Erector

Formal Study and Military Anecdotes Observe Human-Robot Attachment

by RayRenteria

When I discovered Joel Garreau’s article Bots on the Ground, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He described a scenario where a new kind of military robot was being demonstrated to an Army colonel. The robot was long and segmented with many legs and designed to step on and trigger land mines. It was designed by famed BEAM roboticist Mark Tilden whose robots can perform with primitive behaviors toward a larger goal even if they become damaged. The robot was successfully detonating land mines, losing pieces of itself as it moved along to the next mine. When the observing colonel saw the last vestiges of a robot apparently struggling to make its way to the next land mine, the colonel stopped the demonstration and declared the whole thing as inhumane. Here’s an excerpt:

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however — an Army colonel — blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What’s wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

Garreau went on to share other stories about soldiers who have named, promoted, and in some cases award Purple Hearts to their robots.

Given the aggressive push to introduce more robots into the military, the interactions between humans and their robots in the armed forces has become more common than one might find in civilian life. Observations such as the ones Garreau describes are likely an indication of what we as civilians can expect when the per-capita of robot-to-humans becomes similar to that in the field.

One example of a group with robots comes from the popularity of the Roomba floor cleaning robot from iRobot. A study from Georgia Tech formally observed and documented the bond between Roombas and their users.

Some interesting observations included

A person’s introduction of his robot to his parents
Bringing the Roomba along on travels
Cleaning the floor for the Roomba

There were other incidents of anthropomorphizing but none were very surprising. The tendency for humans to want to name and bond with their mechanical counterparts dates way back. Just think about the bond seafaring captains have had with their ships.

The recent study and Garreau’s observations indicate a readiness to accept robots into human life. The introductions of iRobot’s ConnectR and Erector’s Spykee indicate that business is ready to deliver.

Sources:

Two Telepresence Robots Merging into The Mainstream

by RayRenteria

It looks like Meccano woke up.

At the Digital Life show in New York last week, the Spykee demo guys were seen and heard discussing the value of being able to conduct business in New York while “on your computer in Paris.” Clearly, most eight-year-old boys aren’t going to find this next-generation concept of telecommuting as compelling as the neon-like green light tubes that wrap Spykee or the ability to spy on a sister and her friends during a slumber party.

In our writeup, Missing the Point with a Potentially Game Changing “Toy,” we asserted that the low cost and durability of this technology convergence was going to have a big impact on the consumer robotics world. Based on the monologue in the video, it seems that Meccano is starting to believe that. Unfortunately, their message feels like an afterthought. The UI controller screens still look like a video game console and you still have to put Spykee together from a kit of 200 pieces.

iRobot nailed it from the beginning.

While we were appreciating and criticizing Spykee, iRobot was busy working on their own telepresence robot–ConnectR. When it was announced at DigitalLife last week, it was expressly touted as a “virtual presence” robot with working adults in mind.

Here, we take the opportunity to make a side-by-side comparison of the two technologies:

iRobot ConnectR	Erector Spykee
Sold as a complete system.	Sold as an easy-to-assemble kit.
Marketed as a serious quality-of-life improvement technology. They target adults generally, and target working parents specifically.	Being marketed as a “spy toy” for older kids and young teens.

Controller UI:	Controller UI:
The iRobot ConnectR controller UI is a very simple console with a very mature design. Various functions are in different screens in order that the user has controls for the task at hand.	The Spykee controller UI is cool–as it should be if one were targeting young kids wanting to play with his robot. It’s functional but it has all the problems of a typical one-screen-does-it-all application. Considering the (original) target audience this UI is good. It looks like a game.
Communication protocol based on proprietary “Virtual Presence Network.”	Communication protocol based on popular Skype technology.
Automatically finds docking station to recharge when batteries are low.	Automatically finds docking station to recharge when batteries are low.
Price: $499 The fine print says that the price includes one year of Virtual Presence Network suggesting the need for a subscription later.	Price: Right around $300

It’s unclear if ConnectR is programmable; however, iRobot has an established development platform called “Create” and it seems very reasonable to expect that they would soon introduce a client-side development environment that could enable ConnectR to be opened up to application developers looking to build on that platform.

It’s easy to envision a Web 2.0 UI that sits on somebody’s MySpace or Facebook page that invites visitors to jump into Spykee and have an immersive conversation with the owner of the page. Spykee is built on the Open Source Skype technology which suggests that a documented controller API is just around the corner. I suspect there are discrete commands that are IM’ed to and from Spykee by the controller UI which should make it relatively easy to hack. What’d I’d really like to see is a sanctioned document maintained by Meccano that describes this method. Until then, I can’t declare Spykee programmable.

Both robots have a place in the market. The adults that are targeted for the ConnectR trust the iRobot brand and the company’s experience in robotics. It’s an investment akin to a businessperson buying an IBM PC as opposed to an Apple in the early 80′s.

In spite of Meccano’s new push to sell Spykee to adults, kids will buy it. Parents will buy it for them. And the kids will play with their Spykee. He looks cool and Meccano has substantial experience in building durable toys that can take the torture that young children can dish out.

The fact that both companies came up with such similar ideas is a validation of the demand they perceive exists in the market. Ultimately, this fact and the release of these products has progressed human-robot interaction one more step.

iRobot Unveils Telepresence Robot

by RayRenteria

Today at Digital Life, iRobot unveiled its new “Virtual Visiting Robot” named ConnectR (pronounced “connector”). iRobot is positioning this robot squarely in the telepresence market making value statements very similar to those we wrote about several weeks ago. Unlike the marketeers at Erector (via Meccano), iRobot is not targeting children ages eight and up with the ConnectR. They’re not even targeting hobbyists or research institutions. They’re targeting commonfolk who work. Their pitch?

Participate in family moments even though you’re working late.
On a business trip? Read your kids a story and see their faces light up
Join the fun from near or far
Throw a party from a thousand miles away
Tell Fido he’s a “good boy” even while you’re on vacation

The robot was available to a limited audience under a pilot program where customers committed to providing feedback on the robot’s performance. Under that program, ConnectR was available for $199. There was a limited quantity and it was quickly exhausted. The robot will be made available to the rest of us for $499 in mid-2008.

Braintech’s Latest Vision Software to Support Microsoft Robotics Studio

by RayRenteria

In a move consistent with the coalescing of robotics market players, Braintech has released a version of its vision software VOLTS-IQ ™ SDK that is designed to work with Microsoft Robotics Studio.

According to their site,

Braintech specializes in the expert design and integration of artificial intelligence for Vision Guided Robotic (VGR) software and solutions. [Their] applications are used for manufacturing and Internet based support and include quality inspection, process control and complex assembly.

That may be true, but this move to support Microsoft Robotics Studio portends the moving into the service and personal robotics space. Babak Habibi, Braintech’s CTO, states: “We are passionate about our approach to robot vision that is centered on providing actionable information to robots. This contrasts with traditional vision libraries, which provide numerous low level functions but burden the developer with the task of figuring out how to link and configure these functions to produce usable vision information such as an object’s type or position. With the VOLTS-IQ SDK, robotic developers can focus on the evolution of a product or project as opposed to getting bogged down in the details of which edge detection method or image filter to use”. (AMEN BROTHER!)

I viewed a demonstration of the Vi_Tracker software and studied the API. This software is fantastically easy to use. VOLTS-IQ’s compatibility with Microsoft Robotics Studio will open up some interesting doors to the next generation of application developers.

The demonstration video shows a user circumscribing a target object in the video stream and Vi_Tracker instantly following and tracking it. The software does a really good job of keeping up even with partial occlusion. It also maintains the orientation of the target object.

My personal experience with a more arcane method of training vision software affords me the appreciation for VOLTS-IQ’s on-the-fly train-and-track algorithm. Usually, there is a bit of training time that can be expected–sometimes the training takes days and many samples of the object. In this case Vi_Tracker did it instantly.

Now if we could only get Erector (Meccano) to create an API to Spykee! An “open” Spykee with a Microsoft Robotics Studio / Braintech / Skilligent combination would provide for an incredibly robust and inexpensive platform on a standard PC!

This is some cool software I can’t wait to play with.

Other Photos:

Press Release:

Braintech Releases New Vision Software for Service Robots

Missing the Point with a Potentially Game-Changing Robot “Toy”

by RayRenteria

There was this Greek guy from Alexandria named Heron who lived in the first century A.D.. He invented a toy called an aeolipile, which means “wind ball” in Greek. It was a metallic ball with two curved tubes coming out at opposite ends of it. The idea was that you would fill it with water and heat it up over an open flame and steam would come out of each of the tubes causing it to spin around on a perpendicular axle. With just this much more creativity, Heron might have discovered the power of steam for real applications instead of using it to power a novelty toy. Dionysius Papin published plans for a high-pressure steam engine more than one-and-a-half THOUSAND years later in 1690 and it was built only eight years after that by Thomas Savery. Where would we be today if in the first century A.D. Heron or anybody who had seen the wind ball had thought about using steam to do more than spin it?!

Humanity, it seems, missed an opportunity. What’s worse is that we may be on the verge of missing one again.

Erector introduced its newest product at the Consumer Electronics Show last January. They unveiled a seemingly average robot kit called Spykee. It’s a kit being marketed as a kid’s remote-controlled “spy robot” toy. The six different hobby and electronic toy sites I visited all pretty much said the same thing.

The fact is that Spykee is a fantastic robot with one fatal flaw that might make it a modern day aeolipile.

Spykee has a WiFi connection to the internet and is controlled from a remote workstation. He has a camera, microphone, speakers, and a stable mobile platform. Users of the robot can communicate with people in the vicinity of the robot using VoIP. Unlike the SPC-101C, Spykee sells for right around $300. The android robot SPC-101C sells for ten times that much at about $3,000. Sure Spykee doesn’t have actuated arms and he can’t do flips, but I bet Spykee can be thrown down the stairs and survive. I doubt SPC-101C could survive that. Not only is Spykee a consumer-grade robot, he’s a consumer grade robot designed for kids!

Some advanced features include motion detection, audio / video recording capabilities, email notification, and autonomous return-to-base logic for a recharge when the batteries are low.

Okay, so all that sounds cool. What’s the fatal flaw?

Spykee is not programmable.

Personal robots have been struggling to become a part of the mainstream because the platforms have been too primitive or too expensive. Exacerbating the problem is the many disparate platforms and the limited computing resources available to on-board software. A client-server model that leverages the computing resources of a desktop computer and the situatedness of a physical robot is the ideal combination that also allows developers to stick with the tools they know.
You could have a WiFi enabled robot, but you’d either have to build it yourself like the guys at WifiBot.com did or straight up buy one from them. I guarantee it ain’t gonna go for 300 bucks and it ain’t gonna be as durable as Spykee. Furthermore, the developers who are going to write the killer applications for robots don’t want to build ‘em!
Great innovations occur when different disciplines converge. In this case, I assert that most programmers have a favorite language from C++ to PHP, most have a favorite IDE, and many think in terms of the applications for their software. If a company like Meccano opens up an API to Spykee, they’ll instantly have a huge potential army of engineers coming up with novel and likely marketable applications for Spykee.

Even without any API it seems that Erector’s marketing machine could sell to a more mature consumer. It seems that without any code changes, the first killer app for Spykee is simply a telepresence robot. I’d like to have a few of these and send one to my mom who lives 100 miles away and one to my daughter who is in college 12 hours away. I and or anybody else could pop-in for a more enjoyable immersive visit than just a phone call. Imagine the Louvre having several of these in their lobby and you could go to a web-site and enter your credit card number for 30 minutes of looking around. BAM! There’s a startup. A web-site with a UI to control these Spykees.

Nope. Nobody seems to get it. I’ve not seen the word telepresence associated with Spykee anywhere. Instead, I’ve heard it trivialized by being called a “radio-controlled” toy and the ultimate peeping-tom spy–nevermind seeing the potential as being a ground-breaking mass-market robotic platform with applications we haven’t thought of yet.

I hate to think that I’ll just need to wait for hackers to crack this and create an API for me.

In the meantime, I believe this is going to be a hot product for this Christmas. In my research, I came across some sites and prices you might find interesting:

Horizon Hobby sells it for $299.99 and will have them “early November.” These are the guys that called it “radio-controlled.”
Tower Hobbies sells it for $246.99 and will also have them available “early November.”
Fat Brain Toys is selling for $369.95 and will have them available around the same time.
Amazon will be selling it the earliest on October 22 for about $279.99.
Hobbylinc Hobbies will be selling it for $273.89 in “early November. “

You’ll get another chance to see Spykee before he’s available for sale at Digital Life on September 27-30 where Erector will be in booth 730.