Robot Stories at Platform Politics Conference in Cambridge
Recently I presented a paper called ‘Materialising robot platforms’ on the affordances, environments and networks of three Korean service robots. The topic of my paper was something of an outlier in a conference called ‘Platform Politics’ at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, organised by Jussi Parrika and Joss Hands.
Most other papers identified either with political theory and technology, or with platform studies: analysing how the underlying technological infrastructures play out in fostering certain social and political outcomes. My paper was closer to the latter category, examining in particular some of the political implications of technological artefacts: the placement of sensors and motors in robots that respond to touch, allow remote teaching, and bow to indicate subservience.
The conference was video recorded in a pretty rudimentary way using UStream. It is pretty hard to follow the paper from this video. The abstract is below (although of course this doesn’t really reflect what I talked about).
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf
Chris Chesher Research and development in robotics is currently developing a range of network-connected material platforms. This practice is producing robots increasingly tuned towards particular lifeworlds: language teaching robots in classrooms; service robots in public spaces; container-handling robots in ports; rescue robots in earthquake zones, and so on. These specific platforms diverge significantly from the general-purpose robot of popular imagination as robots are made increasingly real as they are themselves formed by their multiple attachments across physical, social and institutional spaces. This paper draws on recent interviews with researchers at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, and company representatives at the Robotworld tradeshow in Korea. The interviews examine the rhetoric and practices by which robot platforms are increasingly blackboxed as technical innovations in ways that are informed by narratives of the application environments, and strategic connections with institutional networks. A robot platform is constituted by a singular combination of elements: sensors, operating systems, programming and effectors (motors, screens, speakers, etc). However, these components must work together towards creating a robot that can perform as an autonomous
actor in forming relations within specific environments. In talking about the robots, engineers, developers and salespeople often provide rich narratives featuring the robots in particular physical and social environments. Developers are also aware of the institutional connections in operation that will be crucial in securing the robot’s current and future existence. The Korean company Dasarobot’s English language teaching robot must capture the interest of teachers, but outside their direct affiliations with schools. Development communities are establishing core features of contenders for future robot platforms, abstracted below the level of particular applications. For example, many robots use similar autocharging systems to respond autonomously to the common problem of a low battery. Some robots use custom operating systems, while others use open source ROS such as those from Willow Garage and Microsoft. The range of issues in robotic platforms gives the problem of software platforms a material base, as seen in the collaborations and conflicts between key mechatronics disciplines of software engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Meanwhile, as robotic platforms stabilise, there are increasing enrolments of other disciplines: media art; media practice; performance; design; marketing; cinema and so on.
Acting the part
Any robot that moves, performs. But those robots that are built or programmed explicitly to perform can accentuate a repertoire of multiply articulated gestures with naturalistic movements and interaction.
One of the hit exhibits at technology trade show CEBit 2011 in Hannover in March 2011 was the performing Robothesbian by Engineered Arts from Cornwall. This gangly robot performer was connected up to a Microsoft Kinect games controller so it could read the body movements of visitors. It has a certain cheekiness, and a Shakespearean repertoire. Its movements are somewhat more explosive than many robots. The designers also exploit lighting and stage sets to good effect.
Robothesbian was built by a company of ten, and engineered over 7 years. At least twenty have been installed, including one at Questacon in Canberra.
Another recent notable robotic performance was at TED, featuring Aldebaran’s NAO playing a stand-up robot comic called Data. He was partnered by Heather Knight from Marilyn Monrobot Labs. Data tells a number of pretty old jokes (but I guess he wasn’t invented yet), and apparently uses software developed at Carnegie Mellon to respond to the audience reactions.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
It’s apparent that the audience’s experience of the robot’s performance is distinct from their experience of the uncanny appearance of an ultra-realistic robot such as Hiroshi Ishiguro’s.
At another level, Knight’s use of Nao as Data shows that robotic innovation can legitimately take place in software alone.
Shut the gate! It’s the self-driving Google car
The Prius accelerates, tyres squealing as it hits the first turn. The car navigates expertly around a course constructed on the vacant top level of a car park in Long Beach, California. Then the camera moves across to reveal that the steering wheel is spinning on its own, between the driver’s fingers. The wheel remains magically out of his grasp as the G-forces throw around the passenger in the drivers seat.
This is a close-up of the kind of robot car that Google first talked about last year, and was reported in the New York Times among other outlets. This demo is appropriately connected with a TED event. This is not only a demonstration that the car works. It’s a geeky expression of robot car machismo.
Exoskeleton gait
This video illustrates another practice in robotics that enhances and distorts the human gait: the exoskeleton. In the tradition of bionics, wearers strap a motorised assemblage to their body, and the device senses nerve signals running through the limbs, and amplifies these into movements. It is designed for people with poor mobility (broken leg, aged etc) and rehabilitation.The “Hybrid Assistive Limb” (HAL) is being developed by Japanese scientists at Cyberdine Corporation and Professor Sankai of Tsukuba University.
The very deliberate, (robotic) gait that wearers adopt when strapped into this is reminiscent of cinematic clichés about how robots move. Rather than allowing movement in-between each step, this device regulates the gait, while giving enhanced strength.
