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#437689 GITAI Sending Autonomous Robot to Space ...

We’ve been keeping a close watch on GITAI since early last year—what caught our interest initially is the history of the company, which includes a bunch of folks who started in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials as SCHAFT, got swallowed by Google, narrowly avoided being swallowed by SoftBank, and are now designing robots that can work in space.

The GITAI YouTube channel has kept us more to less up to date on their progress so far, and GITAI has recently announced the next step in this effort: The deployment of one of their robots on board the International Space Station in 2021.

Photo: GITAI

GITAI’s S1 is a task-specific 8-degrees-of-freedom arm with an integrated sensing and computing system and 1-meter reach.

GITAI has been working on a variety of robots for space operations, the most sophisticated of which is a humanoid torso called G1, which is controlled through an immersive telepresence system. What will be launching into space next year is a more task-specific system called the S1, which is an 8-degrees-of-freedom arm with an integrated sensing and computing system that can be wall-mounted and has a 1-meter reach.

The S1 will be living on board a commercially funded, pressurized airlock-extension module called Bishop, developed by NanoRacks. Mounted on the inside of the Bishop module, the S1 will have access to a task board and a small assembly area, where it will demonstrate common crew intra-vehicular activity, or IVA—tasks like flipping switches, turning knobs, and managing cables. It’ll also do some in-space assembly, or ISA, attaching panels to create a solar array.

Here’s a demonstration of some task board activities, conducted on Earth in a mockup of Bishop:

GITAI says that “all operations conducted by the S1 GITAI robotic arm will be autonomous, followed by some teleoperations from Nanoracks’ in-house mission control.” This is interesting, because from what we’ve seen until now, GITAI has had a heavy emphasis on telepresence, with a human in the loop to get stuff done. As GITAI’s founder and CEO Sho Nakanose commented to us a year ago, “Telepresence robots have far better performance and can be made practical much quicker than autonomous robots, so first we are working on making telepresence robots practical.”

So what’s changed? “GITAI has been concentrating on teleoperations to demonstrate the dexterity of our robot, but now it’s time to show our capabilities to do the same this time with autonomy,” Nakanose told us last week. “In an environment with minimum communication latency, it would be preferable to operate a robot more with teleoperations to enhance the capability of the robot, since with the current technology level of AI, what a robot can do autonomously is very limited. However, in an environment where the latency becomes noticeable, it would become more efficient to have a mixture of autonomy and teleoperations depending on the application. Eventually, in an ideal world, a robot will operate almost fully autonomously with minimum human cognizance.”

“In an environment where the latency becomes noticeable, it would become more efficient to have a mixture of autonomy and teleoperations depending on the application. Eventually, in an ideal world, a robot will operate almost fully autonomously with minimum human cognizance.”
—Sho Nakanose, GITAI founder and CEO

Nakanose says that this mission will help GITAI to “acquire the skills, know-how, and experience necessary to prepare a robot to be ISS compatible, prov[ing] the maturity of our technology in the microgravity environment.” Success would mean conducting both IVA and ISA experiments as planned (autonomous and teleop for IVA, fully autonomous for ISA), which would be pretty awesome, but we’re told that GITAI has already received a research and development order for space robots from a private space company, and Nakanose expects that “by the mid-2020s, we will be able to show GITAI's robots working in space on an actual mission.”

NanoRacks is schedule to launch the Bishop module on SpaceX CRS-21 in November. The S1 will be launched separately in 2021, and a NASA astronaut will install the robot and then leave it alone to let it start demonstrating how work in space can be made both safer and cheaper once the humans have gotten out of the way. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437610 How Intel’s OpenBot Wants to Make ...

You could make a pretty persuasive argument that the smartphone represents the single fastest area of technological progress we’re going to experience for the foreseeable future. Every six months or so, there’s something with better sensors, more computing power, and faster connectivity. Many different areas of robotics are benefiting from this on a component level, but over at Intel Labs, they’re taking a more direct approach with a project called OpenBot that turns US $50 worth of hardware and your phone into a mobile robot that can support “advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments.”

