Translated by Harold B. Gill
World-class German Researchers smoothes the robots' way into the everyday world. Their top man resides in "The Vatican" of Automatons: the legendary "Robotics Institute." CHIP looks into the innards of his creations in his research laboratory.
It could be that one day a unsightly barrel might scoot past you and throw your mail for you onto your desk. Perhaps the tin can inquires as to your wishes and rolls away to fetch a coffee. When that happens you can be sure that a pair of German Robotics Researchers have had a role in the game.
Scientists form the Institut fuer Informatik (Institute for Information Sciences) in Bonn are not only first in the world in inventing autonomous (self-guided) Automatons. The Bonn scientists are also much more involved in preparing the robots' invasion into the everyday world. In 20 years, the mechanical beings have conquered our world- at least so the purist visionaries maintain: Digital social machines for car of the old and sick, rolling museum guides, barrel-shaped postmen or even champagne filled receptionists that greet and serve drinks to hotel guests.
Their star researcher, the 30 year old Sebastian Thrun, meanwhile resides at the American Carnegie Mellon University. This institution has inherited him from Bonn and named him Assistant Professor in the "Vatican", the insiders reverential name for the "Robotics Institute" of the elite Pittsburgh University. It is the world's leading experimental workshop for robotics researchers. When Thrun looks out of the office window, he surveys the laboratory halls in which scientists construct Mars and moon exploration vehicles or strange automatons with spider legs that crawl into volcanoes.
Up until recently the Americans surpassed all others in the area of autonomous robotics. That is changing, however, as at the beginning of the 90's, Thrun who was then a scientist in the Bonn Institut fuer Informatik came on exchange to the Robotics Institute as a visiting researcher. "Day and night" Thrun experimented with the automatons then in the windowless research laboratory on the fifth floor. After one and a half years of apprenticing he persuaded his Bonn Institute to order one of these barrels for around 100,000 Marks from the manufacturer Real World International, Inc (RWI).
Using "Rhino" (Rhein), as the digital cylinder is named, the study of robotics became the focal point of research on artificial intelligence at Bonn (see the illustration on page 216 "The Inner Life of the Robot Rhino"). Since then the Rheinlanders have made haste. After one year of programming work, the Rhino Team won second prize in the robot competition in 1994 at the renowned "American Association for Artificial Intelligence". Rhino autonomously removed garbage from an office course. Not a banal assignment for robots: The prize catapulted the scientists to the first rank of automaton pioneers and Thrun to a professorship in Pittsburgh.
In the hideous gray cement halls of the Robotics Institute, the visitor must prepare himself for unusual encounters in the cold light of the neon tubes. It may happen that a beetle like automaton approaches his feet, searching the floor for lost tennis balls with a rotating dust bin. This droll robotic animal is called "Jeeves". It is intended to remove the tedious task of collecting balls from tennis instructors - in a year this is to waste 6000 dollars in work time with this activity. Jeeves should only cost 2000 dollars. The beetle usually hides in the shadows in Thrun's office. In the final analysis, Thrun actually invented it more as a lark to show how useful autonomously operating dust bin can be.
Military dreams of combat robots in the knapsack
In regard to usefulness: "The USA could save between two and three billion dollars", the prodigy calculates, " if, with robots, we could reduce the number of nursing homes by one percent." Does he foresee problems with acceptance? Not a trace, counters Thrun: "Rather than go into a nursing home, a retiree would rather have a robot to help with the housekeeping and clean the bathroom."
In the final analysis, the senior's aid may become a field combat robot. The research organization of the Pentagon, the "Defense Advanced Research Project Agency" (DARPA) meanwhile is cooking up one such suggestion from the Pittsburgh think-tank. "Remote control model buggies" a few of which can be comfortably carried in knapsack, according to Thrun can replace the "Intelligent Pointman" (IP). The IP is a soldier who acts as the first to set foot into an enemy position. The life-threatening job is now to be taken over by the automatons.
Thrun projects euphorically the boom of a gigantic robotic industry. Only the critical mass is yet wanting: If only a tenth of the money that is applied currently to automobile research were applied to robotics, there would be an explosive increase of Robots in everyday life.
"We are responsible for the mind of the machine"
Things have not yet progressed so far. The barrel-shaped machines with which the German experiments are initially dumb - in spite of their impressive hardware, the RWI is ready for the small international world of the researchers. What good was a complicated sensor system, consisting of around one hundred ultrasonic and infrared sensors, contact and distance measuring devices if the on-board computer could understand only simple steering commands; for example, "Drive one meter forward." Buyers who wanted more from the robots had to program them themselves.
Since then RWI markets the apparatus with software that Thrun and his colleagues in Bonn have invented, they have become a good bit more intelligent. "We are responsible for the mind in the machine," Thrun says with a grin. Along with the Rhino-scientists, he tinkered together a type of universal robot operational system. Their goal: Autonomy, that means making creations capable of free movement that learn on their own from experience.
In the meantime, 25 software modules exist that, for example, allow the robot to explore an area unfamiliar to it and produce maps of this area. However the devil often lies in the details. Thus the infrared floor sensors interpret a black floor coating as a step. The result: The robot stands still.
How does a robot learn that chairs do not dissolve in air?
However the hardware does not keep the scientists awake at night. It is much more difficult to pour into the barrel the simplest everyday knowledge. For example how does one get a robot to recognize a chair? It does not suffice to explain to it that a chair consists of four legs and a back. It has to know much more, that one can sit upon it, that they do not dissolve in air, that they fall down and not up when they tip over. "People know this through decades of experience, intuitively,- a robot lacks this knowledge," Thrun says.
In the office corridors of the Robotics Institute one can experience the barrel in action. There Rhino's similarly constructed sister "Amelia" lives - a quietly humming sheet metal basin, that suddenly comes racing at full speed. That can cause one a rush of anxiety. Just before the adrenaline threshold is surpassed, it stops and swings her two camera eyes across with curiosity. Whoever this robotic glance scans, experiences a peculiar shiver. In childhood we learn to divide our environment into living and non-living things. But when a mechanism behaves like a living thing, this world-view is shaken to its foundations.
Amelia's sensors have meanwhile noted the human across from it on its internal digital environment map. Amelia swings to the right, moves around the observer and continues the exploration of the corridor. "I don't exactly know what she is going," Thrun says. Immediately the curious barrel shoots toward an unnoticed door to the neighboring research space that is standing open whereupon the young professor produces a cry and sprints after to catch the robot.
Spectacular success: Rhino as Museum Guide
While Thrun has been drawn into the Mecca of robotics research in Pittsburgh, his old research team at the Bonn Informatikinstitut has been progressing further with the Rhino Automaton: In a spectacular experiment, in May they have installed Rhino in the German Museum in Bonn as an autonomous museum guide. The project is spectacular because, up until now, no robot has been able to navigate autonomously and accurately from one point to another in a moving mass of people. That presupposes that Rhino not only can avoid current hindrances, but rather knows to continually recalculate the "course" to the goal. Thus it happened that the Robot Curious drove by an atomic power plant model and gives reports via the on-board computer.
Rhino has become a favorite of the children: the kids block constantly block the sheet metal E.T.'s way. Its software passes this crash test too, however, to the delight of the kids, the barrel hops and if this doesn't scare them, he quickly tries another way. Besides this, Rhino serves hundreds of virtual exhibit visitors via the Internet. Then exponents and its position is transferred by the digital Rheinlander through the camera into cyber space in the space of a second. Anyone who wishes can also steer Rhino through the Bonn Museum from, say, Australia.
Robots Ask people for help when travelling by elevator
Thrun and his colleagues in Pittsburgh have already made the next step: They want set Amelia to work in their eight floor research complex as a type of digital postman-it is to deliver faxes and carry out the mail. "Our goal is to communicate with the robot using the Internet and the in-house computer net at all times," says Thrun. "It should tell us its position and we want to be able to say to it: 'Please go to the second floor and bring a letter for me.'"
How can one get a Robot to use the elevator of the Robotics Institute? The Robot arm is too clumsy to press the elevator buttons. "Quite simple," says Thrun cunningly, "It will politely ask another occupant of the house to press the button." And who would want to deny such a well mannered barrel such a request?
Peter Diesler