Self-designing resilient robot gaits
(thanks to Andrew Murphie for the link)
The robot from Cornell University in this video ‘generates a conception of itself’ and improvises ways of moving around. At startup, the design has been left incomplete, and the robot itself finishes the design. As the robot starts up, it moves all its parts to establish its own morphology. If it has been damaged or reorganised, it can adapt to its new body and still improvise getting around.
Unlike the programmed gaits in the previous Following Robots post, this robot belongs to a tradition of self-generative designs. In the documentation, the developers emphasise that this robot generates internal models — diagrams in the robot’s mind that represent its body. The principle of creating mathematical models of the robotic body (and of the artificially intelligent mind) is the dominant approach to designing self-aware autonomous systems.
Against the internal model approach, an alternative view proposes bottom-up designs, such as in Simon Penny’s work (see his paper ‘Trying to be Calm: Ubiquity, Cognitivism and Embodiment’). This tradition critiques the assumption that robotic movement requires models, and that models explain robotic movement and ‘awareness’.
Watching this mangle of motors, sensors and connections struggle to get to its feet, irrespective of the mathematics of its internal model, the information in play clearly comes from the bottom up. The gait is not calculated in the internal model and then applied to the outside. It is generated in the encounter of robot with the gravity-bound world. The model is a vectoral diagram of the forces at play in the robot body, and the ‘model’ is inseparably part of the world.
Economies of the gait in robotics and animation
How a robot walks, runs and jumps is critical to how it moves through its environment. Beyond these instrumental questions, how a robot moves can’t help establishing a sense of its perceived character. We’ve faced these questions of movement, embodiment and identity before — in animation. The problems of designing the gait of robots recalls (and deviates from ) the technique of creating walk cycles in cel animation, which date back to the earliest days of cinema.
Both robotic and animated bodies use rhythms to generate economies in movement. For animators, walk cycles can continue indefinitely to fill any duration in the linear sequence of a final animation. The walk cycle helps establish character by communicating the urgency, competence and mood in the figure’s movements. Shape, style and frame-to-frame changes give the character an implied history by adding deliberate distortions: squashing and stretching the body, and manipulating the apparent forces of acceleration, inertia and gravity on head, torso and limbs.
For the roboticist, a well-designed gait is also economical, because it allows the robot to establish rhythms in movement that maximise its use of energy. A well-tuned gait takes advantage of the dynamics in between the points at which robotic motors activate. It uses the weight and intertia of the robot body to maintain balance and stability at speed. This is inevitably also read by observers as a creating kind of character. The aesthetic inevitably returns.
In designing movement, the animator seems to begin with an aesthetic problem, where the roboticist seems to start with instrumental problems. Of course, the animator must resolve the aesthetic through technical means: whether that is use of cameras and in-betweening, or 3D computer animation (quite similar to robot simulators). The roboticist, on the other hand, cannot escape the aesthetic, as the human eye inevitably reads movement as life and finds a face and character. See also Cholodenko 2007 and Sobchack 2009.
An example of an animated walk cycle.Todd Wheeler
A fast-walking robot built by a researcher in Thailand, Weerayut.
There are many other examples of roboticists using aesthetic / metaphorical framings to design robotic gait: walking on an incline ( and and from nature, pronking springboks).
Reference
Cholodenko, A., 2007. The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications.
Sobchack, V., 2009. Animation and automation, or, the incredible effortfulness of being. Screen, 50(4), pp.375 -391.
Van Breemen, A.J.N., 2004. Bringing robots to life: Applying principles of animation to robots. In Proceedings of Shapping Human-Robot Interaction workshop held at CHI.
Auto-paternalism
‘But you can’t always be there…’
The mobile sensing system Mobileye uses a single camera, mounted on the windscreen, to judge whether the car is drifting out of the lane, or about to hit a vehicle, pedestrian, or kangaroo. It can give up to 2.7 seconds warning if it calculates there is a potential collision. But it may not see a wombat (too short), according to the person presenting this product at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics this morning.
This $2000 device from Israel seems most often to be designed to correct the driving behaviour of other people. It does so by beeping whenever it senses poor driving. You can avoid the warning beep by using the indicators properly before crossing the lane. In the advertisement above, it’s this woman’s rogue texting that would have made her smash her car. Luckily the Mobileye operates as the surrogate eye of the father, and warns her of this danger. Another common use case is in truck fleets. If the device reports too many times when the truck drifted out of the lane, the driver can be fired. ‘if you have a serial tailgater you can prove it and dismiss him for it’.
Some car manufacturers are already using Mobileye in production cars: BMW is using it only for keeping their drivers in the lane, but not for collision monitoring. Volvo and GM are working on a system that will actually read road signs, and give their speeding drivers warning.
The researchers at the ACFR were interested in adapting the Mobileye for use on robots. One of the limitations of the system is that it won’t recognise obstacles unless the vehicle is moving at over 5kmh (presumably stereo-optical systems would work better). This is unfortunate, because robots have a problem with starting moving. The researchers also needed to access the Mobileye as a data source, and not as a black-boxed commodity system. They need information, not beeping. The presenter assured the roboticists that it should be possible to hack the eye so that it would be useable in that way (but they would need to contact the head office).