This work aims to address two key challenges in robotics: accessibility and scalability. Smartphones are ubiquitous and are becoming more powerful by the year. We have developed a combination of hardware and software that turns smartphones into robots. The resulting robots are inexpensive but capable. Our experiments have shown that a $50 robot body powered by a smartphone is capable of person following and real-time autonomous navigation. We hope that the presented work will open new opportunities for education and large-scale learning via thousands of low-cost robots deployed around the world.

Smartphones point to many possibilities for robotics that we have not yet exploited. For example, smartphones also provide a microphone, speaker, and screen, which are not commonly found on existing navigation robots. These may enable research and applications at the confluence of human-robot interaction and natural language processing. We also expect the basic ideas presented in this work to extend to other forms of robot embodiment, such as manipulators, aerial vehicles, and watercraft.

One of the interesting things about this idea is how not-new it is. The highest profile phone robot was likely the $150 Romo, from Romotive, which raised a not-insignificant amount of money on Kickstarter in 2012 and 2013 for a little mobile chassis that accepted one of three different iPhone models and could be controlled via another device or operated somewhat autonomously. It featured “computer vision, autonomous navigation, and facial recognition” capabilities, but was really designed to be a toy. Lack of compatibility hampered Romo a bit, and there wasn’t a lot that it could actually do once the novelty wore off.

As impressive as smartphone hardware was in a robotics context (even back in 2013), we’re obviously way, way beyond that now, and OpenBot figures that smartphones now have enough clout and connectivity that turning them into mobile robots is a good idea. You know, again. We asked Intel Labs’ Matthias Muller why now was the right time to launch OpenBot, and he mentioned things like the existence of a large maker community with broad access to 3D printing as well as open source software that makes broader development easier.

And of course, there’s the smartphone hardware: “Smartphones have become extremely powerful and feature dedicated AI processors in addition to CPUs and GPUs,” says Mueller. “Almost everyone owns a very capable smartphone now. There has been a big boost in sensor performance, especially in cameras, and a lot of the recent developments for VR applications are well aligned with robotic requirements for state estimation.” OpenBot has been tested with 10 recent Android phones, and since camera placement tends to be similar and USB-C is becoming the charging and communications standard, compatibility is less of an issue nowadays.

Image: OpenBot

Intel researchers created this table comparing OpenBot to other wheeled robot platforms, including Amazon’s DeepRacer, MIT’s Duckiebot, iRobot’s Create-2, and Thymio. The top group includes robots based on RC trucks; the bottom group includes navigation robots for deployment at scale and in education. Note that the cost of the smartphone needed for OpenBot is not included in this comparison.

If you’d like an OpenBot of your own, you don’t need to know all that much about robotics hardware or software. For the hardware, you probably need some basic mechanical and electronics experience—think Arduino project level. The software is a little more complicated; there’s a pretty good walkthrough to get some relatively sophisticated behaviors (like autonomous person following) up and running, but things rapidly degenerate into a command line interface that could be intimidating for new users. We did ask about why OpenBot isn’t ROS-based to leverage the robustness and reach of that community, and Muller said that ROS “adds unnecessary overhead,” although “if someone insists on using ROS with OpenBot, it should not be very difficult.”

Without building OpenBot to explicitly be part of an existing ecosystem, the challenge going forward is to make sure that the project is consistently supported, lest it wither and die like so many similar robotics projects have before it. “We are committed to the OpenBot project and will do our best to maintain it,” Mueller assures us. “We have a good track record. Other projects from our group (e.g. CARLA, Open3D, etc.) have also been maintained for several years now.” The inherently open source nature of the project certainly helps, although it can be tricky to rely too much on community contributions, especially when something like this is first starting out.

The OpenBot folks at Intel, we’re told, are already working on a “bigger, faster and more powerful robot body that will be suitable for mass production,” which would certainly help entice more people into giving this thing a go. They’ll also be focusing on documentation, which is probably the most important but least exciting part about building a low-cost community focused platform like this. And as soon as they’ve put together a way for us actual novices to turn our phones into robots that can do cool stuff for cheap, we’ll definitely let you know. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437577 A Swarm of Cyborg Cockroaches That Lives ...

Digital Nature Group at the University of Tsukuba in Japan is working towards a “post ubiquitous computing era consisting of seamless combination of computational resources and non-computational resources.” By “non-computational resources,” they mean leveraging the natural world, which for better or worse includes insects.

