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Thanks for the reply. The Terregator was historic in its own way -- as perhaps the first robust outdoors-oriented general-purpose wheeled flexible mobile testbe

Thanks for the reply. The Terregator was historic in its own way -- as perhaps the first robust outdoors-oriented general-purpose wheeled flexible mobile testbed with an AC gasoline-powered generator capable of supporting a significant computer with an onboard interactive terminal. I remember walking behind the Terregator with Red's brother Chuck and others in Schenley park as people tested road-following (well, park-path-following) algorithms. It was cool to see on the terminal display what the robot thought it was seeing in real-time. And it was nice to be outside in good weather. If you made that or worked on it, kudos to you! Terregator was a key innovative step forward as a platform that made possible other follow-on work like for Alvan (all leading up to self-driving cars). Well, when it wasn't trying to drive up trees -- which is what an emergency stop is for. :-) But yeah to learn it was fork-lifted into place, sigh. I also have my own personal (essentially now non-functional) robotics projects from back then and before squirreled away in a storage area, with bittersweet feelings as I look at them now and then in passing when looking for other things. Somehow I wonder if -- beside the general issue of becoming middle aged and wistfully looking backwards at past artifacts and past times -- if there is perhaps a certain disappointment that robots today are not that much better in the main that back in the 1980s? Even the video from Boston Dynamics for all its awesomeness doesn't actually show legged robots doing anything useful. We still don't have robots as capable or general purpose as B9 from Lost in Space or the walking drones from Silent Running appeared to be when on the screen (even if in real life they were human-operated fakes). Show me Spot folding laundry (like WG's PR2 could do, if slowly) and I might be more impressed. Robotics was also so expensive to work on in the 1980s -- plus also the AI winter happened -- which all probably contributed to many people with robotics aspirations (like me, especially to do stuff like this: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ ) instead moving into software-only work, working on programs generally about other things than robots. Robotics is such a different space today though for a new generation with cheap sensors, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, reliable WiFi, cheap laptops, cheap platforms, disused old Roombas, and so on... I remember in the 1980s how excited Hans Moravec was of the special (and expensive) "Swedish wheels" he had gotten for a new robot being built (Uranus, an unfortunate name for anything, sadly) which provided sideways mobility without computational complexity -- and now I see those wheels on robot toys. It's kind of surprising though when I think about that how relatively little progress towards useful activities there has been by hobbyists and even professionals given all that personally affordable potential compared to what one might have expected in the 1980s if we has just had more cheap hardware? Still there is FarmBot, ShopBot, 3D printing, cheaper CNC machines, flying inspection drones, robotic surgical systems, easily configurable commercial vision systems for parts inspection, and probably many other useful things. Even somewhat-self-driving cars that don't kill that many people. But somehow I might have expected more a third of a century later? To be clear, I am talking about crossing some gap between playing with or learning about mechanisms (like FIRST robotics or Girls of Steel, which seem like genuinely useful educational programs) and actually creating something useful and reliable day-in-day out like a dishwasher, or robot vacuum that deals with pet hair, or window curtain closer, or plant waterer, or robot chef, or reliable Lego sorter or whatever. Or ideally one device that can do all of those things. Willow Garage was a promising (if pricey, with PR2) endeavor in that direction. Sad that it got disbanded. The open source aspect (including ROS) though was another innovation that was good to see. Perhaps like it has been said that AI is that which computers can't do reliably yet (e.g. winning at chess is not longer considered AI the way it was in the 1980s at CMU with Hans Berliner), maybe robotics is that which mechanisms can't do reliably yet? :-) So maybe the vacuuming and mopping robots we have at home don't emotionally seem to count as robotics? And neither does Subaru's EyeSight emergency braking or similar driver assistance technology of other car makers? Or maybe there is some robotics equivalent of Moravec's observation that decade after decade of researchers from the 1950s on through the 1990s were stuck at 1 MIPS as budgets kept decreasing and researchers kept increasing -- until eventually researchers could move beyond 1 MIPS when hardware crossed some price/performance threshold? Or perhaps that is an example of Roy Amara's law that "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Maybe we are on the cusp of hobbyist and university lab breakthroughs driven by falling costs opening things up to more tinkering? The bottom line for flexible robots with manipulators is they seem to require force-torque sensors and touch sensors and flexible vision processing (with high CPU requirements). Demos of advanced manipulators like a "High-Speed Robot Hand" by Ishikawa Oku from The University of Tokyo aside, or the promising Baxter by Rethink Robotics aside (now defunct, sadly), it sees like robots with flexible manipulators are still not quite there yet -- even if Boston Dynamics and even Tesla show that computer-controlled mobility by itself is increasingly essentially a solved problem (assuming batteries continue to improve). Or maybe I am just so far out of the robotics loop as this point that I have not heard of more amazing stuff going on for manipulation and vision? Even though I see new things now and then, the last time I looked around a lot at robotics progress was perhaps ten years ago, when I was working on this essay: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society." Or maybe, as with Moravec's paradox of higher-level thinking requiring less computation than low-level hand-eye coordination, maybe some key aspects of robotics like object manipulation in unstructured environments remain hard problems?

intrasight 6y ago
Of course I remember Chuck :) BD is taking baby steps (sorry) towards the consumer market, and that's one reason that I'm rooting for them. Economic theory may need time to catch up. I have some theories of my own. Let's talk. ShufflePoint.
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  Thanks; that might be fun. You can also email me at the same userid at kurtz-fernhout.com. For reference (nothing new for you, but others may find of interest) I just found a writeup on the Terregator where the document was started by others in 1984 but finished by Kevin Dowling years later: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2299052_The_Terregator_Mobile_Robot https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2299052_The_Terrega... Looking at that sparks some more thoughts... Kevin himself demonstrates an interesting example of robotics as a career path. He was the first CMU Robotics Institute employee -- but ultimately left to work for a LED lighting company, then on to wearable sensors, and now on to 3D scanning: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/dowling-receives-alumni-award https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/dowling-receives-alumni-award https://www.topionetworks.com/people/kevin-dowling-54395e99ac291edc540067a6 https://www.topionetworks.com/people/kevin-dowling-54395e99a... I was very surprised to learn Kevin was leaving CMU RI for the LED lighting company -- given his commitment to robotics for so long. But, aside from interests perhaps changing over time, perhaps it's an example of people in robotics starting out trying to solve some big complex integrated thing of a general-purpose robot (e.g. Uranus, Terregator, Alvan, etc.) and then ending up focusing on various related details (solid-state electronics and sensors for Kevin; simulations and UI software for me). And of course Mark Raibert's lab at CMU, then MIT, then BD, has (for decades) focused on improving walking. Walking was an area in which incremental progress could be made in contrast to more complex navigation tasks and manipulation tasks that may have seemed intractable in practice (especially in the 1980s). It's not clear to me though how much special insight BD might have into the larger unstructured navigation issue though. Yet, as every piece of individual robotics technology gets refined by someone, whether walking, 3D scanning, image recognition, reliable mobile power sources, touch sensors, terrain mapping, and so on, we do get closer to someone putting all those things together again in a way we might have imagined in the 1980s but were always disappointed by each component's limitations. Essentially, BD's progress is necessary in terms of removing another excuse for not having amazing robots (i.e. walking is hard, but BD solved it) -- but by itself that is not sufficient to deliver the robots imagined in sci-fi stories (assuming we really still want them). I can also guess there may have been a lot of falls edited out of that video? :-) For reference, a section of a larger video showing lots of falling walking robots: https://youtu.be/xEwtM0pKOV0?t=1154 https://youtu.be/xEwtM0pKOV0?t=1154 Having linked to that collection of robot falls, I still feel it is at most a matter of time before all sorts of walking robots (and manipulating robots) can reliably do much better in unstructured environments. It's hard to predict exactly how long though -- whether years or decades. I should have been clearer in my previous post that while computer-controlled mobility is increasingly a solved problem like the BD video shows, using mobility effectively when navigating unstructured environments remains an open issue (similar as for manipulating in unstructured environments remains open). That may sound like a subtle distinction perhaps, but in the 1980s (as you undoubtedly know from first hand experience) just getting a computer to control a big motor reliably was a big deal. As with your point on baby steps, another example is there are now about 200,000 Kiva robots in Amazon warehouses (somewhat structured environments) where automation makes a big difference in reducing costs -- even if the "robots" are not humanoid in form and not general purpose in function. Coincidentally, I currently work on a robotics project -- a gene sequencer -- but I rarely think of it as doing "robotics". That is mostly because the robot itself is essentially an off-the-shelf commercialized device integrated into a larger unit with lots of other specialized hardware (and it is the specialized hardware including custom chips and related reagents and laser beams that are the star of the show). I myself generally just work on UI stuff that essentially forms an ecosystem that surrounds that device. I don't usually work on software running on the device itself -- which others do, who I sometimes envy. :-) And then I think of all the headaches involved in making robotics work reliably, and