Robonaut 2 Being Carried on Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133

R2 is capable of both teleoperated missions as well as autonomous and semi-autonomous modes. Certainly having dextrous hands capable of using some of the same tools as humans do will go a long way in carrying out these missions and NASA expects to both accomplish and learn a great deals in using robots in such missions in outer space.

A while ago I had a brief email thread with Dr. Firouz Naderi at JPL about the wisdom of the humanoid form-factor for such robots. While the crammed hallways of the ISS are conducive to the humanoid form, I can think of a variety of other form-factors that may be more ideal to the Zero G environment and the types of tasks they are expected to perform – particularly in the longer term roadmap of NASA’s space exploration roadmap. Nevertheless, the fact that NASA is actively investigating the role of robots in space exploration marks a significant milestone not only for NASA but for robotics as well.

No doubt we will be learning a great deal on human-robot interaction given the tightly controlled and scripted experiments that are run on any given day on the ISS. The introduction of robot assistants into the mechanics of running these experiments will go a long way in providing best practices and intuitive interfaces for human-robot collaboration, amongst other lessons. The use of robots also opens up the possibility of experiments that are otherwise too dangerous and/or laborious for human scientists to undertake in the extreme environment of LEO, leading to both direct and indirect scientific research benefits never before possible.

There are other benefits worth mentioning as well.

As robots are a natural at capturing the cultural imagination, putting a visible humanoid robot into space may have the added benefit of getting people interested in not only space exploration, but the incredible scientific research and development that is needed and conducted on an ongoing basis to do so. The interest of the populace is particularly important today as the global economic climate and the domestic political mood are in misalignment with our appetite to invest in such endeavors.

It is indeed worrisome that the current Republican controlled U.S. Congress has publicly gone on the record that cutting funding for NASA is on their agenda. While as a CEO of a for-profit company I am deeply concerned with our national debt, I believe cutting funding to NASA (and any other national organization conducting public R&D for that matter) is extremely short-sighted and carries grave consequences for the longer term viability of our national economy. It is no secret that innovation has been the key driving force of our economy and if we are to remain competitive in the globalized marketplace, it is vitally important that we continue to be a nation of innovation. And without public investments in large-scale abstract and directed research, we will be severely and measurably cutting the very lifeblood that has sustained our economic viability since World War II.

R2 is a great first step… and to the extent it helps to inspire us to ever greater achievements, and inspires an entirely new generation of our youth into science and engineering, I’m all for it, wish it luck, and hope to see it do great things in the very near future.

Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 Crew

Best,
/F

Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 Launches for her Final Journey

Stunning video captured on iPhone from airplane

Soon after my talk I was asked by many of you asking for a video of my talk titled Around the World in 80 Seconds, A Story of Robotic Telepresence from RoboDynamics CEO, Fred Nikgohar.

In this talk I got a chance to share what I’ve learned so far on making and deploying Robotic Telepresence technologies across various enterprise verticals. If you’re still interested, the folks at Immersive Tech put up all the talks on Vimeo and with permission I’m embedding mine below:

Meanwhile, I’d like to draw your attention to several other talks from that day. Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list and I recommend checking out all the great talks that have been posted.

Dr JoAnn Kuchera-Morin (UCSB) presenting The Allosphere

Dr. Avideh Zakhour’s Instant 3D Modeling

Chris Noessel on Science Fiction and Immersive Tech

…and of course the bonus here is the incredible video of Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir which is an absolute must see:

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir

I am grateful for the fantastic summit that was put on by Nathan Makino and his team and am honored for the opportunity to have had this intimate time with the fine people who came to the conference.

See you all next year.

Best,
/F

“The Need for Low Cost Sensors in Robotics – The Holiday Edition” is an analysis of the current state of sensory components in robotics, our dire need for more complex sensing at lower prices, and a look at how Microsoft has been able to create a powerful (3D sensing) device with Kinect at a very reasonable price.

Emulating the same strategy as Microsoft, the robotics industry can also achieve significant milestones in commercialization of mobile/intelligent robots… and the Kinect project should be looked at as a simple and achievable roadmap in our industry.

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine’s Editor in Chief and author of one of my favorite books The Long Tail, seems to agree with me on the tenets of my analysis. On his DYI Drones blog, Chris writes about the article:

There’s a very good post over at Hizook on the lessons of the hacked Kinect: Nutshell:

“The best solution to complex low cost sensing (or actuation for that matter) is to take advantage of affordable, mass-produced components, complementing them with the innovative use of software solutions that benefit from constantly declining prices of computation.”

Well worth reading it all.

You can read the full article over at the Hizook blog here:

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/01/09/need-low-cost-sensors-robotics-holiday-edition/

Special thanks to Travis Deyle for posting it to Hizook.

Given the feedback I’ve received on this article, I’ve been inspired to write a whole series of articles analyzing and offering a roadmap for the successful commercialization of personal robots. If you have insights and would like to contribute, please get in contact with me.

Happy new year everyone.

Best,
/F

The Noun Project has a simple mission” “… to share, celebrate, and enhance the world’s visual language”.

Their goal is to collect and organize all the symbols that form our language into one easy-to-use online library that can be accessed by anyone. These symbols (icons) are available for download and use through their website – and they’re adding new symbols everyday.

In order to raise a bit of funding to accomplish their mission, they used Kickstarter to post a funcing request… and they’re giving really cool prizes to the people who support them. For example, for a $30 donation, you can get a custom-made T-Shirt with the symbol of your choice printed on it.

I was particularly interested in the $45 prize, which includes a custom-made T-Shirt with a custom-designed symbol created in collaboration with the person who donates. I was interested in this because I noticed they have yet to include a ROBOT symbol on their site.

I spoke to Edward Boatman, the principle at The Noun Project, via email today and he agreed to make a custom-designed robot icon that would be included on their website for anyone’s use. He will also send a T-Shirt with that symbol to me – which is very cool!

The Noun Project is a fantastic undertaking that benefits the world. And I’m clearly not the only person who thinks so – given that they’ve raised five times the money they were seeking. Nevertheless, I highly recommend everyone to checkout their funding request on Kickstarter and support them.

I will post an update with a picture of myself wearing the T-Shirt once I receive it.

Follow The Noun Project on Twitter: @nounproject

RoboDynamics HQ – Santa Monica (December 14, 2010)

RoboDynamics announced today that Dr. George Bekey has joined its Advisory Board.

Dr. Bekey is the founding Director of the USC Robotics Lab and current Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering at USC. Since retirement several years ago, Dr. Bekey has remained active in teaching and research, currently leading courses in biomedical engineering and robotics at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Dr. Bekey will join Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU’s Robotics Institute and other distinguished robotics scientists on the RoboDynamics Board of Advisors. In this capacity Dr. Bekey will work closely with the R&D teams at the company while representing RoboDynamics at international conferences where he is a frequent invited speaker.

“Dr. Bekey has provided a half century of distinguished contributions to the field of robotics” said Fred Nikgohar, CEO of RoboDynamics. “He is the preeminent Statesman of our field and we are honored to be in the position of benefiting from his guidance and having him representing the values and the people of RoboDynamics”.

“The profiling of RoboDynamics as the company pioneering Enterprise Robotic Telepresence by the New York Times and other major publications is an indication of this company’s vision and potential” said Dr. George Bekey. “Being privy to upcoming projects I am excited to be a part of something that has the potential to be historic and I’m glad for the opportunity to be a part of this team”.

RoboDynamics is the recognized global leader in enterprise robotic telepresence with its TiLR Robotic Telepresence Platform. Introduced commercially in 2008, RoboDynamics is the first company to bring cost-savings, travel reduction, and significant productivity increases through the use of robotic technology.

***

About RoboDynamics

RoboDynamics is the pioneer of Enterprise Robotic Telepresence. Their human-sized TiLR platform has been in deployment since 2008 across multiple verticals and organizations of all sizes. TiLR is a robotic avatar that enables remote users to participate with geographically dispersed team members as though they’re there in person. RoboDynamics, founded in 2003, is a privately held company based out of Santa Monica, CA.

Almost all countries in the world have been keeping reliable statistics on things like life-expectancy and GDP for over two centuries. The advent of digital technology and personal computers specifically has enabled us to not only collect better stats on everything, but to analyze the numbers and gain real intelligence out of them.

This analyzing of the date to gather intelligence is what specifically interests me. In more recent years, as computer generated graphics have excelled, so has our ability to display data in ever more creative ways. Technologies such as Augmented Reality, the notion of transposing reality with a layer of computer-generated graphics, is a very effective means for data visualization. AR has the potential to enables the layman to understand, analyze, and appreciate the massive amounts of data we collect on everything.

Case in point: Dr. Hans Rosling and Global Health!

Dr. Rosling is a distinguished Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation. His work often involves looking at vast amounts of data to better understand the macro trends of Global Health, enabling him to make better predictions about our future and informing the tools and infrastructure that we’ll need going forward. In this short and fascinating video produced by BBC, Dr. Rosling visualizes 200 years of life expectancy at a global scale, in under four minutes with a little help from Augmented Reality.

As a side note, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is the largest philanthropic organization in the world, has identified Global Health as its international objective. Their mission is to eradicate the 10 most deadly diseases worldwide through research, philanthropy, and education.

As of this morning, we have switched over our feed to Feedburner which provides additionally functionalities for you the reader – as well as the authors of this blog.

Feedburner, another fantastic Google product, enables blog authors to get basic statistics such as total number of subscriebed and/or total blogs read – all the while respecting your privacy. We will be using this tool as an analytic engine to measure which bogs you have enjoyed more and informs us to further cover a particular topic.

Please give us one click and subscribe to our new feed URL at http://feeds.feedburner.com/RoboDynamicsBlog or by clicking the RSS button on the top/right any page (hint: it looks like the rainbow and turns orange when you mouse over it).

We have a number of exciting announcements in the upcoming months that I will distribute from this blog. Hope to see you soon.

Regards,
Alex Lea
Community Relations

Completely out of left-field (to me) a company called Mantaro introduces the MantaroBot, a Skype-based telepresence robot for $3,500 – available now!

I don’t know who this company is or what exactly the capabilities of this robot are but they’re definitly at the right price point. Given that their order form says 60 days for delivery, it remains to be seen how serious of a business this is for the company.

Via Engadget

An obvious place for Kinect is using it as a sensor for robust SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

SLAM is one of those interesting problems that predates computers. Scientists and mathematicians have been working on SLAM algorithms for a long time and though there are now a few different viable approaches, a low-cost robust SLAM system still eludes us.

Recently I had a brief conversation with William Cox of RobotBox.net who is offering an $800 prize to the first person who demonstrates live data from the Neato Robotics’s Neato vacuum cleaner, called the Open Lidar Project.

Update: the Open Lidar Project has a winner!

I’m therefore offering an additional $200 to the first person who can demonstrate any SLAM algorithm on a mobile robot using either the Microsoft Kinect or the Neato Vacuum Cleaner’s Lidar.

To win this prize, you’re free to choose any SLAM algorithm found on OpenSlam.org or any other algorithm of your choice. The robot must be able to map (with or without human assistance) but then be able to take command to navigate autonomously from Point A to Point B within the created map. The first person to post a video showing the result and sharing the code will win $200 from RoboDynamics.

Special thanks to William Cox of RobotBox.net, Phillipp Robbel of MIT, and of course Adafruit who put the original bounty on the Microsoft Kinect hack.

The six technologies identified are:

• The real-world Web of smart objects and places
• Augmented reality, which provides contextual information as an overlay on the physical world
• Next-generation user interfaces, including touch, gesture and tangible computing
• Predictive analytics of new data sources and types
• 3D printing of physical models and spare parts
• Mobile robots for remote presence and mobile infrastructure

I’m of course very glad that serious research houses are giving Robotic Telepresence their due respect, and finally distinguishing the difference between traditional HD Conferencing and Mobile Robotic Telepresence correctly.