At small scales, the capabilities of insects far exceed the capabilities of robots. I get that. And I get that turning cockroaches into an army of insect cyborgs could be useful in a variety of ways. But what makes me fundamentally uncomfortable is the idea that “in the future, they’ll appear out of nowhere without us recognizing it, fulfilling their tasks and then hiding.” In other words, you’ll have cyborg cockroaches hiding all over your house, all the time.

Warning: This article contains video of cockroaches being modified with cybernetic implants that some people may find upsetting.

Remote controlling cockroaches isn’t a new idea, and it’s a fairly simple one. By stimulating the left or right antenna nerves of the cockroach, you can make it think that it’s running into something, and get it to turn in the opposite direction. Add wireless connectivity, some fiducial markers, an overhead camera system, and a bunch of cyborg cockroaches, and you have a resilient swarm that can collaborate on tasks. The researchers suggest that the swarm could be used as a display (by making each cockroach into a pixel), to transport objects, or to draw things. There’s also some mention of “input or haptic interfaces or an audio device,” which frankly sounds horrible.

The reason to use cockroaches is that you can take advantage of their impressive ruggedness, efficiency, high power to weight ratio, and mobility. They can also feed themselves, meaning that whenever you don’t need the swarm to perform some task for you, you can deactivate the control system and let them scurry off to find crumbs in dark places.

There are many other swarm robotic platforms that can perform what you’re seeing these cyborg roaches do, but according to the researchers, the reason to use cockroaches is that you can take advantage of their impressive ruggedness, efficiency, high power to weight ratio, and mobility. They’re a lot messier (yay biology!), but they can also feed themselves, meaning that whenever you don’t need the swarm to perform some task for you, you can deactivate the control system and let them scurry off to find crumbs in dark places. And when you need them again, turn the control system on and experience the nightmare of your cyborg cockroach swarm reassembling itself from all over your house.

While we’re on the subject of cockroach hacking, we would be doing you a disservice if we didn’t share some of project leader Yuga Tsukuda’s other projects. Here’s a cockroach-powered clock, about which the researchers note that “it is difficult to control the cockroaches when trying to control them by electrical stimulation because they move spontaneously. However, by cutting off the head and removing the brain, they do not move spontaneously and the control by the computer becomes easy.” So, zombie cockroaches. Good then.

And if that’s not enough for you, how about this:

The researchers describe this project as an “attempt to use cockroaches for makeup by sticking them on the face.” They stick electrodes into the cockroaches to make them wiggle their legs when electrical stimulation is applied. And the peacock feathers? They “make the cockroach movement bigger, and create a cosmic mystery.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437491 3.2 Billion Images and 720,000 Hours of ...

Twitter over the weekend “tagged” as manipulated a video showing US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supposedly forgetting which state he’s in while addressing a crowd.

Biden’s “hello Minnesota” greeting contrasted with prominent signage reading “Tampa, Florida” and “Text FL to 30330.”

The Associated Press’s fact check confirmed the signs were added digitally and the original footage was indeed from a Minnesota rally. But by the time the misleading video was removed it already had more than one million views, The Guardian reports.

A FALSE video claiming Biden forgot what state he was in was viewed more than 1 million times on Twitter in the past 24 hours

In the video, Biden says “Hello, Minnesota.”

The event did indeed happen in MN — signs on stage read MN

But false video edited signs to read Florida pic.twitter.com/LdHQVaky8v

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 1, 2020

If you use social media, the chances are you see (and forward) some of the more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily. When faced with such a glut of content, how can we know what’s real and what’s not?

While one part of the solution is an increased use of content verification tools, it’s equally important we all boost our digital media literacy. Ultimately, one of the best lines of defense—and the only one you can control—is you.

Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing
Misinformation (when you accidentally share false content) and disinformation (when you intentionally share it) in any medium can erode trust in civil institutions such as news organizations, coalitions and social movements. However, fake photos and videos are often the most potent.

For those with a vested political interest, creating, sharing and/or editing false images can distract, confuse and manipulate viewers to sow discord and uncertainty (especially in already polarized environments). Posters and platforms can also make money from the sharing of fake, sensationalist content.

