ GRVC ]

Soldiers navigate a wide variety of terrains to successfully complete their missions. As human/agent teaming and artificial intelligence advance, the same flexibility will be required of robots to maneuver across diverse terrain and become effective combat teammates.

[ Army ]

The goal of the GRIFFIN project is to create something similar to sort of robotic bird, which almost certainly won't look like this concept rendering.

While I think this research is great, at what point is it in fact easier to just, you know, train an actual bird?

[ GRIFFIN ]

Paul Newman narrates this video from two decades ago, which is a pretty neat trick.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

The first step towards a LEGO-based robotic McMuffin creator is cracking and separating eggs.

[ Astonishing Studios ] via [ BB ]

Some interesting soft robotics projects at the University of Southern Denmark.

[ SDU ]

Chong Liu introduces Creature_02, his final presentation for Hod Lipson's Robotics Studio course at Columbia.

[ Chong Liu ]

The world needs more robot blimps.

[ Lab INIT Robots ]

Finishing its duty early, the KR CYBERTECH nano uses this time to play basketball.

[ Kuka ]

senseFly has a new aerial surveying drone that they call “affordable,” although they don't say what the price is.

[ senseFly ]

In summer 2020 participated several science teams of the ETH Zurich at the “Art Safiental” in the mountains of Graubunden. After the scientists packed their hiking gear and their robots, their only mission was “over hill and dale to the summit”. How difficult will it be to reach the summit with a legged robot and an exosceletton? What's the relation of synesthetic dance and robotic? How will the hikers react to these projects?

[ Rienerschnitzel Films ]

Thanks Robert!

Karen Liu: How robots perceive the physical world. A specialist in computer animation expounds upon her rapidly evolving specialty, known as physics-based simulation, and how it is helping robots become more physically aware of the world around them.

[ Stanford ]

This week's UPenn GRASP On Robotics seminar is by Maria Chiara Carrozza from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, on “Biorobotics for Personal Assistance – Translational Research and Opportunities for Human-Centered Developments.”

The seminar will focus on the opportunities and challenges offered by the digital transformation of healthcare which was accelerated in the COVID-19 Pandemia. In this framework rehabilitation and social robotics can play a fundamental role as enabling technologies for providing innovative therapies and services to patients even at home or in remote environments.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438080 Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Is Now ...

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Android

Boston Dynamics has been working on an arm for its Spot quadruped for at least five years now. There have been plenty of teasers along the way, including this 45-second clip from early 2018 of Spot using its arm to open a door, which at 85 million views seems to be Boston Dynamics’ most popular video ever by a huge margin. Obviously, there’s a substantial amount of interest in turning Spot from a highly dynamic but mostly passive sensor platform into a mobile manipulator that can interact with its environment.

As anyone who’s done mobile manipulation will tell you, actually building an arm is just the first step—the really tricky part is getting that arm to do exactly what you want it to do. In particular, Spot’s arm needs to be able to interact with the world with some amount of autonomy in order to be commercially useful, because you can’t expect a human (remote or otherwise) to spend all their time positioning individual joints or whatever to pick something up. So the real question about this arm is whether Boston Dynamics has managed to get it to a point where it’s autonomous enough that users with relatively little robotics experience will be able to get it to do useful tasks without driving themselves nuts.

Today, Boston Dynamics is announcing commercial availability of the Spot arm, along with some improved software called Scout plus a self-charging dock that’ll give the robot even more independence. And to figure out exactly what Spot’s new arm can do, we spoke with Zachary Jackowski, Spot Chief Engineer at Boston Dynamics.

Although Boston Dynamics’ focus has been on dynamic mobility and legged robots, the company has been working on manipulation for a very long time. We first saw an arm prototype on an early iteration of Spot in 2016, where it demonstrated some impressive functionality, including loading a dishwasher and fetching a beer in a way that only resulted in a minor catastrophe. But we’re guessing that Spot’s arm can trace its history back to BigDog’s crazy powerful hydraulic face-arm, which was causing mayhem with cinder blocks back in 2013:

Spot’s arm is not quite that powerful (it has to drag cinder blocks along the ground rather than fling them into space), but you can certainly see the resemblance. Here’s the video that Boston Dynamics posted yesterday to introduce Spot’s new arm:

A couple of things jumped out from this video right away. First, Spot is doing whole body manipulation with its arm, as opposed to just acting as a four-legged base that brings the arm where it needs to go. Planning looks to be very tightly integrated, such that if you ask the robot to manipulate an object, its arm, legs, and torso all work together to optimize that manipulation. Also, when Spot flips that electrical switch, you see the robot successfully grasp the switch, and then reposition its body in a way that looks like it provides better leverage for the flip, which is a neat trick. It looks like it may be able to use the strength of its legs to augment the strength of its arm, as when it’s dragging the cinder block around, which is surely an homage to BigDog. The digging of a hole is particularly impressive. But again, the real question is how much of this is autonomous or semi-autonomous in a way that will be commercially useful?

Before we get to our interview with Spot Chief Engineer Zack Jackowski, it’s worth watching one more video that Boston Dynamics shared with us:

This is notable because Spot is opening a door that’s not ADA compliant, and the robot is doing it with a simple two-finger gripper. Most robots you see interacting with doors rely on ADA compliant hardware, meaning (among other things) a handle that can be pushed rather than a knob that has to be twisted, because it’s much more challenging for a robot to grasp and twist a smooth round door knob than it is to just kinda bash down on a handle. That capability, combined with Spot being able to pass through a spring-loaded door, potentially opens up a much wider array of human environments to the robot, and that’s where we started our conversation with Jackowski.

IEEE Spectrum: At what point did you decide that for Spot’s arm to be useful, it had to be able to handle round door knobs?

Zachary Jackowski: We're like a lot of roboticists, where someone in a meeting about manipulation would say “it's time for the round doorknob” and people would start groaning a little bit. But the reality is that, in order to make a robot useful, you have to engage with the environments that users have. Spot’s arm uses a very simple gripper—it’s a one degree of freedom gripper, but a ton of thought has gone into all of the fine geometric contours of it such that it can grab that ADA compliant lever handle, and it’ll also do an enclosing grasp around a round door knob. The major point of a robot like Spot is to engage with the environment you have, and so you can’t cut out stuff like round door knobs.

We're thrilled to be launching the arm and getting it out with users and to have them start telling us what doors it works really well on, and what they're having trouble with. And we're going to be working on rapidly improving all this stuff. We went through a few campaigns of like, “this isn’t ready until we can open every single door at Boston Dynamics!” But every single door at Boston Dynamics and at our test lab is a small fraction of all the doors in the world. So we're prepared to learn a lot this year.

When we see Spot open a door, or when it does those other manipulation behaviors in the launch video, how much of that is autonomous, how much is scripted, and to what extent is there a human in the loop?

All of the scenes where the robot does a pick, like the snow scene or the laundry scene, that is actually an almost fully integrated autonomous behavior that has a bit of a script wrapped around it. We trained a detector for an object, and the robot is identifying that object in the environment, picking it, and putting it in the bin all autonomously. The scripted part of that is telling the robot to perform a series of picks.

One of the things that we’re excited about, and that roboticists have been excited about going back probably all the way to the DRC, is semi-autonomous manipulation. And so we have modes built into the interface where if you see an object that you want the robot to grab, all you have to do is tap that object on the screen, and the robot will walk up to it, use the depth camera in its gripper to capture a depth map, and plan a grasp on its own in real time. That’s all built-in, too.

The jump rope—robots don’t just go and jump rope on their own. We scripted an arm motion to move the rope, and wrote a script using our API to coordinate all three robots. Drawing “Boston Dynamics” in chalk in our parking lot was scripted also. One of our engineers wrote a really cool G-code interpreter that vectorizes graphics so that Spot can draw them.

So for an end user, if you wanted Spot to autonomously flip some switches for you, you’d just have to train Spot on your switches, and then Spot could autonomously perform the task?

There are a couple of ways that task could break down depending on how you’re interfacing with the robot. If you’re a tablet user, you’d probably just identify the switch yourself on the tablet’s screen, and the robot will figure out the grasp, and grasp it. Then you’ll enter a constrained manipulation mode on the tablet, and the robot will be able to actuate the switch. But the robot will take care of the complicated controls aspects, like figuring out how hard it has to pull, the center of rotation of the switch, and so on.

The video of Spot digging was pretty cool—how did that work?

That’s mostly a scripted behavior. There are some really interesting control systems topics in there, like how you’d actually do the right kinds of force control while you insert the trowel into the dirt, and how to maintain robot stability while you do it. The higher level task of how to make a good hole in the dirt—that’s scripted. But the part of the problem that’s actually digging, you need the right control system to actually do that, or you’ll dig your trowel into the ground and flip your robot over.

The last time we saw Boston Dynamics robots flipping switches and turning valves I think might have been during the DRC in 2015, when they had expert robot operators with control over every degree of freedom. How are things different now with Spot, and will non-experts in the commercial space really be able to get the robot to do useful tasks?

A lot of the things, like “pick the stuff up in the room,” or ‘turn that switch,” can all be done by a lightly trained operator using just the tablet interface. If you want to actually command all of Spot’s arm degrees of freedom, you can do that— not through the tablet, but the API does expose all of it. That’s actually a notable difference from the base robot; we’ve never opened up the part of the API that lets you command individual leg degrees of freedom, because we don’t think it’s productive for someone to do that. The arm is a little bit different. There are a lot of smart people working on arm motion planning algorithms, and maybe you want to plan your arm trajectory in a super precise way and then do a DRC-style interface where you click to approve it. You can do all that through the API if you want, but fundamentally, it’s also user friendly. It follows our general API design philosophy of giving you the highest level pieces of the toolbox that will enable you to solve a complex problem that we haven't thought of.

Looking back on it now, it’s really cool to see, after so many years, robots do the stuff that Gill Pratt was excited about kicking off with the DRC. And now it’s just a thing you can buy.

Is Spot’s arm safe?

You should follow the same safety rules that you’d follow when working with Spot normally, and that’s that you shouldn’t get within two meters of the robot when it’s powered on. Spot is not a cobot. You shouldn’t hug it. Fundamentally, the places where the robot is the most valuable are places where people don’t want to be, or shouldn’t be.

We’ve seen how people reacted to earlier videos of Spot using its arm—can you help us set some reasonable expectations for what this means for Spot?

You know, it gets right back to the normal assumptions about our robots that people make that aren’t quite reality. All of this manipulation work we’re doing— the robot’s really acting as a tool. Even if it’s an autonomous behavior, it’s a tool. The robot is digging a hole because it’s got a set of instructions that say “apply this much force over this much distance here, here, and here.”

It’s not digging a hole and planting a tree because it loves trees, as much as I’d love to build a robot that works like that.

Photo: Boston Dynamics

There isn’t too much to say about the dock, except that it’s a requirement for making Spot long-term autonomous. The uncomfortable looking charging contacts that Spot impales itself on also include hardwired network connectivity, which is important because Spot often comes back home with a huge amount of data that all needs to be offloaded and processed. Docking and undocking are autonomous— as soon as the robot sees the fiducial markers on the dock, auto docking is enabled and it takes one click to settle the robot down.

During a brief remote demo, we also learned some other interesting things about Spot’s updated remote interface. It’s very latency tolerant, since you don’t have to drive the robot directly (although you can if you want to). Click a point on the camera view and Spot will move there autonomously while avoiding obstacles, meaning that even if you’re dealing with seconds of lag, the robot will continue making safe progress. This will be especially important if (when?) Spot starts exploring the Moon.

The remote interface also has an option to adjust how close Spot can get to obstacles, or to turn the obstacle avoidance off altogether. The latter functionality is useful if Spot sees something as an obstacle that really isn’t, like a curtain, while the former is useful if the robot is operating in an environment where it needs to give an especially wide berth to objects that could be dangerous to run into. “The robot’s not perfect—robots will never be perfect,” Jackowski reminds us, which is something we really (seriously) appreciate hearing from folks working on powerful, dynamic robots. “No matter how good the robot is, you should always de-risk as much as possible.”

Another part of that de-risking is having the user let Spot know when it’s about to go up or down some stairs by putting into “Stair Mode” with a toggle switch in the remote interface. Stairs are still a challenge for Spot, and Stair Mode slows the robot down and encourages it to pitch its body more aggressively to get a better view of the stairs. You’re encouraged to use stair mode, and also encouraged to send Spot up and down stairs with its “head” pointing up the stairs both ways, but these are not requirements for stair navigation— if you want to, you can send Spot down stairs head first without putting it in stair mode. Jackowski says that eventually, Spot will detect stairways by itself even when not in stair mode and adjust itself accordingly, but for now, that de-risking is solidly in the hands of the user.

Spot’s sensor payload, which is what we were trying out for the demo, provided a great opportunity for us to hear Spot STOMP STOMP STOMPING all over the place, which was also an opportunity for us to ask Jackowski why they can’t make Spot a little quieter. “It’s advantageous for Spot to step a little bit hard for the same reason it’s advantageous for you to step a little bit hard if you’re walking around blindfolded—that reason is that it really lets you know where the ground is, particularly when you’re not sure what to expect.” He adds, “It’s all in the name of robustness— the robot might be a little louder, but it’s a little more sure of its footing.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t yet ready to disclose the price of an arm-equipped Spot, but if you’re a potential customer, now is the time to contact the Boston Dynamics sales team to ask them about it. As a reminder, the base model of Spot costs US $74,500, with extra sensing or compute adding a substantial premium on top of that.

There will be a livestream launch event taking place at 11am ET today, during which Boston Dynamics’ CEO Robert Playter, VP of Marketing Michael Perry, and other folks from Boston Dynamics will make presentations on this new stuff. It’ll be live at this link, or you can watch it below. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438076 Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Is Now ...

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Android

Boston Dynamics has been working on an arm for its Spot quadruped for at least five years now. There have been plenty of teasers along the way, including this 45-second clip from early 2018 of Spot using its arm to open a door, which at 85 million views seems to be Boston Dynamics’ most popular video ever by a huge margin. Obviously, there’s a substantial amount of interest in turning Spot from a highly dynamic but mostly passive sensor platform into a mobile manipulator that can interact with its environment.

As anyone who’s done mobile manipulation will tell you, actually building an arm is just the first step—the really tricky part is getting that arm to do exactly what you want it to do. In particular, Spot’s arm needs to be able to interact with the world with some amount of autonomy in order to be commercially useful, because you can’t expect a human (remote or otherwise) to spend all their time positioning individual joints or whatever to pick something up. So the real question about this arm is whether Boston Dynamics has managed to get it to a point where it’s autonomous enough that users with relatively little robotics experience will be able to get it to do useful tasks without driving themselves nuts.

Today, Boston Dynamics is announcing commercial availability of the Spot arm, along with some improved software called Scout plus a self-charging dock that’ll give the robot even more independence. And to figure out exactly what Spot’s new arm can do, we spoke with Zachary Jackowski, Spot Chief Engineer at Boston Dynamics.

Although Boston Dynamics’ focus has been on dynamic mobility and legged robots, the company has been working on manipulation for a very long time. We first saw an arm prototype on an early iteration of Spot in 2016, where it demonstrated some impressive functionality, including loading a dishwasher and fetching a beer in a way that only resulted in a minor catastrophe. But we’re guessing that Spot’s arm can trace its history back to BigDog’s crazy powerful hydraulic face-arm, which was causing mayhem with cinder blocks back in 2013:

Spot’s arm is not quite that powerful (it has to drag cinder blocks along the ground rather than fling them into space), but you can certainly see the resemblance. Here’s the video that Boston Dynamics posted yesterday to introduce Spot’s new arm:

A couple of things jumped out from this video right away. First, Spot is doing whole body manipulation with its arm, as opposed to just acting as a four-legged base that brings the arm where it needs to go. Planning looks to be very tightly integrated, such that if you ask the robot to manipulate an object, its arm, legs, and torso all work together to optimize that manipulation. Also, when Spot flips that electrical switch, you see the robot successfully grasp the switch, and then reposition its body in a way that looks like it provides better leverage for the flip, which is a neat trick. It looks like it may be able to use the strength of its legs to augment the strength of its arm, as when it’s dragging the cinder block around, which is surely an homage to BigDog. The digging of a hole is particularly impressive. But again, the real question is how much of this is autonomous or semi-autonomous in a way that will be commercially useful?

Before we get to our interview with Spot Chief Engineer Zack Jackowski, it’s worth watching one more video that Boston Dynamics shared with us:

This is notable because Spot is opening a door that’s not ADA compliant, and the robot is doing it with a simple two-finger gripper. Most robots you see interacting with doors rely on ADA compliant hardware, meaning (among other things) a handle that can be pushed rather than a knob that has to be twisted, because it’s much more challenging for a robot to grasp and twist a smooth round door knob than it is to just kinda bash down on a handle. That capability, combined with Spot being able to pass through a spring-loaded door, potentially opens up a much wider array of human environments to the robot, and that’s where we started our conversation with Jackowski.

IEEE Spectrum: At what point did you decide that for Spot’s arm to be useful, it had to be able to handle round door knobs?

Zachary Jackowski: We're like a lot of roboticists, where someone in a meeting about manipulation would say “it's time for the round doorknob” and people would start groaning a little bit. But the reality is that, in order to make a robot useful, you have to engage with the environments that users have. Spot’s arm uses a very simple gripper—it’s a one degree of freedom gripper, but a ton of thought has gone into all of the fine geometric contours of it such that it can grab that ADA compliant lever handle, and it’ll also do an enclosing grasp around a round door knob. The major point of a robot like Spot is to engage with the environment you have, and so you can’t cut out stuff like round door knobs.

We're thrilled to be launching the arm and getting it out with users and to have them start telling us what doors it works really well on, and what they're having trouble with. And we're going to be working on rapidly improving all this stuff. We went through a few campaigns of like, “this isn’t ready until we can open every single door at Boston Dynamics!” But every single door at Boston Dynamics and at our test lab is a small fraction of all the doors in the world. So we're prepared to learn a lot this year.

When we see Spot open a door, or when it does those other manipulation behaviors in the launch video, how much of that is autonomous, how much is scripted, and to what extent is there a human in the loop?

All of the scenes where the robot does a pick, like the snow scene or the laundry scene, that is actually an almost fully integrated autonomous behavior that has a bit of a script wrapped around it. We trained a detector for an object, and the robot is identifying that object in the environment, picking it, and putting it in the bin all autonomously. The scripted part of that is telling the robot to perform a series of picks.

One of the things that we’re excited about, and that roboticists have been excited about going back probably all the way to the DRC, is semi-autonomous manipulation. And so we have modes built into the interface where if you see an object that you want the robot to grab, all you have to do is tap that object on the screen, and the robot will walk up to it, use the depth camera in its gripper to capture a depth map, and plan a grasp on its own in real time. That’s all built-in, too.

The jump rope—robots don’t just go and jump rope on their own. We scripted an arm motion to move the rope, and wrote a script using our API to coordinate all three robots. Drawing “Boston Dynamics” in chalk in our parking lot was scripted also. One of our engineers wrote a really cool G-code interpreter that vectorizes graphics so that Spot can draw them.

So for an end user, if you wanted Spot to autonomously flip some switches for you, you’d just have to train Spot on your switches, and then Spot could autonomously perform the task?

There are a couple of ways that task could break down depending on how you’re interfacing with the robot. If you’re a tablet user, you’d probably just identify the switch yourself on the tablet’s screen, and the robot will figure out the grasp, and grasp it. Then you’ll enter a constrained manipulation mode on the tablet, and the robot will be able to actuate the switch. But the robot will take care of the complicated controls aspects, like figuring out how hard it has to pull, the center of rotation of the switch, and so on.

The video of Spot digging was pretty cool—how did that work?

That’s mostly a scripted behavior. There are some really interesting control systems topics in there, like how you’d actually do the right kinds of force control while you insert the trowel into the dirt, and how to maintain robot stability while you do it. The higher level task of how to make a good hole in the dirt—that’s scripted. But the part of the problem that’s actually digging, you need the right control system to actually do that, or you’ll dig your trowel into the ground and flip your robot over.

The last time we saw Boston Dynamics robots flipping switches and turning valves I think might have been during the DRC in 2015, when they had expert robot operators with control over every degree of freedom. How are things different now with Spot, and will non-experts in the commercial space really be able to get the robot to do useful tasks?

A lot of the things, like “pick the stuff up in the room,” or ‘turn that switch,” can all be done by a lightly trained operator using just the tablet interface. If you want to actually command all of Spot’s arm degrees of freedom, you can do that— not through the tablet, but the API does expose all of it. That’s actually a notable difference from the base robot; we’ve never opened up the part of the API that lets you command individual leg degrees of freedom, because we don’t think it’s productive for someone to do that. The arm is a little bit different. There are a lot of smart people working on arm motion planning algorithms, and maybe you want to plan your arm trajectory in a super precise way and then do a DRC-style interface where you click to approve it. You can do all that through the API if you want, but fundamentally, it’s also user friendly. It follows our general API design philosophy of giving you the highest level pieces of the toolbox that will enable you to solve a complex problem that we haven't thought of.

Looking back on it now, it’s really cool to see, after so many years, robots do the stuff that Gill Pratt was excited about kicking off with the DRC. And now it’s just a thing you can buy.

Is Spot’s arm safe?

You should follow the same safety rules that you’d follow when working with Spot normally, and that’s that you shouldn’t get within two meters of the robot when it’s powered on. Spot is not a cobot. You shouldn’t hug it. Fundamentally, the places where the robot is the most valuable are places where people don’t want to be, or shouldn’t be.

We’ve seen how people reacted to earlier videos of Spot using its arm—can you help us set some reasonable expectations for what this means for Spot?

You know, it gets right back to the normal assumptions about our robots that people make that aren’t quite reality. All of this manipulation work we’re doing— the robot’s really acting as a tool. Even if it’s an autonomous behavior, it’s a tool. The robot is digging a hole because it’s got a set of instructions that say “apply this much force over this much distance here, here, and here.”

It’s not digging a hole and planting a tree because it loves trees, as much as I’d love to build a robot that works like that.

Photo: Boston Dynamics

There isn’t too much to say about the dock, except that it’s a requirement for making Spot long-term autonomous. The uncomfortable looking charging contacts that Spot impales itself on also include hardwired network connectivity, which is important because Spot often comes back home with a huge amount of data that all needs to be offloaded and processed. Docking and undocking are autonomous— as soon as the robot sees the fiducial markers on the dock, auto docking is enabled and it takes one click to settle the robot down.

During a brief remote demo, we also learned some other interesting things about Spot’s updated remote interface. It’s very latency tolerant, since you don’t have to drive the robot directly (although you can if you want to). Click a point on the camera view and Spot will move there autonomously while avoiding obstacles, meaning that even if you’re dealing with seconds of lag, the robot will continue making safe progress. This will be especially important if (when?) Spot starts exploring the Moon.

The remote interface also has an option to adjust how close Spot can get to obstacles, or to turn the obstacle avoidance off altogether. The latter functionality is useful if Spot sees something as an obstacle that really isn’t, like a curtain, while the former is useful if the robot is operating in an environment where it needs to give an especially wide berth to objects that could be dangerous to run into. “The robot’s not perfect—robots will never be perfect,” Jackowski reminds us, which is something we really (seriously) appreciate hearing from folks working on powerful, dynamic robots. “No matter how good the robot is, you should always de-risk as much as possible.”

Another part of that de-risking is having the user let Spot know when it’s about to go up or down some stairs by putting into “Stair Mode” with a toggle switch in the remote interface. Stairs are still a challenge for Spot, and Stair Mode slows the robot down and encourages it to pitch its body more aggressively to get a better view of the stairs. You’re encouraged to use stair mode, and also encouraged to send Spot up and down stairs with its “head” pointing up the stairs both ways, but these are not requirements for stair navigation— if you want to, you can send Spot down stairs head first without putting it in stair mode. Jackowski says that eventually, Spot will detect stairways by itself even when not in stair mode and adjust itself accordingly, but for now, that de-risking is solidly in the hands of the user.

Spot’s sensor payload, which is what we were trying out for the demo, provided a great opportunity for us to hear Spot STOMP STOMP STOMPING all over the place, which was also an opportunity for us to ask Jackowski why they can’t make Spot a little quieter. “It’s advantageous for Spot to step a little bit hard for the same reason it’s advantageous for you to step a little bit hard if you’re walking around blindfolded—that reason is that it really lets you know where the ground is, particularly when you’re not sure what to expect.” He adds, “It’s all in the name of robustness— the robot might be a little louder, but it’s a little more sure of its footing.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t yet ready to disclose the price of an arm-equipped Spot, but if you’re a potential customer, now is the time to contact the Boston Dynamics sales team to ask them about it. As a reminder, the base model of Spot costs US $74,500, with extra sensing or compute adding a substantial premium on top of that.

There will be a livestream launch event taking place at 11am ET today, during which Boston Dynamics’ CEO Robert Playter, VP of Marketing Michael Perry, and other folks from Boston Dynamics will make presentations on this new stuff. It’ll be live at this link, or you can watch it below. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots