Tag Archives: stories

Robot Operating System (ROS)
http://www.ros.org
Today by far the most commonly used robotics software is ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System. This is an open source software, and the most number of developers and robotics users are involved with this program with an ever increasing rate. It contains set of libraries, algorithms, developer tools and drivers for developing robotics projects. The first release of ROS was in 2010, and as of beginning of 2017, ROS has reached its 10th official release, which is called “ROS Kinetic Kame”. There are translations to 11 languages other than English, which are: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Thai and Chinese. It currently has 2000+ software libraries, which keeps increasing every year.
Many robots use ROS now, including but not limited to hobby robots, drones, educational or advanced humanoid robots, domestic robots including cleaning robot vacuums, cooking robots or telepresence robots and more, robot arms, farming robots, industrial robots, even Robonaut of NASA in space or the four legged military robots in development. A list of robots which use ROS can be found here: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots. In here, the link to each robot shows varying information such as packages, installation, resources, related software if any, usage and other details about how ROS is used for that robot. It virtually standardizes the robotics software and therefore prevents “reinventing the wheel” by individual robot developers.
We were checking the Alexa.Com (a website that gives you the ranking of websites in the world) ranking of ROS since few years, in order to track the increase in usage:

Copyright: Robokingdom LLC

As can be seen here, in May 2011, when we first checked this ranking, ROS.org was at 189,000 th place in the world from the top among all other websites in terms of unique visitors that visit the site, and it almost continuously increased its ranking. As of February 2017, it is now the 15,621st most reached website in the world, with mostly being accessed in Japan (6044 from top in Japan). Let’s not forget that even if it’s ranking in the world remained the same, let alone going up, it would still mean the traffic of the site was going up, as every day there are more websites in the world which means the same ranking means better place and more traffic. The ranking of 15,621 means ROS.org is a very high traffic website in the world right now, being accessed probably by at least hundreds of thousands of people every day, with no indication of slowing down its rise yet.
The most important result of all of this, is that the use of robots is increasing, both in terms of number and type (when you look at the type of robots that use ROS, as it also increases in variety all the time).
From Alexa, we were also able to see, that the percentage of reach among countries for ROS.org is as follows as of February 2017:
Japan 22.9%
China 19.8%
USA 13.7%
South Korea 9.0%
Germany 5.2%
With ROS, any type of sensors can be controlled, including 1d/2d range sensors, 3d range finders and cameras, audio/speech recognition sensors, cameras, environmental sensors, force/torque/touch sensors, motion capture, pose estimation, power supply, RFID, and sensor interfaces.
In ros.org site, in addition to all packages, there are also extensive tutorials and a discussion board that one can ask questions and share knowledge.
ROS also has an industrial section, the version of software modified for industrial applications. It is called ROS industrial, and can be reached at: http://rosindustrial.org/. Although we see domestic robots with new abilities or advanced research projects that aim to develop capabilities of robotics every year, according to the results of a study that is shown on http://rosindustrial.org/the-challenge/ website, the abilities of industrial robots are not progressing and the abilities are restricted to welding, material handling, dispensing, coating (although we know that they do additional tasks such as packaging, inspection, labeling etc…). ROS Industrial aims to solve this challenge by providing a common skeleton to all developers, with its extensive and stronger software architecture, than other individual robotics programs.
ROS makes possible to program a robot’s navigation and limbs, regardless of what hardware is used. Therefore it is a highly promising tool to standardize operations of robots all over the world. It has high level commands for anything a robot can do. ROS starts its operation in a robot first by obtaining information about the robot’s characteristics, such as the length and movement limits of limbs, servos involved, sensors and then it will communicate this data to higher level algorithms.
A discussion forum that users and developers of ROS where users can share information and ask questions also exist, at ROS website : http://answers.ros.org/questions/
The post ROS keeps growing in use appeared first on Roboticmagazine. Continue reading →

