Well, once again Steve Sutherland and Dale Wick are in sunny Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. This week they are expecting 100,000 attendies to look at the all of the various vendors. We will be surveying the robotics area, and posting the highlights throughout the week.

In the Robotics TechZone, put together by Robotic Trends, will be some old favorites: anybots, hitec, Hagisonic Co Ltd, Husqvarna, RoboWare

But we are looking forward to seeing what’s new from players like Radio Shack, LEGO, Wow Wee, and Mechano, and even more from some new entrants.

Our intreped reporter Steve Sutherland made it to iREX organized by JARA, and saw a lot of cool robots going on there.  With a theme of “Challenge for the Next”. 

iREX is billed as the largest robotic exhibition in the world and has been running every 2^nd year since 1973!   Personal service robots shared the limelight this year with a new generation of adaptive industrial robotic systems.

One of the most intriguing “robots” on exhibit at iREX was an integrated towel folding system.  Employing two robotic arms assisted with controlled jets of compressed air, towels arriving on a conveyor in piles were separated and then drawn along a plane to expose at least one corner.  Various gyrations, air bursts, and sculpted grippers eventually correctly positioned the towels into a conventional laundry folding machine which then piled the towels neatly.  It was roughly 70% effective, with the remaining 30% of towels falling beneath the system (presumably, in production, such towels would then be moved back into the stream).

Another interesting feature of the show, a series of toy robots competed for the best dancing abilities.  Although not the winner, one talented robotic dancer was the size of a young teenage girl, complete with schoolgirl dress, which swung fairly naturally with the motion and music.

Elsewhere on the show floor, the Fraunhofer research organisation’s Care-O-bot v3 served bottles of juice from it’s built-in tray which also serves as a handy order tablet.  Care-O-bot has one large arm, rear mounted, which was consistently able to pick up bottles and place them on its tray.  After delivery, customers then simply take the bottle from the tray… no need to risk the robotic arm hitting or otherwise interfering with the customer.  Care-O-bot looks like a production-ready system. 

Other highlights include:

•     Met a cool inventor who can send very high data rates using light… useful for the robotic displays – and possibly the head tracker in cases where it is not easy to run a line from the camera to the display.
•       Saw Willow Garage’s new data log display tool… looks like a video timeline, but shows all data logged… joint position, video, amperage, etc.  They say it only took them a few weeks to develop, but that it is one of the best things about ROS.
•      Willow Garage confirmed that they are carefully monitoring motor current… I suspected that this was how they were closing grippers, etc., but now it’s confirmed.  They do plan to add pressure-sensors, etc., but for now, it’s current.  Their new PR2 has 2, yes 2 independent Xeon 8 core processor systems – weighs over 400lbs.
•      Discovered that Harmonic drives are now being produced (with original components) from a large variety of manufacturers.
•     I’ve been at some great sessions – am amazed at how much Japan and Germany (the gov’ts) are spending on robotics!  I saw one of their lightweight arms which at 15kg, will lift 8kg!

Well once again we are at the Consumer Electronics show.  Already we see taxi ads everywhere for the various booths and can’t wait to dig in and get at some new gadgets.  We are especially looking forward to seeing what new announcements are going to come from iRobot, Wowee Toys, Roboware and other exhibitors that we met last year.

Maybe Panasonic will suprise us with a demonstration of the kitchen cleaning robot which is built into the counter, and was demonstrated recently to the Japanese press.  An older video from 2007 shows a more humanoid approach that they’ve tried.

 – Dale Wick and Stephen Sutherland

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Stephen Gentner who is the founder of RoboRealm, and Roger Gay who is the VP of Business Development for iRobis.  I greatly enjoyed talking to both of them over horderves.  I’ll get to RoboRealm in a second.  But first I found out lots of interesting info about the state of the art in Genetic Programming for robot behaviours from Roger.  He has a wealth of knowledge about this and the subject of what things were invented in Sweden (where iRobis is located).

Now back to Stephen and RoboRealm. RoboRealm has made it a mission to make robot vision easier by making a free Windows application that allows even a novice to give a wide variety of computer vision capabilities to a robot.  By combining dozens of pre-implemented algorithms with tuning parameters with a great visual editor it makes it easy to experiment and see what algorithms are the most effective.  To make it go from theory to practice, the visual stack of vision algorithms can connect together such as stacking progressive filters or by passing values through named variables.  To make it even more powerful, there is a simple way to add a line of scripting here and there to do extra calculations that the existing modules don’t already offer.  Finally there is support for control of many basic robot platforms including Lego NXT, Sabertooth motor controllers used by First Robotics competition and other kits.  At my office I use both Lego NXT for quick prototyping and the Sabertooth motor controller for my 14-dof robot, so I felt right at home.

The NXT robot can be built from a single Lego NXT kit. Stephen admits that Lego can fall apart when it crashes into an obstacle, but at least it is easy to repair. I think it is clever how it uses the red ball from the kit as an omni wheel.  And it seems pretty effective too.  He uses remote desktop to control it with the RoboRealm application running on the EEE PC, and that means you could control it from the PSP as well, since it is possible to use the homebrew VNC client to access whatever is running on the EEE PC.

In his talk, he demonstrated several object avoidance techniques and how to build up a stack of filters and even do stereo vision.  In total he brought 4 robots which were all wheel based, and included a kit robot that I was unfamiliar with, one based on iRobot Create and the other two I mentioned already.

I was so inspired by the talk that I have downloaded the app, and demoed it to the other people at my company.

– Dale Wick

If you know a lot about me, you would know that I am keenly interested in a kitchen cleaning robot.  In fact, I started a company with two partners in 2006, to design one.  But I’m not alone in this quest.  There are other groups working on this same idea.  One such group is a Silicon Valley group that are working on the ReadyBot Project.  You may have seen their first video on youtube but the FAQ says that so far, they are primarily teleoperating it (ie by remote control).  Also they believe that the robot shouldn’t necessarily be doing all of the work autonomously, but instead require help to get past that last 15% of the job.  By skipping the trickiest parts they can make a robot for a reasonable price that can do what is needed.

Now personally I feel that the current test videos that show custom tools that need to be attached and detached manually lacks an elegant simplicity.  But then again, simplicity perhaps only comes from observing the patterns in a combination of special cases.

At any rate, I came across one of the people from the team that are working on it, on the show floor.  He had the prototype unit with him and was discussing what it could and couldn’t do with the people who walked by.  He was next to a booth that specializes in sensors, and was using those in his robot.

Anyway, it was nice to see the prototype in person, but I didn’t really get a demo of what the latest improvements were, since it is still a research platform and wasn’t in the demonstration environment.  I see now that they have released a new video on youtube though.  So maybe that will interest you.

– Dale Wick

One of the keynote addresses at RoboDevelopment 2008 this week was one from Sabastian Thrun.  He is well known in robotic circles as heading the team from Stanford to create Stanley, which is the car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.  His team’s entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 came in second, beat only by the second place team from the 2005 event, the Tartan Racing Team.  I had a chance to ride in the Tartan Racing Team vehicle at CES 2008.  So I was listening with rapt attention to see what he had to say.

 His declaration was that one of society’s big problems is preventable deaths from car accidents.  He compared the number of car deaths per year to terrorist deaths and medical conditions and it is startling how a problem that is so common is just accepted as an everyday cost of commuting.

In addition he noted that if you photograph highways from above, you’ll find that the percent of the road that is actually in use at any given time is quite low.  For instance I normally drive 6 car lengths from the car in front of me, when I am on the highway.  His claim was that by increasing the density of traffic from 15% to 40%, you would more than double the capacity of cars you could get through a given stretch of road without building any extra infrastructure.

Finally he observed that most of the time, your car is in a parking lot, taking up valuable space, but not really accomplishing anything.

The way to improve all of these problems, according to Professor Strun is a subject that he knows well: self-driving cars.  Thus he claims that self-driving cars is one of the best ideas for how to improve society.  Now, as intrigued as I was by thinking about all of these problems, I wasn’t immediately convinced that all of these can be improved by self-driving cars.

He pictures a world where you call for a car, or your car anticipates when you are planning to leave for somewhere, and self-drives to where you need it to be.  As a result you could take a large pool of cars and have them constantly in motion making sure that everyone had a vehicle when they needed it.  If you do that, then the amount of parking spaces at work, the mall and so on is cut down dramatically.  There is no reason that self-driving cars would ever be in a “driver error” type car accident since it would constantly be negotiating with cars around it for lane space.  And similarly it could drive much closer to other vehicles, since it could anticipate slow downs and react much faster to other cars than a person.  As a fringe benefit the 40% of the weight of the car which is safety equipment could be cut down significantly, thus saving gas on each trip and of course cost of manufacturing.

An interesting world it would be, don’t you think?

– Dale Wick