Only 11-25 percent of journalists globally use social media content verification tools, according to the International Centre for Journalists.

Could You Spot a Doctored Image?
Consider this photo of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Giving the middle finger #DopeHistoricPics pic.twitter.com/5W38DRaLHr

— Dope Historic Pics (@dopehistoricpic) December 20, 2013

This altered image clones part of the background over King Jr’s finger, so it looks like he’s flipping off the camera. It has been shared as genuine on Twitter, Reddit, and white supremacist websites.

In the original 1964 photo, King flashed the “V for victory” sign after learning the US Senate had passed the civil rights bill.

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This photo was taken on June 19th, 1964, showing Dr King giving a peace sign after hearing that the civil rights bill had passed the senate. @snopes pic.twitter.com/LXHmwMYZS5

— Willie's Reserve (@WilliesReserve) January 21, 2019

Beyond adding or removing elements, there’s a whole category of photo manipulation in which images are fused together.

Earlier this year, a photo of an armed man was photoshopped by Fox News, which overlaid the man onto other scenes without disclosing the edits, the Seattle Times reported.

You mean this guy who’s been photoshopped into three separate photos released by Fox News? pic.twitter.com/fAXpIKu77a

— Zander Yates ザンダーイェーツ (@ZanderYates) June 13, 2020

Similarly, the image below was shared thousands of times on social media in January, during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires. The AFP’s fact check confirmed it is not authentic and is actually a combination of several separate photos.

Image is more powerful than screams of Greta. A silent girl is holding a koala. She looks straight at you from the waters of the ocean where they found a refuge. She is wearing a breathing mask. A wall of fire is behind them. I do not know the name of the photographer #Australia pic.twitter.com/CrTX3lltdh

— EVC Music (@EVCMusicUK) January 6, 2020

Fully and Partially Synthetic Content
Online, you’ll also find sophisticated “deepfake” videos showing (usually famous) people saying or doing things they never did. Less advanced versions can be created using apps such as Zao and Reface.

Or, if you don’t want to use your photo for a profile picture, you can default to one of several websites offering hundreds of thousands of AI-generated, photorealistic images of people.

These people don’t exist, they’re just images generated by artificial intelligence. Generated Photos, CC BY

Editing Pixel Values and the (not so) Simple Crop
Cropping can greatly alter the context of a photo, too.

We saw this in 2017, when a US government employee edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger, according to The Guardian. The staffer cropped out the empty space “where the crowd ended” for a set of pictures for Trump.

Views of the crowds at the inaugurations of former US President Barack Obama in 2009 (left) and President Donald Trump in 2017 (right). AP

But what about edits that only alter pixel values such as color, saturation, or contrast?

One historical example illustrates the consequences of this. In 1994, Time magazine’s cover of OJ Simpson considerably “darkened” Simpson in his police mugshot. This added fuel to a case already plagued by racial tension, to which the magazine responded, “No racial implication was intended, by Time or by the artist.”

Tools for Debunking Digital Fakery
For those of us who don’t want to be duped by visual mis/disinformation, there are tools available—although each comes with its own limitations (something we discuss in our recent paper).

Invisible digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution. However, it isn’t widespread and requires buy-in from both content publishers and distributors.

Reverse image search (such as Google’s) is often free and can be helpful for identifying earlier, potentially more authentic copies of images online. That said, it’s not foolproof because it:

Relies on unedited copies of the media already being online.
Doesn’t search the entire web.
Doesn’t always allow filtering by publication time. Some reverse image search services such as TinEye support this function, but Google’s doesn’t.
Returns only exact matches or near-matches, so it’s not thorough. For instance, editing an image and then flipping its orientation can fool Google into thinking it’s an entirely different one.

Most Reliable Tools Are Sophisticated
Meanwhile, manual forensic detection methods for visual mis/disinformation focus mostly on edits visible to the naked eye, or rely on examining features that aren’t included in every image (such as shadows). They’re also time-consuming, expensive, and need specialized expertise.

Still, you can access work in this field by visiting sites such as Snopes.com—which has a growing repository of “fauxtography.”