Smart-television maker Vizio agreed to pay a penalty this month for spying on 11 million customers. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the company captured second-by-second information on what customers viewed, combined it with their gender, age and income, and sold it to third parties.
How much was the fine for Vizio, which has sales in excess of $3 billion? It was $2.2 million — barely a slap on the wrist.
These kinds of privacy breaches are increasingly common as billions of devices now become part of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). Whether it be our TV sets, cars, bathroom scales, children’s toys or medical devices, we are already surrounded by everyday objects equipped with sensors and computers. And the companies that make them can get away with being careless with consumer security — and with stealing customer data.
Vizio has been accused of exposing its customers to hackers before. In November 2015, security researchers at Avast demonstrated how easy it was for hackers to gain complete access to the WiFi networks that Vizio’s TVs were connected to and that it recorded customer data even when they explicitly opted out of its terms of service.
On Black Friday in 2015, hackers broke into the servers of Chinese toymaker VTech and lifted personal information on nearly 5 million parents and more than 6 million children. The data haul included home addresses, names, birth dates, email addresses and passwords. Worse still, it included photographs and chat logs between parents and their children. VTech paid no fine and changed its terms of service to require that customers acknowledge their private data “may be intercepted or later acquired by unauthorized parties.”
Regulations and consumer protections are desperately needed.
One option would be to hold the manufacturers strictly liable for these hacks, to financially motivate them to improve product security. In the same way that seat belt manufacturers are responsible for the safety of their products, IoT device makers would be presumed to be liable unless they could prove that they had taken all reasonable precautions. The penalties could be high enough to put a company out of business.
But this would be inequitable. One of the factors enabling such hacking is that users don’t use sufficiently complex passwords and thus leave the front door unlocked. It could also stifle innovation, with the big players avoiding the possibility of extreme penalties by becoming averse to innovations, and small players avoiding entering the market because they lack the resources to handle possible litigation.
Duke School of Law researcher Jeremy Muhlfelder says that copyright law has a history of Supreme Court cases that have ruled on this exact principle, of not wanting to curb the “next big thing” by holding innovators liable for their innovations. Innovators themselves wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be liable for how carelessly their innovations are incorporated into new products. But imposing strict liabilities on manufacturers, since it would lead indirectly to canceling the rewards of innovation, might not be legally realistic either.

"IoT devices would be deemed inherently dangerous, and thus the producer would be strictly liable for faults unless an independent agency certifies the devices as secure."

A more reasonable solution may be along the lines of what attorney Matt Sherer recommends in a paper on regulating artificial intelligence systems that was published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology: Impose strict liability but with the potential for pre-certification that removes the liability. IoT devices would be deemed inherently dangerous, and thus the producer would be strictly liable for faults unless an independent agency certifies the devices as secure. This would be similar to the UL certification provided by Underwriters Laboratories, a government-approved company that carries out testing and certification to ensure products meet safety specifications.
Equipment certification is also one of the recommendations that former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler made in a letter to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) regarding the government’s response to the October 2016 attack on the Internet. He proposed a public-private partnership that creates a set of best practices for securing devices, the certification or self-certification of products, and labeling requirements to make consumers aware of the risks. Wheeler proposed “market-based incentives and appropriate regulatory oversight where the market does not, or cannot, do the job effectively.”
As Wheeler also noted, addressing IoT threats is a national imperative and must not be stalled by the transition to a new president. This is beyond politics. It is a matter of national security and consumer safety.
Image Credit: Shutterstock Continue reading →

