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#437800 Malleable Structure Makes Robot Arm More ...

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Android

The majority of robot arms are built out of some combination of long straight tubes and actuated joints. This isn’t surprising, since our limbs are built the same way, which was a clever and efficient bit of design. By adding more tubes and joints (or degrees of freedom), you can increase the versatility of your robot arm, but the tradeoff is that complexity, weight, and cost will increase, too.

At ICRA, researchers from Imperial College London’s REDS Lab, headed by Nicolas Rojas, introduced a design for a robot that’s built around a malleable structure rather than a rigid one, allowing you to improve how versatile the arm is without having to add extra degrees of freedom. The idea is that you’re no longer constrained to static tubes and joints but can instead reconfigure your robot to set it up exactly the way you want and easily change it whenever you feel like.

Inside of that bendable section of arm are layers and layers of mylar sheets, cut into flaps and stacked on top of one another so that each flap is overlapping or overlapped by at least 11 other flaps. The mylar is slippery enough that under most circumstances, the flaps can move smoothly against each other, letting you adjust the shape of the arm. The flaps are sealed up between latex membranes, and when air is pumped out from between the membranes, they press down on each other and turn the whole structure rigid, locking itself in whatever shape you’ve put it in.

Image: Imperial College London

The malleable part of the robot consists of layers of mylar sheets, cut into flaps that can move smoothly against each other, letting you adjust the shape of the arm. The flaps are sealed up between latex membranes, and when air is pumped out from between the membranes, they press down on each other and turn the whole structure rigid, locking itself in whatever shape you’ve put it in.

The nice thing about this system is that it’s a sort of combination of a soft robot and a rigid robot—you get the flexibility (both physical and metaphorical) of a soft system, without necessarily having to deal with all of the control problems. It’s more mechanically complex than either (as hybrid systems tend to be), but you save on cost, size, and weight, and reduce the number of actuators you need, which tend to be points of failure. You do need to deal with creating and maintaining a vacuum, and the fact that the malleable arm is not totally rigid, but depending on your application, those tradeoffs could easily be worth it.

For more details, we spoke with first author Angus B. Clark via email.

IEEE Spectrum: Where did this idea come from?

Angus Clark: The idea of malleable robots came from the realization that the majority of serial robot arms have 6 or more degrees of freedom (DoF)—usually rotary joints—yet are typically performing tasks that only require 2 or 3 DoF. The idea of a robot arm that achieves flexibility and adaptation to tasks but maintains the simplicity of a low DoF system, along with the rapid development of variable stiffness continuum robots for medical applications, inspired us to develop the malleable robot concept.

What are some ways in which a malleable robot arm could provide unique advantages, and what are some potential applications that could leverage these advantages?

Malleable robots have the ability to complete multiple traditional tasks, such as pick and place or bin picking operations, without the added bulk of extra joints that are not directly used within each task, as the flexibility of the robot arm is provided by ​a malleable link instead. This results in an overall smaller form factor, including weight and footprint of the robot, as well as a lower power requirement and cost of the robot as fewer joints are needed, without sacrificing adaptability. This makes the robot ideal for scenarios where any of these factors are critical, such as in space robotics—where every kilogram saved is vital—or in rehabilitation robotics, where cost reduction may facilitate adoption, to name two examples. Moreover, the collaborative soft-robot-esque nature of malleable robots also tends towards collaborative robots in factories working safely alongside and with humans.

“The idea of malleable robots came from the realization that the majority of serial robot arms have 6 or more degrees of freedom (DoF), yet are typically performing tasks that only require 2 or 3 DoF”
—Angus B. Clark, Imperial College London

Compared to a conventional rigid link between joints, what are the disadvantages of using a malleable link?

Currently the maximum stiffness of a malleable link is considerably weaker than that of an equivalent solid steel rigid link, and this is one of the key areas we are focusing research on improving as motion precision and accuracy are impacted. We have created the largest existing variable stiffness link at roughly 800 mm length and 50 mm diameter, which suits malleable robots towards small and medium size workspaces. Our current results evaluating this accuracy are good, however achieving a uniform stiffness across the entire malleable link can be problematic due to the production of wrinkles under bending in the encapsulating membrane. As demonstrated by our SCARA topology results, this can produce slight structural variations resulting in reduced accuracy.

Does the robot have any way of knowing its own shape? Potentially, could this system reconfigure itself somehow?

Currently we compute the robot topology using motion tracking, with markers placed on the joints of the robot. Using distance geometry, we are then able to obtain the forward and inverse kinematics of the robot, of which we can use to control the end effector (the gripper) of the robot. Ideally, in the future we would love to develop a system that no longer requires the use of motion tracking cameras.

As for the robot reconfiguring itself, which we call an “intrinsic malleable link,” there are many methods that have been demonstrated for controlling a continuum structure, such as using positive pressure or via tendon wires, however the ability to in real-time determine the curvature of the link, not just the joint positions, is a significant hurdle to solve. However, we hope to see future development on malleable robots work towards solving this problem.

What are you working on next?

For us, refining the kinematics of the robot to enable a robust and complete system for allowing a user to collaboratively reshape the robot, while still achieving the accuracy expected from robotic systems, is our current main goal. Malleable robots are a brand new field we have introduced, and as such provide many opportunities for development and optimization. Over the coming years, we hope to see other researchers work alongside us to solve these problems.

“Design and Workspace Characterization of Malleable Robots,” by Angus B. Clark and Nicolas Rojas from Imperial College London, was presented at ICRA 2020.

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Posted in Human Robots

#437791 Is the Pandemic Spurring a Robot ...

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Android

“Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?” This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of the experts interviewed was Siddhartha Srinivasa, at the time professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and currently director of Robotics and AI for Amazon. He said, “I’d love to make robots unsexy. It’s weird to say this, but when something becomes unsexy, it means that it works so well that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t stare at your dishwasher as it washes your dishes in fascination, because you know it’s gonna work every time… I want to get robots to that stage of reliability.”

Have we managed to get there over the last four years? Are robots unsexy yet? And how has the pandemic changed the trajectory of automation across industries?

The Covid Effect
The pandemic has had a massive economic impact all over the world, and one of the problems faced by many companies has been keeping their businesses running without putting employees at risk of infection. Many organizations are seeking to remain operational in the short term by automating tasks that would otherwise be carried out by humans. According to Digital Trends, since the start of the pandemic we have seen a significant increase in automation efforts in manufacturing, meat packing, grocery stores and more. In a June survey, 44 percent of corporate financial officers said they were considering more automation in response to coronavirus.

MIT economist David Autor described the economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic as “an event that forces automation.” But he added that Covid-19 created a kind of disruption that has forced automation in sectors and activities with a shortage of workers, while at the same time there has been no reduction in demand. This hasn’t taken place in hospitality, where demand has practically disappeared, but it is still present in agriculture and distribution. The latter is being altered by the rapid growth of e-commerce, with more efficient and automated warehouses that can provide better service.

China Leads the Way
China is currently in a unique position to lead the world’s automation economy. Although the country boasts a huge workforce, labor costs have multiplied by 10 over the past 20 years. As the world’s factory, China has a strong incentive to automate its manufacturing sector, which enjoys a solid leadership in high quality products. China is currently the largest and fastest-growing market in the world for industrial robotics, with a 21 percent increase up to $5.4 billion in 2019. This represents one third of global sales. As a result, Chinese companies are developing a significant advantage in terms of learning to work with metallic colleagues.

The reasons behind this Asian dominance are evident: the population has a greater capacity and need for tech adoption. A large percentage of the population will soon be of retirement age, without an equivalent younger demographic to replace it, leading to a pressing need to adopt automation in the short term.

China is well ahead of other countries in restaurant automation. As reported in Bloomberg, in early 2020 UBS Group AG conducted a survey of over 13,000 consumers in different countries and found that 64 percent of Chinese participants had ordered meals through their phones at least once a week, compared to a mere 17 percent in the US. As digital ordering gains ground, robot waiters and chefs are likely not far behind. The West harbors a mistrust towards non-humans that the East does not.

The Robot Evolution
The pandemic was a perfect excuse for robots to replace us. But despite the hype around this idea, robots have mostly disappointed during the pandemic.

Just over 66 different kinds of “social” robots have been piloted in hospitals, health centers, airports, office buildings, and other public and private spaces in response to the pandemic, according to a study from researchers at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). Their survey looked at 195 robot deployments across 35 countries including China, the US, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

But if the “robot revolution” is a movement in which automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence proliferate through the value chain of various industries, bringing a paradigm shift in how we produce, consume, and distribute products—it hasn’t happened yet.

But there’s a more nuanced answer: rather than a revolution, we’re seeing an incremental robot evolution. It’s a trend that will likely accelerate over the next five years, particularly when 5G takes center stage and robotics as a field leaves behind imitation and evolves independently.

Automation Anxiety
Why don’t we finally welcome the long-promised robotic takeover? Despite progress in AI and increased adoption of industrial robots, consumer-facing robotic products are not nearly as ubiquitous as popular culture predicted decades ago. As Amara’s Law says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It seems we are living through the Gartner hype cycle.

People have a complicated relationship with robots, torn between admiring them, fearing them, rejecting them, and even boycotting them, as has happened in the automobile industry.

Retail robot in a Walmart store. Credit: Bossa Nova Robotics
Walmart terminated its contract with Bossa Nova and withdrew its 1,000 inventory robots from its stores because the company was concerned about how shoppers were reacting to seeing the six-foot robots in the aisles.

With road blocks like this, will the World Economic Forum’s prediction of almost half of tasks being carried out by machines by 2025 come to pass?

At the rate we’re going, it seems unlikely, even with the boost in automation caused by the pandemic. Robotics will continue to advance its capabilities, and will take over more human jobs as it does so, but it’s unlikely we’ll hit a dramatic inflection point that could be described as a “revolution.” Instead, the robot evolution will happen the way most societal change does: incrementally, with time for people to adapt both practically and psychologically.

For now though, robots are still pretty sexy.

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Posted in Human Robots

#437783 Ex-Googler’s Startup Comes Out of ...

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Android

Over the last 10 years, the PR2 has helped roboticists make an enormous amount of progress in mobile manipulation over a relatively short time. I mean, it’s been a decade already, but still—robots are hard, and giving a bunch of smart people access to a capable platform where they didn’t have to worry about hardware and could instead focus on doing interesting and useful things helped to establish a precedent for robotics research going forward.

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford an enormous US $400,000 robot, and even if they could, PR2s are getting very close to the end of their lives. There are other mobile manipulators out there taking the place of the PR2, but so far, size and cost have largely restricted them to research labs. Lots of good research is being done, but it’s getting to the point where folks want to take the next step: making mobile manipulators real-world useful.

Today, a company called Hello Robot is announcing a new mobile manipulator called the Stretch RE1. With offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Atlanta, Ga., Hello Robot is led by Aaron Edsinger and Charlie Kemp, and by combining decades of experience in industry and academia they’ve managed to come up with a robot that’s small, lightweight, capable, and affordable, all at the same time. For now, it’s a research platform, but eventually, its creators hope that it will be able to come into our homes and take care of us when we need it to.

A fresh look at mobile manipulators
To understand the concept behind Stretch, it’s worth taking a brief look back at what Edsinger and Kemp have been up to for the past 10 years. Edsinger co-founded Meka Robotics in 2007, which built expensive, high performance humanoid arms, torsos, and heads for the research market. Meka was notable for being the first robotics company (as far as we know) to sell robot arms that used series elastic actuators, and the company worked extensively with Georgia Tech researchers. In 2011, Edsinger was one of the co-founders of Redwood Robotics (along with folks from SRI and Willow Garage), which was going to develop some kind of secret and amazing new robot arm before Google swallowed it in late 2013. At the same time, Google also acquired Meka and a bunch of other robotics companies, and Edsinger ended up at Google as one of the directors of its robotics program, until he left to co-found Hello Robot in 2017.

Meanwhile, since 2007 Kemp has been a robotics professor at Georgia Tech, where he runs the Healthcare Robotics Lab. Kemp’s lab was one of the 11 PR2 beta sites, giving him early experience with a ginormous mobile manipulator. Much of the research that Kemp has spent the last decade on involves robots providing assistance to untrained users, often through direct physical contact, and frequently either in their own homes or in a home environment. We should mention that the Georgia Tech PR2 is still going, most recently doing some clever material classification work in a paper for IROS later this year.

Photo: Hello Robot

Hello Robot co-founder and CEO Aaron Edsinger says that, although Stretch is currently a research platform, he hopes to see the robot deployed in home environments, adding that the “impact we want to have is through robots that are helpful to people in society.”

So with all that in mind, where’d Hello Robot come from? As it turns out, both Edsinger and Kemp were in Rodney Brooks’ group at MIT, so it’s perhaps not surprising that they share some of the same philosophies about what robots should be and what they should be used for. After collaborating on a variety of projects over the years, in 2017 Edsinger was thinking about his next step after Google when Kemp stopped by to show off some video of a new robot prototype that he’d been working on—the prototype for Stretch. “As soon as I saw it, I knew that was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be working on,” Edsinger told us. “I’d become frustrated with the complexity of the robots being built to do manipulation in home environments and around people, and it solved a lot of problems in an elegant way.”

For Kemp, Stretch is an attempt to get everything he’s been teaching his robots out of his lab at Georgia Tech and into the world where it can actually be helpful to people. “Right from the beginning, we were trying to take our robots out to real homes and interact with real people,” says Kemp. Georgia Tech’s PR2, for example, worked extensively with Henry and Jane Evans, helping Henry (a quadriplegic) regain some of the bodily autonomy he had lost. With the assistance of the PR2, Henry was able to keep himself comfortable for hours without needing a human caregiver to be constantly with him. “I felt like I was making a commitment in some ways to some of the people I was working with,” Kemp told us. “But 10 years later, I was like, where are these things? I found that incredibly frustrating. Stretch is an effort to try to push things forward.”

A robot you can put in the backseat of a car
One way to put Stretch in context is to think of it almost as a reaction to the kitchen sink philosophy of the PR2. Where the PR2 was designed to be all the robot anyone could ever need (plus plenty of robot that nobody really needed) embodied in a piece of hardware that weighs 225 kilograms and cost nearly half a million dollars, Stretch is completely focused on being just the robot that is actually necessary in a form factor that’s both much smaller and affordable. The entire robot weighs a mere 23 kg in a footprint that’s just a 34 cm square. As you can see from the video, it’s small enough (and safe enough) that it can be moved by a child. The cost? At $17,950 apiece—or a bit less if you buy a bunch at once—Stretch costs a fraction of what other mobile manipulators sell for.

It might not seem like size or weight should be that big of an issue, but it very much is, explains Maya Cakmak, a robotics professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Cakmak worked with PR2 and Henry Evans when she was at Willow Garage, and currently has access to both a PR2 and a Fetch research robot. “When I think about my long term research vision, I want to deploy service robots in real homes,” Cakmak told us. Unfortunately, it’s the robots themselves that have been preventing her from doing this—both the Fetch and the PR2 are large enough that moving them anywhere requires a truck and a lift, which also limits the home that they can be used in. “For me, I felt immediately that Stretch is very different, and it makes a lot of sense,” she says. “It’s safe and lightweight, you can probably put it in the backseat of a car.” For Cakmak, Stretch’s size is the difference between being able to easily take a robot to the places she wants to do research in, and not. And cost is a factor as well, since a cheaper robot means more access for her students. “I got my refurbished PR2 for $180,000,” Cakmak says. “For that, with Stretch I could have 10!”

“I felt immediately that Stretch is very different. It’s safe and lightweight, you can probably put it in the backseat of a car. I got my refurbished PR2 for $180,000. For that, with Stretch I could have 10!”
—Maya Cakmak, University of Washington

Of course, a portable robot doesn’t do you any good if the robot itself isn’t sophisticated enough to do what you need it to do. Stretch is certainly a compromise in functionality in the interest of small size and low cost, but it’s a compromise that’s been carefully thought out, based on the experience that Edsinger has building robots and the experience that Kemp has operating robots in homes. For example, most mobile manipulators are essentially multi-degrees-of-freedom arms on mobile bases. Stretch instead leverages its wheeled base to move its arm in the horizontal plane, which (most of the time) works just as well as an extra DoF or two on the arm while saving substantially on weight and cost. Similarly, Stretch relies almost entirely on one sensor, an Intel RealSense D435i on a pan-tilt head that gives it a huge range of motion. The RealSense serves as a navigation camera, manipulation camera, a 3D mapping system, and more. It’s not going to be quite as good for a task that might involve fine manipulation, but most of the time it’s totally workable and you’re saving on cost and complexity.

Stretch has been relentlessly optimized to be the absolutely minimum robot to do mobile manipulation in a home or workplace environment. In practice, this meant figuring out exactly what it was absolutely necessary for Stretch to be able to do. With an emphasis on manipulation, that meant defining the workspace of the robot, or what areas it’s able to usefully reach. “That was one thing we really had to push hard on,” says Edsinger. “Reachability.” He explains that reachability and a small mobile base tend not to go together, because robot arms (which tend to weigh a lot) can cause a small base to tip, especially if they’re moving while holding a payload. At the same time, Stretch needed to be able to access both countertops and the floor, while being able to reach out far enough to hand people things without having to be right next to them. To come up with something that could meet all those requirements, Edsinger and Kemp set out to reinvent the robot arm.

Stretch’s key innovation: a stretchable arm
The design they came up with is rather ingenious in its simplicity and how well it works. Edsinger explains that the arm consists of five telescoping links: one fixed and four moving. They are constructed of custom carbon fiber, and are driven by a single motor, which is attached to the robot’s vertical pole. The strong, lightweight structure allows the arm to extend over half a meter and hold up to 1.5 kg. Although the company has a patent pending for the design, Edsinger declined to say whether the links are driven by a belt, cables, or gears. “We don’t want to disclose too much of the secret sauce [with regard to] the drive mechanism.” He added that the arm was “one of the most significant engineering challenges on the robot in terms of getting the desired reach, compactness, precision, smoothness, force sensitivity, and low cost to all happily coexist.”

Photo: Hello Robot

Stretch’s arm consists of five telescoping links constructed of custom carbon fiber, and are driven by a single motor, which is attached to the robot’s vertical pole, minimizing weight and inertia. The arm has a reach of over half a meter and can hold up to 1.5 kg.

Another interesting features of Stretch is its interface with the world—its gripper. There are countless different gripper designs out there, each and every one of which is the best at gripping some particular subset of things. But making a generalized gripper for all of the stuff that you’d find in a home is exceptionally difficult. Ideally, you’d want some sort of massive experimental test program where thousands and thousands of people test out different gripper designs in their homes for long periods of time and then tell you which ones work best. Obviously, that’s impractical for a robotics startup, but Kemp realized that someone else was already running the study for him: Amazon.

“I had this idea that there are these assistive grabbers that people with disabilities use to grasp objects in the real world,” he told us. Kemp went on Amazon’s website and looked at the top 10 grabbers and the reviews from thousands of users. He then bought a bunch of different ones and started testing them. “This one [Stretch’s gripper], I almost didn’t order it, it was such a weird looking thing,” he says. “But it had great reviews on Amazon, and oh my gosh, it just blew away the other grabbers. And I was like, that’s it. It just works.”

Stretch’s teleoperated and autonomous capabilities
As with any robot intended to be useful outside of a structured environment, hardware is only part of the story, and arguably not even the most important part. In order for Stretch to be able to operate out from under the supervision of a skilled roboticist, it has to be either easy to control, or autonomous. Ideally, it’s both, and that’s what Hello Robot is working towards, although things didn’t start out that way, Kemp explains. “From a minimalist standpoint, we began with the notion that this would be a teleoperated robot. But in the end, you just don’t get the real power of the robot that way, because you’re tied to a person doing stuff. As much as we fought it, autonomy really is a big part of the future for this kind of system.”

Here’s a look at some of Stretch’s teleoperated capabilities. We’re told that Stretch is very easy to get going right out of the box, although this teleoperation video from Hello Robot looks like it’s got a skilled and experienced user in the loop:

For such a low-cost platform, the autonomy (even at this early stage) is particularly impressive:

Since it’s not entirely clear from the video exactly what’s autonomous, here’s a brief summary of a couple of the more complex behaviors that Kemp sent us:

Object grasping: Stretch uses its 3D camera to find the nearest flat surface using a virtual overhead view. It then segments significant blobs on top of the surface. It selects the largest blob in this virtual overhead view and fits an ellipse to it. It then generates a grasp plan that makes use of the center of the ellipse and the major and minor axes. Once it has a plan, Stretch orients its gripper, moves to the pre-grasp pose, moves to the grasp pose, closes its gripper based on the estimated object width, lifts up, and retracts.
Mapping, navigating, and reaching to a 3D point: These demonstrations all use FUNMAP (Fast Unified Navigation, Manipulation and Planning). It’s all novel custom Python code. Even a single head scan performed by panning the 3D camera around can result in a very nice 3D representation of Stretch’s surroundings that includes the nearby floor. This is surprisingly unusual for robots, which often have their cameras too low to see many interesting things in a human environment. While mapping, Stretch selects where to scan next in a non-trivial way that considers factors such as the quality of previous observations, expected new observations, and navigation distance. The plan that Stretch uses to reach the target 3D point has been optimized for navigation and manipulation. For example, it finds a final robot pose that provides a large manipulation workspace for Stretch, which must consider nearby obstacles, including obstacles on the ground.
Object handover: This is a simple demonstration of object handovers. Stretch performs Cartesian motions to move its gripper to a body-relative position using a good motion heuristic, which is to extend the arm as the last step. These simple motions work well due to the design of Stretch. It still surprises me how well it moves the object to comfortable places near my body, and how unobtrusive it is. The goal point is specified relative to a 3D frame attached to the person’s mouth estimated using deep learning models (shown in the RViz visualization video). Specifically, Stretch targets handoff at a 3D point that is 20 cm below the estimated position of the mouth and 25 cm away along the direction of reaching.

Much of these autonomous capabilities come directly from Kemp’s lab, and the demo code is available for anyone to use. (Hello Robot says all of Stretch’s software is open source.)

Photo: Hello Robot

Hello Robot co-founder and CEO Aaron Edsinger says Stretch is designed to work with people in homes and workplaces and can be teleoperated to do a variety of tasks, including picking up toys, removing laundry from a dryer, and playing games with kids.

As of right now, Stretch is very much a research platform. You’re going to see it in research labs doing research things, and hopefully in homes and commercial spaces as well, but still under the supervision of professional roboticists. As you may have guessed, though, Hello Robot’s vision is a bit broader than that. “The impact we want to have is through robots that are helpful to people in society,” Edsinger says. “We think primarily in the home context, but it could be in healthcare, or in other places. But we really want to have our robots be impactful, and useful. To us, useful is exciting.” Adds Kemp: “I have a personal bias, but we’d really like this technology to benefit older adults and caregivers. Rather than creating a specialized assistive device, we want to eventually create an inexpensive consumer device for everyone that does lots of things.”

Neither Edsinger nor Kemp would say much more on this for now, and they were very explicit about why—they’re being deliberately cautious about raising expectations, having seen what’s happened to some other robotics companies over the past few years. Without VC funding (Hello Robot is currently bootstrapping itself into existence), Stretch is being sold entirely on its own merits. So far, it seems to be working. Stretch robots are already in a half dozen research labs, and we expect that with today’s announcement, we’ll start seeing them much more frequently.

This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “A Robot That Keeps It Simple.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437769 Q&A: Facebook’s CTO Is at War With ...

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Android

Photo: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images

Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer leads the company’s AI and integrity efforts.

Facebook’s challenge is huge. Billions of pieces of content—short and long posts, images, and combinations of the two—are uploaded to the site daily from around the world. And any tiny piece of that—any phrase, image, or video—could contain so-called bad content.

In its early days, Facebook relied on simple computer filters to identify potentially problematic posts by their words, such as those containing profanity. These automatically filtered posts, as well as posts flagged by users as offensive, went to humans for adjudication.

In 2015, Facebook started using artificial intelligence to cull images that contained nudity, illegal goods, and other prohibited content; those images identified as possibly problematic were sent to humans for further review.

By 2016, more offensive photos were reported by Facebook’s AI systems than by Facebook users (and that is still the case).

In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bold proclamation: He predicted that within five or ten years, Facebook’s AI would not only look for profanity, nudity, and other obvious violations of Facebook’s policies. The tools would also be able to spot bullying, hate speech, and other misuse of the platform, and put an immediate end to them.

Today, automated systems using algorithms developed with AI scan every piece of content between the time when a user completes a post and when it is visible to others on the site—just fractions of a second. In most cases, a violation of Facebook’s standards is clear, and the AI system automatically blocks the post. In other cases, the post goes to human reviewers for a final decision, a workforce that includes 15,000 content reviewers and another 20,000 employees focused on safety and security, operating out of more than 20 facilities around the world.

In the first quarter of this year, Facebook removed or took other action (like appending a warning label) on more than 9.6 million posts involving hate speech, 8.6 million involving child nudity or exploitation, almost 8 million posts involving the sale of drugs, 2.3 million posts involving bullying and harassment, and tens of millions of posts violating other Facebook rules.

Right now, Facebook has more than 1,000 engineers working on further developing and implementing what the company calls “integrity” tools. Using these systems to screen every post that goes up on Facebook, and doing so in milliseconds, is sucking up computing resources. Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer, who is heading up Facebook’s AI and integrity efforts, spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the team’s progress on building an AI system that detects bad content.

Since that discussion, Facebook’s policies around hate speech have come under increasing scrutiny, with particular attention on divisive posts by political figures. A group of major advertisers in June announced that they would stop advertising on the platform while reviewing the situation, and civil rights groups are putting pressure on others to follow suit until Facebook makes policy changes related to hate speech and groups that promote hate, misinformation, and conspiracies.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with news that Facebook will widen the category of what it considers hateful content in ads. Now the company prohibits claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity, or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health, or survival of others. The policy change also aims to better protect immigrants, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from ads suggesting these groups are inferior or expressing contempt. Finally, Zuckerberg announced that the company will label some problematic posts by politicians and government officials as content that violates Facebook’s policies.

However, civil rights groups say that’s not enough. And an independent audit released in July also said that Facebook needs to go much further in addressing civil rights concerns and disinformation.

Schroepfer indicated that Facebook’s AI systems are designed to quickly adapt to changes in policy. “I don’t expect considerable technical changes are needed to adjust,” he told Spectrum.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

IEEE Spectrum: What are the stakes of content moderation? Is this an existential threat to Facebook? And is it critical that you deal well with the issue of election interference this year?

Schroepfer: It’s probably existential; it’s certainly massive. We are devoting a tremendous amount of our attention to it.

The idea that anyone could meddle in an election is deeply disturbing and offensive to all of us here, just as people and citizens of democracies. We don’t want to see that happen anywhere, and certainly not on our watch. So whether it’s important to the company or not, it’s important to us as people. And I feel a similar way on the content-moderation side.

There are not a lot of easy choices here. The only way to prevent people, with certainty, from posting bad things is to not let them post anything. We can take away all voice and just say, “Sorry, the Internet’s too dangerous. No one can use it.” That will certainly get rid of all hate speech online. But I don’t want to end up in that world. And there are variants of that world that various governments are trying to implement, where they get to decide what’s true or not, and you as a person don’t. I don’t want to get there either.

My hope is that we can build a set of tools that make it practical for us to do a good enough job, so that everyone is still excited about the idea that anyone can share what they want, and so that Facebook is a safe and reasonable place for people to operate in.

Spectrum: You joined Facebook in 2008, before AI was part of the company’s toolbox. When did that change? When did you begin to think that AI tools would be useful to Facebook?

Schroepfer: Ten years ago, AI wasn’t commercially practical; the technology just didn’t work very well. In 2012, there was one of those moments that a lot of people point to as the beginning of the current revolution in deep learning and AI. A computer-vision model—a neural network—was trained using what we call supervised training, and it turned out to be better than all the existing models.

Spectrum: How is that training done, and how did computer-vision models come to Facebook?

Image: Facebook

Just Broccoli? Facebook’s image analysis algorithms can tell the difference between marijuana [left] and tempura broccoli [right] better than some humans.

Schroepfer: Say I take a bunch of photos and I have people look at them. If they see a photo of a cat, they put a text label that says cat; if it’s one of a dog, the text label says dog. If you build a big enough data set and feed that to the neural net, it learns how to tell the difference between cats and dogs.

Prior to 2012, it didn’t work very well. And then in 2012, there was this moment where it seemed like, “Oh wow, this technique might work.” And a few years later we were deploying that form of technology to help us detect problematic imagery.

Spectrum: Do your AI systems work equally well on all types of prohibited content?

Schroepfer: Nudity was technically easiest. I don’t need to understand language or culture to understand that this is either a naked human or not. Violence is a much more nuanced problem, so it was harder technically to get it right. And with hate speech, not only do you have to understand the language, it may be very contextual, even tied to recent events. A week before the Christchurch shooting [New Zealand, 2019], saying “I wish you were in the mosque” probably doesn’t mean anything. A week after, that might be a terrible thing to say.

Spectrum: How much progress have you made on hate speech?

Schroepfer: AI, in the first quarter of 2020, proactively detected 88.8 percent of the hate-speech content we removed, up from 80.2 percent in the previous quarter. In the first quarter of 2020, we took action on 9.6 million pieces of content for violating our hate-speech policies.

Image: Facebook

Off Label: Sometimes image analysis isn’t enough to determine whether a picture posted violates the company’s policies. In considering these candy-colored vials of marijuana, for example, the algorithms can look at any accompanying text and, if necessary, comments on the post.

Spectrum: It sounds like you’ve expanded beyond tools that analyze images and are also using AI tools that analyze text.

Schroepfer: AI started off as very siloed. People worked on language, people worked on computer vision, people worked on video. We’ve put these things together—in production, not just as research—into multimodal classifiers.

[Schroepfer shows a photo of a pan of Rice Krispies treats, with text referring to it as a “potent batch”] This is a case in which you have an image, and then you have the text on the post. This looks like Rice Krispies. On its own, this image is fine. You put the text together with it in a bigger model; that can then understand what’s going on. That didn’t work five years ago.

Spectrum: Today, every post that goes up on Facebook is immediately checked by automated systems. Can you explain that process?

Image: Facebook

Bigger Picture: Identifying hate speech is often a matter of context. Either the text or the photo in this post isn’t hateful standing alone, but putting them together tells a different story.

Schroepfer: You upload an image and you write some text underneath it, and the systems look at both the image and the text to try to see which, if any, policies it violates. Those decisions are based on our Community Standards. It will also look at other signals on the posts, like the comments people make.

It happens relatively instantly, though there may be times things happen after the fact. Maybe you uploaded a post that had misinformation in it, and at the time you uploaded it, we didn’t know it was misinformation. The next day we fact-check something and scan again; we may find your post and take it down. As we learn new things, we’re going to go back through and look for violations of what we now know to be a problem. Or, as people comment on your post, we might update our understanding of it. If people are saying, “That’s terrible,” or “That’s mean,” or “That looks fake,” those comments may be an interesting signal.

Spectrum: How is Facebook applying its AI tools to the problem of election interference?

Schroepfer: I would split election interference into two categories. There are times when you’re going after the content, and there are times you’re going after the behavior or the authenticity of the person.

On content, if you’re sharing misinformation, saying, “It’s super Wednesday, not super Tuesday, come vote on Wednesday,” that’s a problem whether you’re an American sitting in California or a foreign actor.

Other times, people create a series of Facebook pages pretending they’re Americans, but they’re really a foreign entity. That is a problem on its own, even if all the content they’re sharing completely meets our Community Standards. The problem there is that you have a foreign government running an information operation.

There, you need different tools. What you’re trying to do is put pieces together, to say, “Wait a second. All of these pages—Martians for Justice, Moonlings for Justice, and Venusians for Justice”—are all run by an administrator with an IP address that’s outside the United States. So they’re all connected, even though they’re pretending to not be connected. That’s a very different problem than me sitting in my office in Menlo Park [Calif.] sharing misinformation.

I’m not going to go into lots of technical detail, because this is an area of adversarial nature. The fundamental problem you’re trying to solve is that there’s one entity coordinating the activity of a bunch of things that look like they’re not all one thing. So this is a series of Instagram accounts, or a series of Facebook pages, or a series of WhatsApp accounts, and they’re pretending to be totally different things. We’re looking for signals that these things are related in some way. And we’re looking through the graph [what Facebook calls its map of relationships between users] to understand the properties of this network.

Spectrum: What cutting-edge AI tools and methods have you been working on lately?

Schroepfer: Supervised learning, with humans setting up the instruction process for the AI systems, is amazingly effective. But it has a very obvious flaw: the speed at which you can develop these things is limited by how fast you can curate the data sets. If you’re dealing in a problem domain where things change rapidly, you have to rebuild a new data set and retrain the whole thing.

Self-supervision is inspired by the way people learn, by the way kids explore the world around them. To get computers to do it themselves, we take a bunch of raw data and build a way for the computer to construct its own tests. For language, you scan a bunch of Web pages, and the computer builds a test where it takes a sentence, eliminates one of the words, and figures out how to predict what word belongs there. And because it created the test, it actually knows the answer. I can use as much raw text as I can find and store because it’s processing everything itself and doesn’t require us to sit down and build the information set. In the last two years there has been a revolution in language understanding as a result of AI self-supervised learning.

Spectrum: What else are you excited about?

Schroepfer: What we’ve been working on over the last few years is multilingual understanding. Usually, when I’m trying to figure out, say, whether something is hate speech or not I have to go through the whole process of training the model in every language. I have to do that one time for every language. When you make a post, the first thing we have to figure out is what language your post is in. “Ah, that’s Spanish. So send it to the Spanish hate-speech model.”

We’ve started to build a multilingual model—one box where you can feed in text in 40 different languages and it determines whether it’s hate speech or not. This is way more effective and easier to deploy.

To geek out for a second, just the idea that you can build a model that understands a concept in multiple languages at once is crazy cool. And it not only works for hate speech, it works for a variety of things.

When we started working on this multilingual model years ago, it performed worse than every single individual model. Now, it not only works as well as the English model, but when you get to the languages where you don’t have enough data, it’s so much better. This rapid progress is very exciting.

Spectrum: How do you move new AI tools from your research labs into operational use?

Schroepfer: Engineers trying to make the next breakthrough will often say, “Cool, I’ve got a new thing and it achieved state-of-the-art results on machine translation.” And we say, “Great. How long does it take to run in production?” They say, “Well, it takes 10 seconds for every sentence to run on a CPU.” And we say, “It’ll eat our whole data center if we deploy that.” So we take that state-of-the-art model and we make it 10 or a hundred or a thousand times more efficient, maybe at the cost of a little bit of accuracy. So it’s not as good as the state-of-the-art version, but it’s something we can actually put into our data centers and run in production.

Spectrum: What’s the role of the humans in the loop? Is it true that Facebook currently employs 35,000 moderators?

Schroepfer: Yes. Right now our goal is not to reduce that. Our goal is to do a better job catching bad content. People often think that the end state will be a fully automated system. I don’t see that world coming anytime soon.

As automated systems get more sophisticated, they take more and more of the grunt work away, freeing up the humans to work on the really gnarly stuff where you have to spend an hour researching.

We also use AI to give our human moderators power tools. Say I spot this new meme that is telling everyone to vote on Wednesday rather than Tuesday. I have a tool in front of me that says, “Find variants of that throughout the system. Find every photo with the same text, find every video that mentions this thing and kill it in one shot.” Rather than, I found this one picture, but then a bunch of other people upload that misinformation in different forms.

Another important aspect of AI is that anything I can do to prevent a person from having to look at terrible things is time well spent. Whether it’s a person employed by us as a moderator or a user of our services, looking at these things is a terrible experience. If I can build systems that take the worst of the worst, the really graphic violence, and deal with that in an automated fashion, that’s worth a lot to me. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437747 High Performance Ornithopter Drone Is ...

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Android

The vast majority of drones are rotary-wing systems (like quadrotors), and for good reason: They’re cheap, they’re easy, they scale up and down well, and we’re getting quite good at controlling them, even in very challenging environments. For most applications, though, drones lose out to birds and their flapping wings in almost every way—flapping wings are very efficient, enable astonishing agility, and are much safer, able to make compliant contact with surfaces rather than shredding them like a rotor system does. But flapping wing have their challenges too: Making flapping-wing robots is so much more difficult than just duct taping spinning motors to a frame that, with a few exceptions, we haven’t seen nearly as much improvement as we have in more conventional drones.

In Science Robotics last week, a group of roboticists from Singapore, Australia, China, and Taiwan described a new design for a flapping-wing robot that offers enough thrust and control authority to make stable transitions between aggressive flight modes—like flipping and diving—while also being able to efficiently glide and gently land. While still more complex than a quadrotor in both hardware and software, this ornithopter’s advantages might make it worthwhile.

One reason that making a flapping-wing robot is difficult is because the wings have to move back and forth at high speed while electric motors spin around and around at high speed. This requires a relatively complex transmission system, which (if you don’t do it carefully), leads to weight penalties and a significant loss of efficiency. One particular challenge is that the reciprocating mass of the wings tends to cause the entire robot to flex back and forth, which alternately binds and disengages elements in the transmission system.

The researchers’ new ornithopter design mitigates the flexing problem using hinges and bearings in pairs. Elastic elements also help improve efficiency, and the ornithopter is in fact more efficient with its flapping wings than it would be with a rotary propeller-based propulsion system. Its thrust exceeds its 26-gram mass by 40 percent, which is where much of the aerobatic capability comes from. And one of the most surprising findings of this paper was that flapping-wing robots can actually be more efficient than propeller-based aircraft.

One of the most surprising findings of this paper was that flapping-wing robots can actually be more efficient than propeller-based aircraft

It’s not just thrust that’s a challenge for ornithopters: Control is much more complex as well. Like birds, ornithopters have tails, but unlike birds, they have to rely almost entirely on tail control authority, not having that bird-level of control over fine wing movements. To make an acrobatic level of control possible, the tail control surfaces on this ornithopter are huge—the tail plane area is 35 percent of the wing area. The wings can also provide some assistance in specific circumstances, as by combining tail control inputs with a deliberate stall of the things to allow the ornithopter to execute rapid flips.

With the ability to take off, hover, glide, land softly, maneuver acrobatically, fly quietly, and interact with its environment in a way that’s not (immediately) catastrophic, flapping-wing drones easily offer enough advantages to keep them interesting. Now that ornithopters been shown to be even more efficient than rotorcraft, the researchers plan to focus on autonomy with the goal of moving their robot toward real-world usefulness.

“Efficient flapping wing drone arrests high-speed flight using post-stall soaring,” by Yao-Wei Chin, Jia Ming Kok, Yong-Qiang Zhu, Woei-Leong Chan, Javaan S. Chahl, Boo Cheong Khoo, and Gih-Keong Lau from from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, National University of Singapore, Defence Science and Technology Group in Canberra, Australia, Qingdao University of Technology in Shandong, China, University of South Australia in Mawson Lakes, and National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, was published in Science Robotics. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots