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Robotics....
Robotics .....? And you might find it surprising that really, there is no universally accepted definition for what a robot is. If you ask 100 roboticists to define, in very crisp manner, the field, you’re probably going to get maybe, not hundreds definitions, but a few dozens for sure. So just to illustrate why it’s so difficult to define what a robot is, let me throw one example, quickly, out there. Is this a robot, your typical dishwasher? Many, many homes have one. We use it all the time. It’s changed a lot of how we do housework.
Well, let’s hold onto that for a little bit, and we’ll come back. So if the dishwasher is kind of a gray area, some people will say yes that’s a robot, some will say no it’s not. Let’s look at some examples that almost everybody would agree, yes these are robots. First things that come to mind, when you ask somebody give me an example of robots in today’s, world, robots in today’s society. So when I talk about science fiction, we’re not going to talk about terminator’s, Lieutenant-commander Data, and so on. When you say robots that actually exist today in the world, and are doing useful things. So even though we haven’t really seen one in real life, we know that they are there. We know that they have had a big impact on how things get manufactured. This is one example from one particular robot manufacturer, from KUKA, there are many robot manufacturers for industrial robot arms like this. This is just one example of an industrial robot arm. In this case it’s doing a machine tending task, it’s loading and unloading a machine. There you just saw it pick up a part from the machine, then it’s going to go and pick up a different part, and place it in the machine.
And this type of robot, what they do is, they get programmed by a human operator with the kind of movement that they have to execute, then they execute that movement again, and again, and again, tirelessly, exactly the same way. Precision Smoothness all of those desirable attributes. So notice again the trajectory, because some of the things that matter are, where you place the tip of the robot to pick up the part that you need, how do you move in space such that you don’t hit anything, and then how do you place the part where it needs to go. Notice how the robot interacts with the rest of the manufacturing, or assembly plant, around it. These kinds of robots they can even exceed human capabilities, in some important dimensions. Obviously, again, tirelessly, they operate execute the trajectory exactly the same way again, and again, and again. They can also be extremely , precise exceeding human precision.
Here’s another example, just to show this operating at a smaller scale. So another way another dimension that robot manufacturers compete on is precision and repeatability. So here’s an example of another KUKA robot doing a task in consumer electronics manufacturing. So here it’s actually installing small screws into– these look like cell phones– they are said cell phones, indeed. So this is another example of where an industrial robot arm can be better than a human, in terms of precision. And now you’re also starting to get a sense of why these robot arms are really so important in today’s society. Maybe you’ve never seen one of these arms, but so many people today do have those smart phones in their pocket. One of the reasons we have them in our pockets, and they are ubiquitous, is because they can be manufactured very reliably, very precisely, and at low cost. Robots play a big role in that. Of course it’s not all automated, it’s not all robots, but robots play an important role in that. So enabling this ubiquitous computing revolution, the smartphone revolution, that has happened maybe, in the last decade or so. But this is maybe towards the small end of the scale, a robot doing a high precision task.
Here is a robot, in this case a robot arm that is moving around full size car. So another place where a robot manipulator, an industrial robot manipulator, can exceed, vastly exceed, human capabilities, strength. So many, many of these aspects, where industrial robot manipulators are critically important, and they do things in some specific dimensions, they exceed, by a lot, human capabilities. But this is not the only type of robotic manipulation that’s out there in the world, today. This is probably one of the oldest, industrial robot manipulators have been in use for maybe close to half a century, now. Some more recent, the last decades or so, applications, for example, are robotic surgery.
This is the Vinci robotic surgery device from Intuitive Surgical, and its two parts. This is the robot, itself, that performs the surgery on the patient. And the robot is at all times being teleoperated, being controlled, by the surgeon. This is the teleoperation side of the robot. In this picture the robot is behind here, you cannot really see it, but this is what the robot looks like robotic surgery, again, widely deployed today, it’s a place where robotic arms, robot manipulators have had a very clear impact There is more going back behind the scenes, explosive ordinance disposal robots, or bomb disposal robots.
Here’s an example of an explosive ordinance disposal robot from QinetiQ North America. Again this is a robot arm; it doesn’t have as many joints as the industrial arms we’ve seen in the past. It’s also on a mobile base. So now really we’re blurring the line between mobility and manipulation. This is a mobile manipulation platform, I chose to include it with manipulation, but it could have well have gone under mobility. And this robot, again, right now it is being teleoperated by a human operator, who’s seeing the scene through the camera that you see on the robot .So the camera that you see right here is how the teleoperator is seeing the scene and then it’s equipped with an arm, the arm has a little gripper at the end. So this is used for bomb disposal. Things that are not yet, actually, deployed in production, but are being very actively researched. And one thing that we’d like our manipulators to be is more general purpose. This is the picture from what is called the Amazon picking challenge. Where Amazon has challenged robotics research labs around the world to design manipulators that are able to pick objects from these shelves and place them into a tote. And this picture shows the entry from team MIT, from the [? Mcube ?] lab at MIT. And the catch here is that the robot doesn’t know in advance, exactly which objects will be in those shelves, and the robot doesn’t know where exactly they will be in those shelves. So then what happens is that at runtime, the robot needs to use sensing to figure out what the objects are and exactly where they are, and then it needs to figure out how to move and how to grasp them so that it can get them and place them in the tote.
So it’s not a case where the robot can be exactly preprogramed, in advance, with every single movement that it will need to make. That was the case for the industrial manipulators that we started with. Here the robot needs to have on board sensing, it needs to figure out what’s going on. It needs to plan its movement at runtime in response to what it’s seeing. Here you can see examples of that, where the robot is detecting the objects, planning how to pick them up, executing the movement, such that it executors those grasps without hitting anything in the environment without hitting any obstacles, and then picking up the objects and placing them. And as I said right this is still a very active research area. But we still don’t know, as a field, we have not solved this problem to the point where a robot like this could be deployed in production. So the interesting thing if you look at this list of robotic manipulators is that really What the progression also is here, is the first item industrial manipulators, the ones that we’ve looked at, those are completely preprogrammed. So a human operator will define the movement the robot has to execute, and then the robot exhibits that exact movement again, and again. The next two, surgery and explosive ordnance disposal, then obviously the robot have to react to new things. In surgery you don’t know in advance exactly what movements you need to execute. That all changes as the surgery progresses, obviously, the same with bomb disposal. But the key here is both of these types of robots are teleoperated by a human. A human at runtime decides, in detail, exactly which movement the robot should be executing. Whereas the manipulator that we just saw, picking objects from shelves, that one is completely autonomous and very specifically, the rules of the Amazon picking challenge prohibit teleoperation. Robotics is the one of the bottom still very much an active area of research.