I am glad again to only have to wrestle with JavaScript-related technical quirks. :-) Ideally, the customer never has to think about the robot. They can't even see the robot when the device is closed and in operation. Ultimately, the customer doesn't even really care that there is a robot in the big box they bought -- they want to see results (even if the robot is essential right now to delivering the results). Maybe like with all technology, as in Heinlein's "Rolling Stones" novel's discussion of advanced in propulsion from complex IC engine to simpler nuclear rocket, one can wonder how any system using a robot might be simplified to remove the robot entirely to reduce costs and increase reliability. For example, one could make a robot that washes dishes like a human does, picking up one at a time and rinsing it under a faucet and drying it with a towel -- but using a special-purpose dishwasher is overall more effective and energy efficient. However, someone still needs to load the dishwasher and put the plates away in a cabinet, but that usually does not take much time or trouble. And maybe that is an aspect of robotics in general as a field -- that when we set out towards some goal involving figuring out clever ways to deliver the results that currently involve human-like motions (walking, carrying, stacking, looking, etc.), often we eventually achieve the same results or better in different specialized ways. So, "mechanism" advances, even if anthromorphic "robots" get eventually bypassed. The value becomes in creating mechanisms to do thing that humans can't do easily or enjoyably or reliably or profitably. The 1956 Theodore Sturgeon story "The Skills of Xanadu" has a spin on that, where "work" is made into play using nanotech and networks and mobile computing. For another example, any modern car is essentially a robot full of computers and sensors and actuators -- but it does not look or work like a human or other organic creature. We don't usually say 2020s car mechanics are "robot technicians" even though that really is what they are by 1980s standards of the ancestral Terregator. That is because the "robotics" aspect of cars has disappeared into the background culturally through incremental progress. And even designwise, there are also no direct "horse" components in a Tesla electric car, but a Tesla still delivers similar (or better) results in most ways to the horse-drawn carriage which was its ancestor (or human-drawn carriage for rickshaws). Although, "better" perhaps ignores that horses were self-replicating, horses had more "horse sense" about navigating unstructured environments to bring home drunks, horse carts could be refueled anywhere there was grass, horse hooves and wide horse-cart wheels could handle rougher terrain than many cars, and so on (objectives still remaining for advanced robotics). So, some things also got lost along the way amidst other advantages (like not needing to deal with horse manure or abandoned dead horses in cities, which used to be a tremendous problem). So, two steps forward but one step back as so often with technology. Let's just hope overall technology is not two steps forward and two steps back though (at the risk of quoting another Paula Abduhl song). Or worse, two steps forward and three steps back. See the book "Retrotopia" for thoughts on technical advances taken together sometimes leading to more problems then they solve. When electric motors were new, a home might have one that multiple devices could be connected to. Now most people would have a hard time saying how many electric motors (or other actuators) are in their home (e.g. in the microwave, in the dishwasher, in the CD player, etc). The same is happening with computers and sensors as they become embedded in so many devices. Robotics in that sense is perhaps increasingly all around us -- even as we notice it less and less? Economically, making better special-purpose tools (like a dishwasher) is not that threatening to the income-through-jobs link on which our current economy rests for distributing purchasing power (like discussed in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964). That is because humans are still needed in the loop somewhere. In contrast, general purpose robots (and especially general purpose AI) and related larger systems will stretch that link much more to the breaking point. So the broader question is how (or if?) we (who?) want to structure our technosphere and economics so it remains (non-cyborged-)human-compatible... Here is my own dystopian/utopian commentary on that from 2010 involving robots inspired by Marshall Brain's "Manna": :-) "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

intrasight 6y ago

Of course I remember Chuck :) BD is taking baby steps (sorry) towards the consumer market, and that's one reason that I'm rooting for them. Economic theory may need time to catch up. I have some theories of my own. Let's talk. ShufflePoint.

pdfernhout 6y ago
Thanks; that might be fun. You can also email me at the same userid at kurtz-fernhout.com. For reference (nothing new for you, but others may find of interest) I just found a writeup on the Terregator where the document was started by others in 1984 but finished by Kevin Dowling years later: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2299052_The_Terregator_Mobile_Robot https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2299052_The_Terrega... Looking at that sparks some more thoughts... Kevin himself demonstrates an interesting example of robotics as a career path. He was the first CMU Robotics Institute employee -- but ultimately left to work for a LED lighting company, then on to wearable sensors, and now on to 3D scanning: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/dowling-receives-alumni-award https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/dowling-receives-alumni-award https://www.topionetworks.com/people/kevin-dowling-54395e99ac291edc540067a6 https://www.topionetworks.com/people/kevin-dowling-54395e99a... I was very surprised to learn Kevin was leaving CMU RI for the LED lighting company -- given his commitment to robotics for so long. But, aside from interests perhaps changing over time, perhaps it's an example of people in robotics starting out trying to solve some big complex integrated thing of a general-purpose robot (e.g. Uranus, Terregator, Alvan, etc.) and then ending up focusing on various related details (solid-state electronics and sensors for Kevin; simulations and UI software for me). And of course Mark Raibert's lab at CMU, then MIT, then BD, has (for decades) focused on improving walking. Walking was an area in which incremental progress could be made in contrast to more complex navigation tasks and manipulation tasks that may have seemed intractable in practice (especially in the 1980s). It's not clear to me though how much special insight BD might have into the larger unstructured navigation issue though. Yet, as every piece of individual robotics technology gets refined by someone, whether walking, 3D scanning, image recognition, reliable mobile power sources, touch sensors, terrain mapping, and so on, we do get closer to someone putting all those things together again in a way we might have imagined in the 1980s but were always disappointed by each component's limitations. Essentially, BD's progress is necessary in terms of removing another excuse for not having amazing robots (i.e. walking is hard, but BD solved it) -- but by itself that is not sufficient to deliver the robots imagined in sci-fi stories (assuming we really still want them). I can also guess there may have been a lot of falls edited out of that video? :-) For reference, a section of a larger video showing lots of falling walking robots: https://youtu.be/xEwtM0pKOV0?t=1154 https://youtu.be/xEwtM0pKOV0?t=1154 Having linked to that collection of robot falls, I still feel it is at most a matter of time before all sorts of walking robots (and manipulating robots) can reliably do much better in unstructured environments. It's hard to predict exactly how long though -- whether years or decades. I should have been clearer in my previous post that while computer-controlled mobility is increasingly a solved problem like the BD video shows, using mobility effectively when navigating unstructured environments remains an open issue (similar as for manipulating in unstructured environments remains open). That may sound like a subtle distinction perhaps, but in the 1980s (as you undoubtedly know from first hand experience) just getting a computer to control a big motor reliably was a big deal. As with your point on baby steps, another example is there are now about 200,000 Kiva robots in Amazon warehouses (somewhat structured environments) where automation makes a big difference in reducing costs -- even if the "robots" are not humanoid in form and not general purpose in function. Coincidentally, I currently work on a robotics project -- a gene sequencer -- but I rarely think of it as doing "robotics". That is mostly because the robot itself is essentially an off-the-shelf commercialized device integrated into a larger unit with lots of other specialized hardware (and it is the specialized hardware including custom chips and related reagents and laser beams that are the star of the show). I myself generally just work on UI stuff that essentially forms an ecosystem that surrounds that device. I don't usually work on software running on the device itself -- which others do, who I sometimes envy. :-) And then I think of all the headaches involved in making robotics work reliably, and I am glad