Computer vision and machine learning also offer relatively advanced detection capabilities for images and videos. But they too require technical expertise to operate and understand.

Moreover, improving them involves using large volumes of “training data,” but the image repositories used for this usually don’t contain the real-world images seen in the news.

If you use an image verification tool such as the REVEAL project’s image verification assistant, you might need an expert to help interpret the results.

The good news, however, is that before turning to any of the above tools, there are some simple questions you can ask yourself to potentially figure out whether a photo or video on social media is fake. Think:

Was it originally made for social media?
How widely and for how long was it circulated?
What responses did it receive?
Who were the intended audiences?

Quite often, the logical conclusions drawn from the answers will be enough to weed out inauthentic visuals. You can access the full list of questions, put together by Manchester Metropolitan University experts, here.

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

Image Credit: Simon Steinberger from Pixabay Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437224 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

VIRTUAL REALITY
How Holographic Tech Is Shrinking VR Displays to the Size of Sunglasses
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“…researchers at Facebook Reality Labs are using holographic film to create a prototype VR display that looks less like ski goggles and more like lightweight sunglasses. With a total thickness less than 9mm—and without significant compromises on field of view or resolution—these displays could one day make today’s bulky VR headset designs completely obsolete.”

TRANSPORTATION
Stock Surge Makes Tesla the World’s Most Valuable Automaker
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“It’s a remarkable milestone for a company that sells far fewer cars than its leading rivals. …But Wall Street is apparently very optimistic about Tesla’s prospects for future growth and profits. Many experts expect a global shift to battery electric vehicles over the next decade or two, and Tesla is leading that revolution.”

FUTURE OF FOOD
These Plant-Based Steaks Come Out of a 3D Printer
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“The startup, launched by cofounders who met while developing digital printers at HP, created custom 3D printers that aim to replicate meat by printing layers of what they call ‘alt-muscle,’ ‘alt-fat,’ and ‘alt-blood,’ forming a complex 3D model.”

AUTOMATION
The US Air Force Is Turning Old F-16s Into AI-Powered Fighters
Amit Katwala | Wired UK
“Maverick’s days are numbered. The long-awaited sequel to Top Gun is due to hit cinemas in December, but the virtuoso fighter pilots at its heart could soon be a thing of the past. The trustworthy wingman will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence, built into a drone, or an existing fighter jet with no one in the cockpit.”

ROBOTICS
NASA Wants to Build a Steam-Powered Hopping Robot to Explore Icy Worlds
Georgina Torbet | Digital Trends
“A bouncing, ball-like robot that’s powered by steam sounds like something out of a steampunk fantasy, but it could be the ideal way to explore some of the distant, icy environments of our solar system. …This round robot would be the size of a soccer ball, with instruments held in the center of a metal cage, and it would use steam-powered thrusters to make jumps from one area of terrain to the next.”

FUTURE
Could Teleporting Ever Work?
Daniel Kolitz | Gizmodo
“Have the major airlines spent decades suppressing teleportation research? Have a number of renowned scientists in the field of teleportation studies disappeared under mysterious circumstances? Is there a cork board at the FBI linking Delta Airlines, shady foreign security firms, and dozens of murdered research professors? …No. None of that is the case. Which begs the question: why doesn’t teleportation exist yet?”

ENERGY
Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ Could Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
Daniel Oberhaus | Wired
“Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It’s called triso fuel, and it’s like a radioactive gobstopper.”

TECHNOLOGY
A Plan to Redesign the Internet Could Make Apps That No One Controls
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Techology Review
“[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘home of Mind’ is ruled today by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—a small handful of the biggest companies on earth. Yet listening to the mix of computer scientists and tech investors speak at an online event on June 30 hosted by the Dfinity Foundation…it is clear that a desire for revolution is brewing.”

IMPACT
To Save the World, the UN Is Turning It Into a Computer Simulation
Will Bedingfield | Wired
“The UN has now announced its new secret recipe to achieve [its 17 sustainable development goals or SDGs]: a computer simulation called Policy Priority Inference (PPI). …PPI is a budgeting software—it simulates a government and its bureaucrats as they allocate money on projects that might move a country closer to an SDG.”

Image credit: Benjamin Suter / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots