Real World Androids
Dateline: 03/05/00
We are witnessing an evolution of robots, from very specialized to general purpose machines that can function in unfamiliar environments. Industrial robots are old news, but domestic robots like Cye, vacuum cleaners from Electrolux or Eureka, robotics lawn mowers and other friendly machines have entered the market relatively recently. Although these robots manage to adapt themselves to the novel and unexpected situations that are so often in our homes, there are problems that remain to be solved: for example, neither of them cannot climb stairs. We cannot start designing houses without staircases or with completely different furniture and appliances just because our new robot cannot use the old ones. Only a robot with the same locomotive structures as a human will ensure that it can certainly operate in any environment a human can operate in.
Before we discuss some projects for developing anthropomorphic robots, just a few words on a similar field, entertainment robotics. Sony saw a hungry market for entertainment robots after its robot pet dog, Aibo, sold out rapidly in both Japan and the USA. It costs around $2500, but the price tag will drop rapidly as more similar robots are produced. In fact, NEC Corporation has recently announced very interesting personal robot that can recognize individual faces, understand verbal commands, and move smoothly around the home, but is still a prototype. The director of Sony's Digital Creatures Laboratory, Toshi Doi, expects to see innovative working robots - cleaning robots, robots to help aged people and robots that find mines - on the market in the next few years. Sony itself will start working on these models somewhere in the next three years, after it has gathered enough technology to produce robots that were reliable for serious jobs. Following these predictions, iRobot Corporation, (a.k.a. IS Robotics, Inc.), and Hasbro, Inc. have just started to sell the most technologically advanced baby doll - MY REAL BABY. This interactive, animated doll responds to a child's actions with realistic emotion-like responses (powered by 60 servos), and could be characterized as an "toy android".
So, back to research labs - this is a short and somewhat incomplete list of humanoid robots currently built around the world. Please directly all updates and comments to our forum or directly to my e-mail address. For more up-to-date list of research projects and much more interesting info on androids see Android World, an excellent site maintained by Chris Willis, president of Android Publications.
Cog
The Honda Humanoid Robot
The Saika Project
Kawato Dynamic Brain Project
Waseda University Humanoid Project
Shadow Biped
The Humanoid Project, Chalmers University of Technology
ETL-Humanoid
A Biped Walking Robot
ISAC
Monroe
One of the pioneers in this field, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Hans Moravec, presents interesting ideas on the evolution of robots in his latest book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcedent Mind. He predicts that robots will have human level intelligence by the 2040, in the "fourth generation" of robots. However, that's it for the good news - according to Moravec, robots will became even more intelligent than humans, inheriting out universe and expanding in both intellect and form beyond our wildest imaginations.
Probably the most famous project of all described here, MIT's Cog is a single hardware platform which seeks to bring together each of the many subfields of Artificial Intelligence into one unified, coherent, functional whole.
Except for legs and a flexible spine, the major degrees of motor freedom in the trunk, head, and arms are all present. Hands, touch, hearing and speech systems are currently in development, while vision system is already in its place. As for the motivation, project leader, Rodney Brooks says that if we are to build a robot with human like intelligence then it must have a human like body in order to be able to develop similar sorts of representations. At the other hand, an important aspect of being human is interaction with other humans - and if robot has humanoid form it will be easy and natural for humans to interact with it in a human like way.
The goal of this project is to make a robot that should coexist and cooperate with human beings, by doing what a person cannot do and cultivating a new dimension in mobility both of which would result in added value to society.
It should ensure such functions as moving through furnitured rooms and going up and down the stairs. It was designed for home use so two-foot/leg mobility technology was adopted at the beginning - some 10 years ago. Several models were produced, including P2 (6 feet tall, weighs about 460 pounds) and newer P3 (5'3" and 286 pounds).
A light-weight, human-sized and low-cost humanoid robot is developed at Tokyo University that has a two-degrees of freedom (DOF) neck, dual five-DOF upper arms, several types of hands and forearms, a torso and a head. The total weight of the head, the neck, the two upper arms and the torso is only eight kilograms and
most of the motors are installed inside the arms and the torso. Several kinds of skillful manipulations are studied as examples of behavior-based movement control, including hitting a bounding ball, grasping unknown objects by groping and
catching a thrown ball.
This project started in October 1996 as a part of Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) program by Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST). The goal of this five-year research project is to understand the brain mechanisms of human cognition and sensory-motor learning to the extent that we can reproduce them as computer programs and robotic systems. People at JST have recently announced their humanoid robot called DB.
This project was started at Waseda University, Japan, in 1992 with the primary goal to develop an anthropomorphic robot which will comprise sensing, recognition, expression and motion sub-systems to enable robots and humans to build common mental and physical spaces cooperatively. Their robot is 6 feet tall and weighs about 600 pounds.
The Shadow Robot uses a wooden skeletal frame on which the muscles and equipment are mounted, powered by Shadow air muscles. It stands 160 cm tall, with its upper body currently consisting of the control valves, the various control electronics and computer interfaces. Its main purpose is to investigate the necessary designs and techniques of humanoid balancing and walking.
The objective of the project is to produce a full-size, bipedal humanoid robot. At present the plan is to build the robot around a plastic human skeleton, controlled by a hierarchy of evolutionary systems. A 60 cm tall prototype named ELVIS has been built, with the objective to try various hypotheses regarding hardware and control software. The final product should have vision assisted orientation and will communicate verbally, with more advanced behaviours under development, such as walking to an electric outlet to recharge its batteries. However, the short term goal is to get the robot to balance on two legs, and then make it walk.
A full humanoid robot with binocular moving eyes, neck, torso, waist, arms, fingers, legs and feet, 150cm tall and weighting about 60kg is developed at the Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan's Agency of Industrial Science and Technology. It incorporates a high speed internal LAN for control and data collection. So far, the mechanical assembly has been mostly completed, and embedded electronics has also been developed. A high performance real time Unix and low level control software is currently under development. In the later stages, a variety of sensors will be added to the hardware.
Researchers at Kawamura Laboratory first developed a 3-dimensional precise simulation model including the collision between the foot and floor. Investigation of various control algorithms showed that a biped walking system based on force control is more suitable for the legged locomotion than the trajectory controlled one. In 1998, the actual biped robot has been developed and the algorithms are now tested through the experiments.
ISAC is a dual-arm humanoid robot that was designed and built in the Intelligent Robotics Lab, Vanderbilt University, as a research platform for service robotics. The system contains two pneumatic 6-DOF SoftArms actuated by McKibben artificial muscles, an air compressor and compressed air delivery system. Two four fingered, anthropomorphic dexterous manipulators - PneuHands - are controled by a system based on standard Pentium-II processors. Several other subsystems also based on Pentium II's and Pentium Pro's: control pan-tilt platform, video and audio sensors.
The dual-arm system also provides a test-bed to develop new technologies for user-to-robot and robot-to-user communications, including audio, visual, and gestural methods.
Mechatronics Design Lab at Tohoku University has researched on various mechatronics system such as walking robots, autonomous land vehicle, numerical control manufacturing machines, etc. The study on biped robots started in early 1970's, resulting in one of the most sophisticated machines built so far: the biped robot named Monroe. It is about 120 cm tall and weighs around 22 kg. Three computers are used for controlling the robot: one is the master computer (i486DX2-66MHz) that plans the motion of the robot with sensed information. The other two are slave computers (i486DX2-66MHz and i386DX-20MHz) for sensing and controlling rotational position of 12 servo motors.