again to only have to wrestle with JavaScript-related technical quirks. :-) Ideally, the customer never has to think about the robot. They can't even see the robot when the device is closed and in operation. Ultimately, the customer doesn't even really care that there is a robot in the big box they bought -- they want to see results (even if the robot is essential right now to delivering the results). Maybe like with all technology, as in Heinlein's "Rolling Stones" novel's discussion of advanced in propulsion from complex IC engine to simpler nuclear rocket, one can wonder how any system using a robot might be simplified to remove the robot entirely to reduce costs and increase reliability. For example, one could make a robot that washes dishes like a human does, picking up one at a time and rinsing it under a faucet and drying it with a towel -- but using a special-purpose dishwasher is overall more effective and energy efficient. However, someone still needs to load the dishwasher and put the plates away in a cabinet, but that usually does not take much time or trouble. And maybe that is an aspect of robotics in general as a field -- that when we set out towards some goal involving figuring out clever ways to deliver the results that currently involve human-like motions (walking, carrying, stacking, looking, etc.), often we eventually achieve the same results or better in different specialized ways. So, "mechanism" advances, even if anthromorphic "robots" get eventually bypassed. The value becomes in creating mechanisms to do thing that humans can't do easily or enjoyably or reliably or profitably. The 1956 Theodore Sturgeon story "The Skills of Xanadu" has a spin on that, where "work" is made into play using nanotech and networks and mobile computing. For another example, any modern car is essentially a robot full of computers and sensors and actuators -- but it does not look or work like a human or other organic creature. We don't usually say 2020s car mechanics are "robot technicians" even though that really is what they are by 1980s standards of the ancestral Terregator. That is because the "robotics" aspect of cars has disappeared into the background culturally through incremental progress. And even designwise, there are also no direct "horse" components in a Tesla electric car, but a Tesla still delivers similar (or better) results in most ways to the horse-drawn carriage which was its ancestor (or human-drawn carriage for rickshaws). Although, "better" perhaps ignores that horses were self-replicating, horses had more "horse sense" about navigating unstructured environments to bring home drunks, horse carts could be refueled anywhere there was grass, horse hooves and wide horse-cart wheels could handle rougher terrain than many cars, and so on (objectives still remaining for advanced robotics). So, some things also got lost along the way amidst other advantages (like not needing to deal with horse manure or abandoned dead horses in cities, which used to be a tremendous problem). So, two steps forward but one step back as so often with technology. Let's just hope overall technology is not two steps forward and two steps back though (at the risk of quoting another Paula Abduhl song). Or worse, two steps forward and three steps back. See the book "Retrotopia" for thoughts on technical advances taken together sometimes leading to more problems then they solve. When electric motors were new, a home might have one that multiple devices could be connected to. Now most people would have a hard time saying how many electric motors (or other actuators) are in their home (e.g. in the microwave, in the dishwasher, in the CD player, etc). The same is happening with computers and sensors as they become embedded in so many devices. Robotics in that sense is perhaps increasingly all around us -- even as we notice it less and less? Economically, making better special-purpose tools (like a dishwasher) is not that threatening to the income-through-jobs link on which our current economy rests for distributing purchasing power (like discussed in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964). That is because humans are still needed in the loop somewhere. In contrast, general purpose robots (and especially general purpose AI) and related larger systems will stretch that link much more to the breaking point. So the broader question is how (or if?) we (who?) want to structure our technosphere and economics so it remains (non-cyborged-)human-compatible... Here is my own dystopian/utopian commentary on that from 2010 involving robots inspired by Marshall Brain's "Manna": :-) "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA