Snakes, Rovers and Googly Eyes: New Robot Masters Take Many Forms
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Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, with 65 faculty, 127 grad students, 71 docs and 193 staffers, has a myriad of programs. This morning, we got a lightning tour of just a few, with barely minutes to savor the glory of our future machine overlords.
Among the wonders I didn’t see was "Robot City," a field-testing site for robots outside of Pittsburgh. The institute has a big budget—$60m a year—but stiff requirements for who gets to spend it. Of
300 Ph.D. applicants a year, only 8 percent are taken on. Getting into a masters course at the institute is a little less intimidating — fully
20 percent of applicants are accepted.
"We expect them to transform the world," said Reid Simmons, a research professor specializing in social robotics.
No area of research goes unexplored: vision, graphics, medicine, quality of life, social interaction and space exploration are among the fields the institute develops systems in. Simmons said their working definition of robotics is so broad that a thermostat would count as a robot—after all, it’s a machine that perceives its surroundings and acts upon what it seen—but that day to day work tends to focus on weightier concerns.
The Scarab (above) is CMU’s prototype design for a moon-wandering autonomous robot that can drill into craters to examine the composition of the soil. By coring a meter into lunar regolith, and measuring what it finds, it could tell us more about the moon than we’ve learned in 40
years of above-ground observation.
"It’s a prospector," said David Wettergreen, an associate research professor. "Of sorts."
Able to trundle up and down stairs in the lab, in reality, it will take a more stately pace when it is sent to the moon. As it will operate in darkness, it cannot be solar-powered. Instead, the energy cast off by radioactive isotopes will provide 150W of juice for 10
years. Its proposed mission covers 100 corings—enough to build a picture of what lies beneath the lunar surface.
Eventually it will be controlled by complex, high-powered communication systems similar to those that control Spirit and
Opportunity on Mars. In the meantime, a wireless gamepad suffices.
Zoe, a solar-powered rover (above) is another four-wheeler developed at CMU. Designed to search the rainless Atacama desert for signs of life, it’s a prototype for future Mars rovers. The Atacama’s combination of ultraviolet light, barren soil and lack of precipitation makes it the ideal test site, and Zoe will wander hundreds of miles of it should proposed NASA experiments go ahead.
CMU has also teamed up with Raytheon and the University of Arizona to claim the lunar X-prize, a $20m award to whoever lands a lunar rover and sends high-definition video back to Earth. The Robotics Institute’s second prototype (above, with Wettergreen) is covered in side-facing solar panels designed to soak up energy from the first ray of dawn.
It’s also topped by a giant dish needed for high-bandwidth transmissions. With the mission’s 18-month proposed timeframe pressing in—not to mention the pressure of competition— we didn’t get to see the third prototype, which remains under wraps.
The plan is for it to arrive close to the original Apollo 11 landing spot.
"That’s to take a look at how it is after forty years," Wettergreen said. "There’s science to be done."
Another lab at the institute is developing a wide variety of snake-inspired robots that articulate in wild and wonderful ways.
Associate professor Howie Choset said there are some 28 varieties —
each with its own specialism. These range from tiny surgical snakes able to perform minimally-invasive heart surgery, to writhing 4-foot monsters (above) that could be used in disasters to explore dangerous rubble or help emergency workers locate survivors.
Here’s some video of one snake robot climbing a pole:
See more video of the Institute’s snakes here.
There’s already one commercial spinoff, Cardiorobotics, which hopes to exploit the technology’s medical potential. Snake-like robots also have other commercial applications, however: just last week, the robotics lab was called to help a local business repair a damaged steam turbine without having to disassemble it at great expense. Though the attempt was only partially successful, Choset said that they were already looking into adapting the technology for a second spinoff.
Not all the robotics on display Friday at CMU were aimed at expensive scientific and industrial applications. Associate professor
Illah Nourbakhsh (above) demonstrated tools for creative expression and youngsters such as Gigapan, a panorama-creating robot compatible with any pocket-sized digital camera.
Gigapan allows anyone to take multi-billion pixel panoramic images — so long as they have space to store them.
Nourbakhsh also presented a huge array of robotic art pieces that can be assembled and customized to the designer’s whim, no matter what their level of technical expertise. Using the TERK—telepresence robot kit—Pittsburgh residents old and young have already created curious robotic installations across the city, such as the Flower (above), an environmental health monitor, and a robot butterfly that flaps its wings when polluting vehicles roll by.
Even young children can use the TERK, Nourbakhsh said. His laboratory was packed with dozens of bizarre machines, broken components and googly eyes left over from youthful experiments. It’s all leading up to Robot 250, a two-week event this July featuring family workshops, artist exhibitions at local galleries and "safari tours" to show off Pittsburgh’s increasingly wide selection of robotic installations.
The TERK platforms can be installed into Roombas to give them autonomous locomotion, and given sight with off-the-shelf consumer webcams.