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Move Over, Astro Robot Pets Are On the Way
November 16 1998; ComdexRobot pets, Sony's latest incarnation of playful innovation, will be cavorting at Comdex. A technology demonstration that will eventually produce a new category of convergence --"Robot Entertainment" these products combine artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and integrated audio-video and computer processing in ways the Jetsons only dreamed.
Sony will be exhibiting five pet-type robot prototypes that can simulate the behavior of furry friends such as dogs, cats or monkeys and even some human behavior. Interchangeable hardware and software can transform the robot's appearance, functions and movements so they can become different types of playmates, creating an endless stream of fun and games. And, in the future, entertainment robots will have even greater levels of "intelligence" so they can learn, expand their abilities and adopt different personalities through interaction with their owners.
Jonathan Sidener
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WORLD OF THE FUTURE PREDICTIONS OF SCI-FI COMING
CLOSER TO REALITY ON STAGES OF COMDEX
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Las Vegas A crowd at Comdex gathers around three small robot dogs sitting
atop a demonstration platform. Sony technician Takishi Yamomoto pats one on
the head, starting the action at the nation's largest computer show last
week. The gray plastic creature trimmed with wires and diodes stirs
slightly. Yamomoto pats a bit more emphatically. The puppy-size robot slowly
turns his head down toward his chest and stretches his feet out in front, in
a strikingly accurate mimic of a waking dog. The crowd oohs and ahhs.To overcome the noise of the receptive crowd, Yamomoto bends over and talks
into an unseen microphone located where a real dog would have an ear.The dog wags its tail.
The crowd grows and people in the back strain to see the robo- puppies go
through their paces.Perhaps better than any other Comdex item, the Sony Pet Type entertainment
prototype illustrates how the computer is coming closer to making good on
the predictions of science fiction a generation ago. Comparisons to the
clunky but lifelike movements of Star Wars' C3PO are unavoidable.A few feet away from the robot pets, a 3-pound Sony laptop computer sports a
minuscule video camera secreted in the frame of its pop-up monitor. It's not
quite as small as the size of Dick Tracy's wrist video phone, but it's on
the market in Japan and is expected to be sold in the United States next
year.In another area, Richard Tinker is talking with the computerized voice of a
woman, asking her to turn appliances on or to retrieve stock quotes or
sports scores from the Internet. The product's name Home Automated Living is
an obvious reference to Hal, the computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey.ROBOTICS ADVANCING
Sony's pet prototype faces cost issues that may prevent it from ever
reaching production. But it is a striking example of how the robotics field
is advancing.The three dogs are programmed to function autonomously, instead of simply
following a set of prescribed directions, according to Koji Kageyama,
manager of the laboratory that produced the robots.The dogs respond to sound, color and other visual information from the two
tiny digital video cameras that serve as eyes. Sensors in the head respond
to touch. Acceleration sensors allow them to sense gravity, which means that
they can right themselves if they are laid on their sides.The systems run on a 64-bit processor with 8 megabytes of RAM.
One of the robots is programmed to like the color orange and dislike blue.
When he is presented with a blue piece of plastic, he tries to push it away."He's attacking," Kageyama explains.
When he wanders up to an orangege ball, his tail wags and he pats at the ball
in a more playful manner.Similarly, the dogs vary their responses to touch. When petted, they respond
in a friendly manner and raise their front paws off the ground to beg for
more. But pat them too hard, and they will extend their front legs and try
to push away the offending hand.One of the robots, apparently a male, practices lifting one back leg.
The robots can be programmed to mimic the behavior of dogs, cats or humans.
Kageyama will not discuss how much the company has spent developing the
products, or how much it would cost to buy one."How much would you pay for it?" he asks with a smile. He dismisses several
offers of $5,000 or less. "I don't think so," he says.
Jeff Richgels
Someday, perhaps just a few years from now, robots will clean our bathrooms, vacuum our floors and mow our lawns. But they may have to entertain us first.
"People have to get used to the idea of having robots in their homes, and I think entertainment robots are going to help address that point," says Tucker Balch, one of the chairmen of the annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, held this week at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.
Sony already has developed an artificial "dog" on display here this week. In fact, there was an entire team of soccer-playing canine robots. The devices are so sophisticated they are capable of getting back up when they fall. "Right now, I can see some very wealthy people buying them to be the first on the block to have them," said Balch, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. "Sony's target is to get them (priced) under $1,000 and I think that's when you're going to start seeing a real big consumer market for entertainment robots."
"Making human interaction with robots easy and fun is a big direction of research," Balch added. "It's hard for people to work with computers in general. And even if you have a robot that helps you with household chores, there's this issue of how do you interact and communicate with it."
Along the same lines as the robot dog is a Carnegie Mellon project called "Office Plant No. 1."
"It's not quite an animal and not quite a plant," says Balch. "It knows when you're in the office and it monitors your e-mail and makes sounds and moves, but slowly, and sort of in a way to enhance your environment."
Still, there are many technical hurdles to overcome before robots can become as common as other sophisticated appliances or toys. "They need to be reliable," Balch says. "We're having trouble with that. Robots just aren't as great as they appear in the movies. There are so many things that can break."
Dan Stormont, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, brought a robot to the conference called "Lobotomus." Lobotomus took part in the hors d'oeuvres serving contest that concluded Wednesday night. The contest illustrated many of the hurdles facing robots, Stormont said.
The toughest part of building a robot, even one for the seemingly simple task of serving munchies, is integrating everything, from software to the mechanical systems, Stormont said. Lobotomus, for example, has ultrasonic sensors that allow it to sense objects it will then serve. However, it can't tell what those objects are. Add vision sensors and you may fix that, but then you face the hurdle of integrating the vision sensors with the ultrasonic sensors. And if you get by that hurdle, "ideally you'd want it to be able to get the food itself," Stormont said. "It would be able to reload its tray and then come out and serve it." Lobotomus uses contact switches under the tray that cause it to announce "I'm out of food" when the tray is empty. Then it faces navigating back to the kitchen.
Ultimately, you'd want a robot that could think for itself and figure everything out, from getting food to finding people to asking them what they want, serving them and then returning for more when empty.
Speech recognition capability, a necessary step for interaction, is improving all the time, but is still rather primitive. Navigation is the most advanced, Stormont said. And when it comes to "feeling," robots may never get there, Stormont said. "I don't think robots will ever be like humans," he says. "You can get them to raise an eyebrow like they're feeling an emotion, but it's all programmed. It's not something they feel."
Reliability is getting better all the time, however, Balch and Stormont agreed. "Again," says Balch, "entertainment robots are going to help with reliability because we'll have companies like Sony building thousands or hundreds of thousands of these robots and they're going to learn how to build them reliably."
Obviously, the most important hurdle is safety.
"You have to make one you can prove is safe so you don't get nailed by litigation," Stormont says. "And that's a ways away." Tests will be similar to those used with cars, where it can be shown they meet certain safety standards and if operated in the proper manner, won't cause injuries. "Sony's dog robot doesn't have safety problems," Balch says, "But when you get to large robots capable of moving around your house and cleaning your bathroom, you can't have a glitch where it suddenly swings around and possibly injures someone. Again, I think the entertainment market will help refine those technologies."
Current federal regulations mandate that robots, like those used in factories, must be surrounded by safety cages or can be operated only when no people are around it. Japan, on the other hand, is more robot-friendly without such restrictions, Stormont said. Besides factories, the other main applications for robots are areas like space exploration and hazardous waste handling, where economics is overridden by the fact that humans can't operate in those areas. Some consumer robots are available, but they are very expensive and not very reliable, Stormont said. A robot lawn mower, for example, often leaves patches of unmowed grass.
The typical lab robot like those on display this week costs from $5,000 to $10,000, Balch said. "That's just too expensive for the home, but I think very soon - I think 2000 - we're going to start seeing the vacuuming robot, the bathroom cleaning robots, those kinds of things," he added. "When human acceptance, reliability and price all come together, that's when you're going to see the home cleaning robots."
Caption: Henry A. Koshollek/The Capital Times Dan Stormont, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, didn't win the hors d'oeuvres serving contest with "Lobotomus" at this week's American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference at Monona Terrace, but that didn't bother him because it wasn't designed for that task. Stormont intends to use the robot to provide building tours at UNM via the Internet. One of the competitions at this week's American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference at the Monona Terrace Convention Center involved the robots finding objects in simulated space environment. Here the designers put their robots through test trials.
