Chapter 9 Quest for the sentient robot 283
1.1 EARLY PIONEERS AND THE STORY TILL SHAKEY
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hewish for automated machines doing chores on human command goes back to the lore of Greek mythology. Homer writes about artificial servants with the ability of thinking, speech, and locomotion for the Gods at Mt. Olympus, which were built by the blacksmith cum craftsman Haphaestus [25].It is some coincidence that the first evidence of an automaton is also found in ancient Greece at Alexandria, around 250 BC when Philon of Byzantium build a human-like automaton [197] which looked like a maid, holding a jug of wine in her right hand. When a cup was placed in the automaton’s left palm it poured some wine, followed by water to mix in and served a drink. Philon designed his automaton with smart mechanisms and pneumatics and named itAutomatiopoeica, which historically is said to be the first robot.
Lion-like automatons are found in the accounts of Byzantine emperor Theophilos around 820, while around medieval times, building automatons in the Muslim world is well documented in the works of Al-Jazari and Banu Musa. From the 11th to 15th century automatons such as horsemen, birds, doors etc. as parts of mechanical clocks were found both in Europe and the Arab world. Near the European renaissance, Da Vinci [283] helped by royal patronage in Italy, developed mechanically maneuverable automatons, shown in Figure 1.1.
At about the same time across the globe Japan had made its own automaton, the Karakuri Ningyo puppets. These puppets had using mechanical arrangements, where a wound up spring was employed to store energy, This was followed up with a coordination of cams, levers and gears to actuate the puppet. Meant for recreational purposes, as shown in 3
FIGURE 1.1 Da Vinci’s Bird. These are sketches for a bird-like automaton; (a) is from Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus and (b) is from Codex Huygens. From Rosheim [283], with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.
Figure 1.2, it was popularly used as a tea-serving automaton, the puppet can move forward with a cup of tea in its hands and then bow its head to offer tea to the guest, after drinking when the cup is returned by the guest to the puppet, it raises its head in a show of gratitude, turns around and returns.
More sophisticated automatons were to follow in the coming century. Vaucanson made his automated duck [368] in 1738 with mechanical arrangements as shown inFigure 1.3. His duck could flap its wings, make quacking noise, drink water, eat grain and seeds with a near realistic gulping action. The duck was designed to be the same size as a living duck, made out of gold-plated copper. Vaucanson also developed other such automatons: the flute player and the tambourine player which were life-size human figures which created an imitation of playing musical instruments and android waiters which would serve food and clear tables.
Around the late 18th century a similar mechanical arrangement was employed in Mysore, India, to build a mechanical wooden tiger which responded to turning a handle with a growl and an animated attack. Various historians have suggested that this may have been an outcome of Tipu Sultan’s collaboration with the French.
All of these developments took place without any electricity, and were powered either by a smart mechanical arrangement which most of time was a coiled up spring, or by pneumatics and hydraulics. It was not until around 1890 that Tesla used electricity to build miniaturised boats which were controlled remotely using radio signals, as shown in Figure 1.4.
The coining of the word ‘robot’, had to wait until 1920. This etymology is derived from the Czech word ‘robota’ meaning committed labour. It was first used in Karel ˇCapek’s play, R.U.R — Rossum’s Universal Robots1. The evolution in the usage of the word ‘robot’ is shown inFigure 1.5and the word cloud from Wikipedia associating it with other words and ideas is shown inFigure 1.6.
The first humanoid robot, Eric was made by W.H. Richards in 1928 and put on display in London. The Westinghouse Electric Company developed another humanoid, Electro around the 1940s which was controlled by electrical relays and could play recorded speech, respond
1Capek’s play ‘Rosumovi Univerz´ˇ aln´iRoboti’ was written in Czech, published in 1920, and first screened at Prague, Czechoslovakia, on 25 January 1921.
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FIGURE 1.2 Karakuri Puppets.These puppets, made in Japan from the 17th to the 19th century, were triggered by a wound-up spring and could serve tea. Image courtesyen.wikipedia.org.
FIGURE 1.3 Vaucanson’s Duck, made in 1738, is an example of early automaton. Image courtesy en.wikipedia.org.
FIGURE 1.4 Tesla’s radio-controlled boat.Nikola Tesla patented a radio-controlled robot-boat in the winter of 1898, and named it ‘teleautomaton’. Tesla demonstrated his invention at Madison Square Garden, New York City, in the Electrical Exhibition that year. Image courtesy commons.wikimedia.org, CC license.
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FIGURE 1.5 Use of the word ‘robot’.Considering 1950 as a base year, around 1985 the usage of the word ‘robot’ saw an increase of about 12-fold, after the 1990s there has been a decline in usage due to development of nomenclature such as ‘roomba’, which has become a tag name for all cleaning robots, ‘PUMA’ and its variants which have ruled the arm robots domain, ‘drones’ to connote all flying robots, and newer science fiction is more about androids and cyborgs, than the simplistic R2D2 and C3P0 of the 1980s. Made using Google Books Ngram Viewer [230]
FIGURE 1.6 Wordcloud of the word ‘robot’ from Wikipedia. Nearly all the words seen here are used in the chapters to follow. Made using the wordsalad app,http://wordsaladapp.com/
FIGURE 1.7 LUNOKHOD-1, from a Russian lunar mission, is one of the earliest examples of teleoperation and telemanipulation. From Spenneman [308], reprinted by permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd, (http://www.tandfonline.com.)
to voice commands and moved on wheels attached to its toes. Claude Shannon in 1938 made the electromechanical mouse, which could find its way to the goal point by trial and error — a humble ancestor of the modern day micromouse.
Despite Tesla’s boat and Shannon’s mouse, in the first half of the last century, robots were still difficult to build because computer technology such as ENIAC relied on bulky and cumbersome electronics of gas valves which were just too big to be integrated into a mobile unit. It was not until 1949 that Walter’s robots [344] heralded in the concept of a mobile computational unit readily interacting with the environment. These robots had likeness to turtles and could perform simples behaviours as following the light and avoid obstacles.
Walter had achieved the first bonding of electronics and mechanical modules which could respond to an external stimuli. In the 1950s, Devol designed the Unimate robot arm which was the first programmable industrial arm manipulator.
Later, in the early 1970s, Shakey and the Stanford Cart were early robots developed from principles of autonomous agents and AI. Around the same time, researchers at Waseda University developed a full-scale humanoid, Wabot-1, which had two legs and two arms and could communicate with human beings in Japanese. From a cognitive point of view, the robot had the mental faculty of a 2-year-old kid.
The Russian moon missions led to the development of the Lunokhod programme. The Lunokhod-1, shown inFigure 1.7, was the first robot to land on another heavenly body. The Lunokhod-1 in 1970 and the Lunokhod-2 three years later were remote-controlled robotic vehicles designed to chart the lunar surface. The robot vehicles were equipped with solar panels for power by day and a radioisotope heater unit for power by night. Explorer robots,
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FIGURE 1.8 Philae (Toby, 1 of 4.)The robotic lander on Comet 67P came alive [134] with the falling sunlight on its solar panels and reestablished contact with Earth on 13 June 2015. Cartoon made as a part of the Toby series (1 of 4) by the author, CC-by-SA 4.0 license.
since Lunokhod have come of age and gone on to explore other planets and heavenly bodies such as comets as shown inFigure 1.8.
With the microelectronics revolution in the 1970s and computer revolution in the 1980s, robotics took a leap with readily available miniaturised components and smaller processing units and user friendly software interfaces.
1.1.1 Walter‘s turtles
Modern day mobile robotics was born in 1949, when W.G Walter built 2 three-wheeled automated turtle-like robots [154]. These automated turtles had a light sensor, a touch sensor, a propulsion motor for a front-wheel drive, a steering motor to move around and a vacuum tube analog computer. Walter named his project Machina speculatrix, and he named the 2 turtles after characters in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Elmer and Elsie, which also fit the suitable acronyms,ELectroMEchanicalRobots,LightSensitive, withInternal and External stability. This was the first electromechanical autonomous mobile robot. These turtles had three characteristics: attraction to moderate light and repulsion by bright light and obstacles. In various experiments, the turtles responded to a number of external stimuli:
1. Goal seekingbehaviour. When started in the dark, the turtle made its way towards a beam of light and tracked it to reach its feeding hutch.
2. Free willas in the ability to to choose between alternatives, choosing to reach the nearer of two light sources when executing light tracking behaviour, staying close to it for some time and then moving on to the next light source and then returning back to the former. This cyclic behaviour continues until power runs out.
3. Pertinacity. The turtles showed dogged determination, when tracking a light source if it so happened that the light source was not visible from their field of view due to obstacles, they would resort to moving in a random direction and on finding the source of light they would assume light tracking behaviour. This behaviour is shown inFigure 1.9.
4. Preference for an optimum. The turtles avoided extreme stimuli and opted for moderation, e.g., when tracking a light source, they were attracted to the light source, but were repelled by excess brightness.
FIGURE 1.9 Walter’s turtles. A time lapse photograph of Elsie where she demonstrates Pertinacity. Chasing for a light source, it is put off track by the reflection of its own candle in the polished fire-screen. She eventually finds her way to the candle behind the screen. From Fong et al. [107], with permission from Elsevier.
5. Social organisation and competition. When the two turtles are set up simultaneously in a dark environment with candles serving as light sources mounted on each of them. Both the turtles are attracted by the other’s light source still repelled by excess brightness. That led to a concerted dance where each turtle waltzed around the other. Walter made this experiment even more interesting by adding in a third external light source, which encouraged a competitive behaviour as the turtles raced to reach the third light source.
6. Response to internal physiological changes such as low battery power.
Walter designed the turtles such that with a low battery the turtle is attracted to a certain intensity of brightness which guides it to a charging pod.
7. Realisation of self. Walter tried even more innovative experiments with mirrors.
Mounted with a candle the turtle tracked itself in a mirror but on reaching the mirror and touching it, its tactile sensing detects the mirror as an obstacle and then it walks around the mirror. Walter called this behaviour as realisation of self. InChapter 9it will be discussed and demonstrated that a mirror is indeed very crucial for tests of consciousness.
8. Other than the above a firsthand account identified Elsie as a woman, and Elmer as a man.
This was unlike Da Vinci’s bird and Tesla’s boat as the turtles didn’t have a fixed behaviour. Rather performance was on the merit of the stimuli acquired from its environment, mostly at runtime. The turtles demonstrated automaton and path planning as a response to external stimuli. According to Walter, his turtles werean imitation of life[344], and were the first examples of Artificial Life (ALIFE) and established the grounding for anthropomorphic motivation to design robots. It is interesting to note that Walter knew
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FIGURE 1.10 Ninja and Amy, replicas of Walter’s robots, built by Ian Horsfield in The Bristol Robotics Lab. The only modern components used are the 2 motors and the batteries, rest remains nearly as Walter would have made it. Image courtesy Alan Winfield, University of West England, Bristol, used with permission.
to implement learning. However, while it is certain that Walter had developed a standalone learning-based device, it is not certain if he built such faculties into a turtle robot [363].
His later efforts to build the IRMA device — InnateReleasing Mechanism Analogue — exploited more advanced learning models and as with the CORA, was not integrated into a turtle robot.
Though it is a coincidence [155], but not really a surprise that in 1949 Walter started developing his turtles and Wiener [352] discussed preliminary ideas of marrying sensor readings and motor action, via an ultra-rapid computing machine, and around the same time Turing started developing ideas for the Turing machine and Shannon modelled the theory of communication.
1.1.2 Shakey and the Stanford Cart
Mobile robotics took a big leap forward around the end of 1970s decade. At SRI, Nilsson built and programmed Shakey [253] (Figure 1.11) and was able to navigate it in a grid-based environment. This technological advancement was fueled by modern-day electronics, user friendly software interfaces and analytical models and tools developed by AI over the previous 30 odd years. Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, navigation, finding path by search methods as A* search algorithm and also using sophisticated techniques such as the Hough transform and the visibility graph method. When set up, Shakey was controlled by a SDS-940 computer with a 64K 24-bit memory and programming was done in Fortran and LISP. In later versions the SDS-940 computer was replaced by a PDP-10/PDP-15 interface. Later robots as The Stanford Cart and the CMU Rover were developed as direct descendents of Shakey and tried to plugup its shortcomings.
The Stanford Cart was built as a remotely controlled mobile robot with an onboard TV by Adams in 1960 for his research project, later improvements were supervised by Earnest, McCarthy and Moravec over a period of 20 years. They developed it into the first robot road vehicle, though it was broadly employed for research in visual navigation. Adams made the cart to support his research on NASA JPL project Prospector, which hoped to establish teleoperation in robots on the lunar surface using radio control from Earth. The Cart had four small bicycle wheels with electric motors powered by a car battery and carried a TV camera aligned in the forward direction. The interaction of the Cart with its environment was via this onboard TV. Much later, from th mid to late 1970s, Moravec programmed it to navigate autonomously in a cluttered environment. Though, the Cart was appreciably slow at an average speed of 1 meter in 10 to 15 min, in lurches, at the end of each lurch it stopped and took some pictures, and slowly processed them to plan its next path, and this processs continued. Negotiating 20-meter courses, while avoiding obstacles often took about 5 hours.
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FIGURE 1.11 Shakey in 1972.This iconic robot was designed from the late 1960s to the early 1970s at SRI. Nilsson [253] describes Shakey as a mobile robot system “endowed with a limited ability to perceive and model its environment”. Shakey was navigable using grid based methods and could also rearrange simple objects. Shakey is an exhibit on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Image courtesycommons.wikimedia.org.
FIGURE 1.12 Telepresence and teleoperation most often features as a basic functionality in modern day robotics and finds support from most robotic software suits. As shown, a telepresence robot lacks in autonomy and is remote controlled over at a distance, and it’s controller can communicate with people in the robot’s local environment over vision (screen) and voice (microphone) channels. Telepresence is the first steps to a future when communication will commence over virtual reality. On the left is Anybots QA, and on the right is iRobot’s Ava 500, both images courtesycommons.wikimedia.org, CC-by-SA 3.0 license.
Walter’s turtles and Nilsson’s Shakey were near isolated events spaced across 20 years in which there was no appreciable experimental progress, but there was theoretical development of AI as a whole: cybernetics in particular by Wiener, the basis of artificial animals and early ideas which led to ANIMATs by Toda and a general integration of electronics leading to electronic processors. At the end of the 1970s, the development cycle of mobile robots became simpler due to innovations in AI, electronics, computer science, software design etc. In the next three sections I try to relive these technological developments and paradigm shifts.