Home Robots
Dateline: 08/21/00
I don't know what the weather is like in your part of the world, but it is way too hot in my neighborhood. With temperatures approaching 40 C (or almost 100 F), it is almost impossible to work without a decent air-conditioner. I would appreciate all the help I could get with the usual household activities. It is a perfect time for an AI-enthusiast to ask what happened with the practical applications of the robotics technology. You probably didn't know that various researchers have experimented with all kinds of domestic robots for more than 50 years. Westinghouse's Elektro the robot, the Moto-Man who walks, talks, counts, and even smokes a cigarette was featured at the 1939 World's Fair, along with its own mechanical pet dog, Sparko. Robots that should help ordinary people with their domestic chores have been developed since that time, but with little success. However, the time has come, and if you are willing to invest somewhere between $600 and $6000 (or more), a domestic robot could take its place between other household appliances. So, let's see what is currently available, starting with specialized lawn mowing and vacuuming robots, and finishing with more powerful and sophisticated (while not always more expensive) universal home robots.
Electrolux entered the market with the Turtle, a $2000 solar-powered lawn mowing robot. It has been replaced with AutoMover, currently marketed by Husqvarna, the Swedish garden-equipment maker. This battery-powered machine mows randomly within a wired-off lawn, and when the battery gets low, it will automatically return to its home charging station to recharge. However, the installation isn't trivial, so it will raise a price tag (currently around $2000) for an additional $200 to $600. Going back inside the house, Electrolux extended the robotic technology that the company developed for their lawn mowers and produced "the world's first robot vacuum cleaner" that should sell for approximately $800. I know that Allan Branch from Denning Branch International Robotics will have to say more about the "world's first" title (see the sidebar containing some less-known historical facts on this type of robots), but anyhow, this vacuum cleaner has not been made available to consumers because it is still undergoing various tests. Eureka Company officials say this robot vac is a floorcare "concept car", with no production date scheduled at this time. For more information, see our previous article on domestic robots.
Another robot lawn mower called LawnNibbler, developed at the University of Florida's Machine Intelligence Laboratory, can cut your grass "intelligently". It uses a "Radio Fence" to mark the perimeter of the area in which it will work. This fence is a buried wire around the perimeter of LawnNibbler's work area, transmitting a low frequency radio signal. Robot "knows" it has approached the work area boundary when it receives this signal. Additionally, an active beacon system allows LawnNibbler to calculate its position by measuring the distance each of several beacons placed in its environment. This robot isn't commercially available as of this moment (it is expected to sell for $1000-$1500), but you can get on the pre-order list and receive more details on its development.
An Israeli manufacturer called Friendly Robotics recently entered this market with its $795 Robo-mower RL 500, advertising that it can be installed without any expert help. "Just lay the wire around the outer edges of your lawn, then connect it to a small perimeter switch, and find yourself a comfortable chair or hammock. Your robotic lawn mower will take care of the rest". In automatic mode, a fully charged Robo-mower can mow a lawn of 2500 to 3200 sq. ft., depending on the number of obstacles in its path, slopes, height of grass, etc. It can also be used as a regular mower, simply by taking out the manual controller and starting to walk behind the mower. It is quiet and clean, but it needs around 24 hours to recharge its batteries, so be prepared for the long breaks. Additionally, they have recently signed a licensing agreement giving The Toro Company its Roboscan technology to power Toro's iMow robotic lawn mower currently in development.
Other manufacturers like Dyson are also developing their robot vacuum cleaners. DC06, "the world's first truly autonomous home appliance with
Dual Cyclone technology and the revolutionary computer guidance system", offers a functionality similar to the Electrolux's robo-vac. The main difference is that their guidance system is designed to allow DCO6 to chart a spiral tracking course from the outside of the room to the center, navigating around any obstacles and systematically cleaning each room. It also features a "mood indicator" light, telling you how DCO6 is "feeling" about its environment. It is still not available commercially.
Final verdict says that robo-mowers and vacuum cleaners are still a bit expensive for the functionality they offer, but besides many hours of fun they'll give you a glimpse of what's to come. This technology will soon go mainstream, so be prepared and stay tuned for more news...
Going back to more versatile home robots, we'll start from the cheapest one, Cye from Probotics, Inc. But don't let the relatively low price tag ($995, including cordless vac and Cye wagon) and pygmy look fool you, this little machine is capable of performing some pretty advanced tasks. I already described its main features in one of the previous articles, but there are some new developments worth mentioning here. Cye-sr (sound response) is an extension of the Cye personal robot product line, launched in May, 1999. The original Cye ($695) operates remotely from a personal computer, and is controlled by Map-N-Zap, a PC application. On the other hand, Cye-sr is programmed to respond to claps. After one clap, it beeps to let you know you've got its attention. To send Cye-sr to a destination, clap to indicate where you'd like it to go. For example, use two claps to send it to the kitchen, three claps to send it to the den and one clap to come back to its charger.
Advanced users will enjoy using source code of Map-N-Zap software that is released under the Gnu Public License, and includes GUI, Iconic programming language, and Robot communication protocol code. Advanced Cye-tech projects include Voice Module Kit and CyeCam Mount Kit, allowing you to attach the X10 wireless camera to your Cye robot.
Let me conclude this short preview with two "big boys", domestic robots over four feet tall and packed with powerful electronics. Gecko Systems offers the $2,595 ($2,995 with the vacuuming attachment) CareBot PCR (Personal Computer Robot) 1.1, "the only personal utility class robot". This robot is completely enclosed inside the GeckoShroud, a full covering bump/touch (tactile) detection system that hides high speed RF modem and a scanning, high ping rate sonar. Its open software architecture allows users to add their own custom designed software and hardware components. Speaking of software, you can add your own tasks by building on its subsumptive behavior architecture and mapping capabilities using standard C++, with the support for Visual Basic and Java coming soon.
ActivMedia's PeopleBot is being marketed as "the first affordable intelligent mobile robot designed especially for human interaction". It is based on their standard P2-DX base, and comes in four versions. Basic PeopleBot (starting at $5,995) is a human interaction robot operable from a standard desktop or laptop PC. Talking PeopleBot adds speech recognition, voice synthesis and other sounds to the robot's repertoire. Surveillance PeopleBot has all the capabilities of Talking PeopleBots, plus allowing you to monitor or inspect their surroundings through their surveillance camera and audio-video transmitter receiver pair. The tallest one of them all, Performance PeopleBot features a tabletop 2-degree-of-freedom gripper and two forms of tabletop sensing. You can use either the Saphira robotics development environment or standard C/C++ to extend the capabilities of these robots. Software to allow PeopleBots to be customized by less expert programmers will be available this fall.
This robot technology is based on research and a proof of concept robot
called Blinker developed in Australia in 1984 by Branch &
Associates Pty Ltd using in part Australian Federal Government research funds and the Tasmanian Development Authority's funds together with my company's finances and is fully documented in their funding reports and by independent technical auditors. Blinker was named after a famous Australian kids' character called Blinky Bill and because the critical Polaroid ultrasonic navigation sensor was meant to have a blink refex to protect it if it ran into anything, to avoid "blinding" it. Earlier work I did on a robot called Elami (later renamed Omnibot) for Tomy Corporation of Tokyo and on a robot called Chester for Commodore Business Machines at their research centre in Dallas Texas in 1983 (the latter together with Jim Crowley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh) produced a navigational algorithm using what was
then badly called the Local Model (LPM), but which had a fatal open loop design error (meaning it got lost without any help from me), lead to this later development.
We believe Blinker was the world's first truly and practically autonomous robot, in real time in real world environments, and at a realistic mass manufacturable price of about $135 in 1984 dollars, that would allow household appliances. We developed a then unusual multiprocessor architecture (3 x 6502) with unique shared asynchronous memory and mapped with rotating ultrasonic sensors, initially one and then later four. In 1989 this prototype was developed to a commercial concept called Flobot by my company for General Electic Plastics in Pittsfield MA and released at the Domotechnica trade show
in Cologne the following year. Just before that my company made a
presentation to Electrolux in Stockholm and in the USA, and after technical disclosure to their representatives in Connecticut, they did not contract us. In 1991 we developed it for Moulinex instead.
Our Moulinex robot used two methods of navigating, one was to circumnavigate the room first to make a map outline then to "fill" in the rest. The other, and the one we finally used, was to start anywhere and do parallel paths, and as it reached an end point in the room, mapped that point into the circumference map, much more efficient. At the end of the robot's first cleaning job, where it was set into the room with no knowledge of the layout, it cleaned at the same time as it built its map, which it stored from then on to use more efficiently next time. As things moved or changed in the room, the robot "saw" these thigs and changed its map and its path planning accordingly. The parametric mapping and navigation technology was so effective
that this robot could clean an environment without the use of any wheel
encoders or any odometrics of any kind. The Moulinex prototype is called D'entrecasteaux.
Right now I am interested in developing from my work with Quest Technologies and their stair climbing robot (now gone out of business) and our project with the Malaysian Government for walking robots to harvest latex from rubber plantations (incomplete), to develop an automatic 2 legged walking wheelchair for paraplegics. Any takers?
As said on ActivMedia's site, these robots are turning some of the expectations created by science fiction into technological fact. For example, other types of domestic robots are marketed for the Japanese market where the rapidly aging society has led to worries about who will care for the elderly.
Domestic robots: less known historical facts by Allan Branch, Denning Branch International Robotics
The world's first fully autonomous household robot vacuum cleaner meaning self mapping, self navigating and self planning, was developed by myself (as was the world's first successful mass produced mobile robot called the Tasman Turtle for eduation using Seymour Papert's LOGO in 1979) for Moulinex in Caen, France in 1991 which was fully developed as a prototype and ready for productionization, but has never been released by that company.