This article is part of a new series exploring the skills leaders must learn to make the most of rapid change in an increasingly disruptive world. The first article in the series, “How the Most Successful Leaders Will Thrive in an Exponential World,” broadly outlines four critical leadership skills—futurist, technologist, innovator, and humanitarian—and how they work together.
Today's post, part two in the series, takes a more detailed look at leaders as futurists. Upcoming articles will explore leaders as technologists, innovators, and humanitarians.
Science fiction writer William Gibson famously once said, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” As leaders, how do we embrace the elements of the future that are here, and the ones that are just around the corner? By thinking more like a futurist.
In times of increasing change and complexity, it can be difficult to envision bold new futures with any certainty. Our go-to strategies for thinking about the future typically start with the elements that are known, such as projecting out historic results to future performance, analyzing existing competitors, or focusing on executing near-term results.
What’s missing are systematic approaches to understanding and taking advantage of the unknown. This is why leaders need to embrace skills, practices and behaviors of futurists.
Futurists don’t have secret powers to predict the future. They don’t have a Magic 8 Ball or special basket of fortune-cookie predictions. Rather, futurists discipline themselves to question the status quo. They regularly scan external trends, adjacent industries and underlying forces. They consider diverse perspectives. And they boldly tell stories about the future before all of the data is available to back it up.
Why Thinking Like a Futurist Is Valuable
We’ve been trained to think of the future as a linear extension of what we know, typically imagining change as a 10 percent improvement (or decline) from what we see around us.
We think we have a better understanding of the future than we do. Our implicit views about the future are so ingrained in business plans, financial models, and strategy conversations that leaders often don’t take the time to articulate underlying assumptions. When they do, they may discover plans rely on variables that are far from given and perhaps not the only options.
The future lives in a very broad set of possibilities, and these can unfold surprisingly quickly.
Technological, environmental and political changes will likely disrupt your business. How can you prepare for a different, even unimaginable world that will arrive faster than projected?
This is where methods commonly employed by futurists can help you strengthen your plans. Disciplined methods of strategic foresight systematically scan, analyze, probe and project the future beyond what we intuitively think might be possible.
How to See Ahead Like a Futurist
The first step is identifying the most important and uncertain macro forces shaping your business. These can usually be divided into five broad categories: social, technological, economic, environmental and political. (Tip: Recall these with the acronym STEEP.)
Under each of these categories, there are a number of driving forces and external variables that might lead to very different futures.
An insurance company, for example, might track variables related to the extension of human life (social), technologies disrupting treatment of chronic health conditions (technology), the rate of change from traditional employer-driven work arrangements to more independent “gig” jobs (economic), the frequency and impact of natural disasters (environmental), and the government’s stance toward regulation and potential new laws (political).
Once these high-impact variables are identified and prioritized, futurists gather diverse inputs to establish a range of how the variables are likely to play out over time. The further ahead they go, the wider the range of possibilities.
Futurists call this the cone of possibilities and carefully organize their forecasts into four buckets.
What are possible futures? This is the full range of events that could unfold.
What are plausible futures? This is what we believe is possible but unlikely.
What are probable futures? This is what’s most likely to happen.
What are preferred futures? This is what we want to happen.

Although these futures stem from a common set of identified variables, the derived outcomes are significantly different.
This can be an enlightening strategic exercise for leaders: Is your organization overemphasizing its preferred future and neglecting the full range of possible futures? If so, perhaps there isn’t enough hedging of investments. Does your organization default to the plausible future? Consider broadening the view by investigating new technologies, adjacent industries and early startups to inform alternative strategic options.
Paul Saffo, Singularity University’s Chair of Futures Studies and Foresight, repeatedly warns us that “sacred cows make the best burgers.” A quick way to make your organization more future-focused is by asking team members to dive into their networks and scout for evidence related to the key variables you’ve outlined and post them on an analog or digital wall.
How to Create Preferred Futures
Once you’ve identified your preferred future, you can start to identify key activities and milestones that would help create that future.
Backcasting is the act of imagining a preferred future and then stepping backward toward the present, repeatedly probing what has to happen to enable each step.
Backcasting is anchored in an aspirational future state rather than being constrained by limitations of the current state. This allows people to create their own richly detailed stories of the future and leads naturally to the discussion: “How can our product/service do that?”
To dream up bold, new possibilities, try imagining an outcome 10 times better, cheaper, or more impactful than what exists today. What if, for example, we all had access to personalized artificial intelligence wellness care providers through emotional robots? Or what if the majority of our transportation services were provided by autonomous vehicles?
Now step backward from each vision to discover what’s needed to turn it into reality.
Like forecasting, backcasting can be improved by seeking diverse input. For example, consider carving out a few hours in a company-wide meeting to craft “headlines from the future.” Just a few hours of collaboration can spark new thinking and ignite fresh ideas. Such exercises can also fuel interdisciplinary engagement and encourage a sense of collective responsibility.
Don’t be afraid to get creative and even ditch the PowerPoint slides. Lowe’s Innovation Labs’ director Kyle Nel uses narrative driven innovation to imagine new futures. To jumpstart his efforts, Nel brought in science fiction writers and illustrators to create comic books that showcased possible alternatives stretching far beyond smaller, incremental changes, helping the company's leadership concretely imagine and visualize the Lowe’s store of the future.
Getting Comfortable With Ambiguity
One of the most challenging aspects of practicing the skills of a futurist is getting comfortable with the reality that we simply cannot predict the future. For many senior leaders, this is deeply unsettling. How can we possibly make big bets on the future without all the facts and data?
Most of us are uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. Boldly looking ahead elicits doubt, fear, and anxiety — emotions we’d rather hold in check. We can learn to overcome our discomfort with the unknown, and even begin to revel in it, by continuously pushing ourselves to learn new things and seek out new experiences and people.
We are all capable of becoming better futurists. In doing so, we not only architect hope of new possibilities, we also build more flexible, adaptive and resilient organizations in the process.
Image Credit: Zoe Brinkley Continue reading →