Tag Archives: might
#438769 Will Robots Make Good Friends? ...
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
#438749 Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible ...
Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are inaccessible from the surface.
Now, researchers in the UK, led by Headlight AI, have developed a drone that could cast a light in the darkness. Named Prometheus, this drone can enter a mine through a borehole not much larger than a football, before unfurling its arms and flying around the void. Once down there, it can use its payload of scanning equipment to map mines where neither humans nor robots can presently go. This, the researchers hope, could make mine inspection quicker and easier. The team behind Prometheus published its design in November in the journal Robotics.
Mine inspection might seem like a peculiarly specific task to fret about, but old mines can collapse, causing the ground to sink and damaging nearby buildings. It’s a far-reaching threat: the geotechnical engineering firm Geoinvestigate, based in Northeast England, estimates that around 8 percent of all buildings in the UK are at risk from any of the thousands of abandoned coal mines near the country’s surface. It’s also a threat to transport, such as road and rail. Indeed, Prometheus is backed by Network Rail, which operates Britain’s railway infrastructure.
Such grave dangers mean that old mines need periodic check-ups. To enter depths that are forbidden to traditional wheeled robots—such as those featured in the DARPA SubT Challenge—inspectors today drill boreholes down into the mine and lower scanners into the darkness.
But that can be an arduous and often fruitless process. Inspecting the entirety of a mine can take multiple boreholes, and that still might not be enough to chart a complete picture. Mines are jagged, labyrinthine places, and much of the void might lie out of sight. Furthermore, many old mines aren’t well-mapped, so it’s hard to tell where best to enter them.
Prometheus can fly around some of those challenges. Inspectors can lower Prometheus, tethered to a docking apparatus, down a single borehole. Once inside the mine, the drone can undock and fly around, using LIDAR scanners—common in mine inspection today—to generate a 3D map of the unknown void. Prometheus can fly through the mine autonomously, using infrared data to plot out its own course.
Other drones exist that can fly underground, but they’re either too small to carry a relatively heavy payload of scanning equipment, or too large to easily fit down a borehole. What makes Prometheus unique is its ability to fold its arms, allowing it to squeeze down spaces its counterparts cannot.
It’s that ability to fold and enter a borehole that makes Prometheus remarkable, says Jason Gross, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University. Gross calls Prometheus “an exciting idea,” but he does note that it has a relatively short flight window and few abilities beyond scanning.
The researchers have conducted a number of successful test flights, both in a basement and in an old mine near Shrewsbury, England. Not only was Prometheus able to map out its space, the drone was able to plot its own course in an unknown area.
The researchers’ next steps, according to Puneet Chhabra, co-founder of Headlight AI, will be to test Prometheus’s ability to unfold in an actual mine. Following that, researchers plan to conduct full-scale test flights by the end of 2021. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#438606 Hyundai Motor Group Introduces Two New ...
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a couple of new robots from Hyundai Motor Group. This is a couple more robots than I think I’ve seen from Hyundai Motor Group, like, ever. We’re particularly interested in them right now mostly because Hyundai Motor Group are the new owners of Boston Dynamics, and so far, these robots represent one of the most explicit indications we’ve got about exactly what Hyundai Motor Group wants their robots to be doing.
We know it would be a mistake to read too much into these new announcements, but we can’t help reading something into them, right? So let’s take a look at what Hyundai Motor Group has been up to recently. This first robot is DAL-e, what HMG is calling an “Advanced Humanoid Robot.”
According to Hyundai, DAL-e is “designed to pioneer the future of automated customer services,” and is equipped with “state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology for facial recognition as well as an automatic communication system based on a language-comprehension platform.” You’ll find it in car showrooms, but only in Seoul, for now.
We don’t normally write about robots like these because they tend not to represent much that’s especially new or interesting in terms of robotic technology, capabilities, or commercial potential. There’s certainly nothing wrong with DAL-e—it’s moderately cute and appears to be moderately functional. We’ve seen other platforms (like Pepper) take on similar roles, and our impression is that the long-term cost effectiveness of these greeter robots tends to be somewhat limited. And unless there’s some hidden functionality that we’re not aware of, this robot doesn’t really seem to be pushing the envelope, but we’d love to be wrong about that.
The other new robot, announced yesterday, is TIGER (Transforming Intelligent Ground Excursion Robot). It’s a bit more interesting, although you’ll have to skip ahead about 1:30 in the video to get to it.
We’ve talked about how adding wheels can make legged robots faster and more efficient, but I’m honestly not sure that it works all that well going the other way (adding legs to wheeled robots) because rather than adding a little complexity to get a multi-modal system that you can use much of the time, you’re instead adding a lot of complexity to get a multi-modal system that you’re going to use sometimes.
You could argue, as perhaps Hyundai would, that the multi-modal system is critical to get TIGER to do what they want it to do, which seems to be primarily remote delivery. They mention operating in urban areas as well, where TIGER could use its legs to climb stairs, but I think it would be beat by more traditional wheeled platforms, or even whegged platforms, that are almost as capable while being much simpler and cheaper. For remote delivery, though, legs might be a necessary feature.
That is, if you assume that using a ground-based system is really the best way to go.
The TIGER concept can be integrated with a drone to transport it from place to place, so why not just use the drone to make the remote delivery instead? I guess maybe if you’re dealing with a thick tree canopy, the drone could drop TIGER off in a clearing and the robot could drive to its destination, but now we’re talking about developing a very complex system for a very specific use case. Even though Hyundai has said that they’re going to attempt to commercialize TIGER over the next five years, I think it’ll be tricky for them to successfully do so.
The best part about these robots from Hyundai is that between the two of them, they suggest that the company is serious about developing commercial robots as well as willing to invest in something that seems a little crazy. And you know who else is both of those things? Boston Dynamics. To be clear, it’s almost certain that both of Hyundai’s robots were developed well before the company was even thinking about acquiring Boston Dynamics, so the real question is: Where do these two companies go from here? Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#438080 Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Is Now ...
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 ...
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