Preface
Since Walter’s Turtles, technology has come a long way and we can now boast of state-of-the-art robots, such as ASIMO, PR2, NaO and Pepper. My interest in this field of study, which has taken on obsessive proportions, is due to my academic background, my participation in various open source robotic communities (Player/Stage, ROS, MORSE etc.), my teaching assignments and projects with my students and above all, a child-like desire to make robots. Not withstanding my personal desire to put together nearly all that I have learnt over the last ten years, robotics and AI truly stand to change the world as we know it. In this text spanning ten chapters, I have looked to various researchers; Braitenberg, Dennett, Brooks, Arkin, Murphy, Winfield, Vaughan, Dudek, Dorigo, Sahin, Bekey, Abney, Wendell, Takeno, Bringsjord and the Andersons, as those who have had a lasting impression on me and have shown me the proverbial light to the correct path. Other than these academic influences and motivation, science fiction, particularly Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Cory Doctorow, Peter Watts etc., led me to engaging queries on various aspects of AI and robots and their influence on human society and helped me to illustrate ideas in the later chapters. Furthermore, I have been influenced by and have enjoyed a long list of movies, among which are iconic robot movies such as, Wall-E, IRobot and cult classics, such as The Metropolis, Blade Runner and West World, and the more recent ones, such as Interstellar, Real Steel, Robot and Frank, Big Hero 6 and Ex-Machina.
This text is meant for undergraduate students and may also serve as a reference for graduate students. It attempts to introduce the reader to what has been achieved in agent-based robotics over the last four decades, the ways we can implement such concepts with easily available electronics and open source tools, multirobot teams, swarm robotics and human robot interaction, as well as the efforts to develop artificial consciousness in robots.
The last chapter is on the future of AI and robotics in the foreshadow of the prophecies of super intelligent AI and technological singularity.
The journey starts with mythical lore from ancient Greece and ends with a debate on a futuristic prophecy where human beings and technology merge to create superior beings as heir to our evolutionary pathways. From Haphaestus to Philon to Da Vinci to Tesla to Walter to Toda to Moravec to Braitenberg to Brooks to Kurzweil, this text is livened up with examples, pictures, one-on-one chatter with experts, schematics and cartoons.
The seven broad themes addressed across the ten chapters are;
1. AI vs. Applied AI
There is always some contrast in the theory and the practice for any discipline, and the appeal for classroom teaching versus hands-on application in the laboratory, workshop or in industry has had its contrasts. It is many folds more for AI. It has been my experience that the question often boils down to either ‘learn AI’ or ‘make robots’. Outstanding texts in AI as Russell and Norvig and Rich and Knight don’t really help much towards building a robot, and one has to dig out online tutorials, YouTube videos etc. The same is true for machine
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FIGURE 1 The bridge from AI to applied AI.For new initiates the two domains appeal as two different disciplines. An undergraduate student will find it difficult to see the convergence of the doctrines of AI; for example, planning, search and knowledge representation are the philosophical basis and analytical tools for making robots, but at a beginners level it reduces to simple programming scripts, interfacing of sensors with motors and ease of design. Therefore, the correlation between AI and robotics may not be very apparent to a young enthusiast.
learning; a text which introduces a student to neural network, such as Bishop is probably the best treatment that one can offer on the subject, but to make a neural network, the student will have to find suitable C or Python libraries. The bridge, as shown in Figure 1, between theory and application is not only distant but requires different faculties. It is also to be added that AI, by itself is not enough to make robots; the effort calls for electronics, mechanical design, sensor design and other overlapping disciplines, depending on the specifics of the robot. The book makes an effort to shorten this bridge and hopefully, make the crossing easier, by correlating concepts to their applications.
The applications cover designing simple behaviours inChapter 2 and 3, navigation in Chapter 4, and multirobot systems and swarming, many of these are supplemented with examples from practical scenarios, algorithms and introduction to the software. Navigation is unique as it is a basic behaviour and also a design tool. Chapter 5 has a few examples with hardware which are meant as appetizers to whet the imagination and creativity of the budding robot enthusiast.
2. Deliberative vs. Reactive and the Question of Relevance
This debate between the two ways of approaching agent-based robotics was triggered by the pioneering work of Rodney Brooks in the mid 1980s. However, the thread of thought can be traced back to behaviourism and phenomenology. Behaviourism was established as a sub-discipline in psychology in late 1890s through the works of Pavlov, Thorndike and by Skinner in 1950s. Philosophical development in phenomenology by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty helped to cement the concepts of situatedness and embodiment. Assimilation of these ideas into robotics was done independently by three daring scientists, who had the wish to create artificial creatures: Walter in late 1940s, Toda in mid 1960s and Braitenberg in early 1980s. Walter explicitly demonstrated design of behaviour in his turtles, Toda suggested the first models of autonomous agency and Braitenberg’s gedanken experiments showed that simple agency can lead to very advanced performance. These independent conclusions led to the basic principles of behaviour-based robotics.
The frame problem and the question of relevance is an inherent burden in designing a robot and forms the crux of the argument. It cannot be eradicated, and has to be either completely avoided as in behaviour-based paradigm, or consider addressing it to a minimal
as in PENGI. In sheer contrast, we human beings can ‘solve’ the frame problem ‘on the run’.
Nowadays, most robots have deliberative as well as reactive modules and are supplemented with machine learning, thus overcoming the issue of relevance at least in low-level repetitive behaviours contained in a more or less known environment. However, this ugly monster raises its head time and again. The utilitarianism vs. deontology debate for autonomous vehicles is a direct extension of the deliberative vs. reactive quarrel, where all deontic approaches are pegged to a set ‘frame’ of pre-programmed rules and utilitarian principles are based on immediacy. Also, most attempts to develop conscious robots such as those discussed in Chapter 9 are defacto inquiries into the question of relevance: Is the dynamics of a tambourine relevant for its beat? Will looking into the mirror make the robot find its own image? Can a robot appropriate causality, and relate actions to conclusion? I would wish to believe that a robot which can ‘solve’ the frame problem across five senses as human beings do, would be conscious, devoid of any shade of doubt.
Fodor claimed that due to the frame problem, AI is dead. For what the last two decades of research has provided, the debate of the frame problem has added to the richness of AI.
3. Engineering Robot Behaviour
My best reference for understanding behaviour is, Ronald Arkin’s tome,Behaviour Based Robotics, and the works of Richard Vaughan and Alan Winfield, and a good part of the book documents the engineering of desired behaviour in a robot.
Reactive systems are faster and easier to design than the deliberative or hybrid ones, and they do not need sleek hardware such as a camera or a laser scanner. The unwitting contrast is that since behaviour is emergent it is difficult to design the architecture for a desired performance. Very simple behaviours, such as ‘track a light source’ or ‘follow a line’, hardly demonstrate the inherent relation between the agent and the environment. Swarm robotics and Braitenberg vehicles help to illustrate such intimate relations and contrast of the ease of design to the unpredictable nature of performance. Gerardo Beni, very cleverly summarises this phenomenon, that [robot] behaviour stands as a convergence of two radically different ideas, unpredictability and the wish to find order. The definition of robot behaviour has been modified over the last three decades, and may be further edited in the years to come.
Walter’s Turtles was the beginning of agent based robotics, but it was left to Simon and later Toda, to envisage a self-sustaining mobile agency with local landmarks and multiple goals which can negotiate tradeoff between its energy supply and the task at hand. The fungus eaters mined uranium on a far off planet and gathered fungus which when digested provided them with energy, Toda’s model was also a blueprint for early path planning models. The Mars rovers can be said to be the modern-day avatars of the fungus eater, though they harness their energy from solar panels and not Martian fungus.
In the 1980s, Wilson’s model of the ANIMATs, Pfeifer’s principles for design and development of agent based robotics and Lumelsky and Stepanov’s Bug Algorithms were motivated from mother nature and streamlined the principles for designing of automated self-sustaining mobile agency.
Braitenberg’s vehicles are designs of more involved functionalities, as emotions, value systems, correspondence of information, collating aspects of reality to memory, learning and evolution, all of these from simple sensory-motor principles. Braitenberg’s vehicles have served as illustrative examples in a number of chapters and is a recurring theme across the book.
AI has wilfully plagiarised from the natural world and anthropomorphic motivation in design and behaviour models derived from ethological studies has been the trend. Best examples are: Fukuda’s brachiatron was motivated from the swinging motion of apes;
ECOBOT series of robots modelled on the process of digestion; swarm behaviour designed
on trophallaxis in insects and birds; INSBOT project which introduced robot decoys in a cockroach colony etc.
The contrast between robot groups and robot swarms further helps to appreciate the facets for engineering a behaviour. Reactive methods are the basis of multirobot swarming, this cohesion among the robots is a boon as it is flexible to dynamical changes in the local environment, and easier to scale up without hampering the performance. However, robot swarms are notorious and it is difficult to warrant their reliability and tag its performance to a factor of fault tolerance. Therefore, engineering a desired swarm behaviour is more a subject for future research than a cutting-edge technology. On the other hand, robot groups with designed with deliberative paradigm working over a local wifi network lend more safety and predictability. However, they are not very flexible, and they lack versatility and are difficult to scale up.
4. Replicating Human-Like Intelligence
Nearly all human activities can be classified as motivated either by survival or curiosity.
The former is essential for our homeostasis, the latter encourages growth of culture, society, intellect, technology etc. Robot designs have exploited both these facets, both in low-level behaviour and also in sophisticated ones. Self preservation is enshrined into Asimov’s laws and is also coded into simple robots, viz. Roomba, and curiosity is closely tagged to the phenomenon of emergence and is the driver of the behaviour-based paradigm.
Behaviour-based approaches are insufficient to provide for ethical agency and artificial consciousness, and the ethical question finds the best answer in developmental approaches, while the question on artificial consciousness for robots has probed into various avenues, and there is yet to be human-like conscious behaviour in robots. To fully address the question on ethics and consciousness leads to queries regarding the human brain, and robotics still awaits a breakthrough in medical science, neurology and psychology.
5. Open Source Robotics
Robotic suites Player/Stage/Gazebo and later ROS were designed for UBUNTU installations and helped unify the domains of simulation and running of the real robot. These software suites function in a client server fashion and encourage crowd sourcing in code pieces, designs and tweaks to hardware, thereby establishing a benchmark for hardware and software in robotics. ROS also integrates open source hardware such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ODROID, etc. making the design and development of a new robot more modular and therefore open to crowdsourcing.
6. Robots as Conscious Beings — More Than a Tool, a Machine or a Slave
As a robot enthusiast, I cannot justify a book without the mention of Isaac Asimov.
His vision for a human robot society is the backdrop ofChapter 8. However, his three laws are found to be mutually conflicting. They have implementation issues and lack practical applications. Similarly, the Turing test is more a concept than a real tool to distinguish between the natural and the artificial. Such failures of Asimov’s laws and the Turing test make us reflect as to what robots are and will they ever measure up to being humans, and what future they may have. Instead of labeling robots as tools or slaves, the greatest triumph of AI would be if robots can acquire free will and demonstrate human-like sentient behaviour and such ideas are discussed inChapter 9.
Robots imbued with deontic ethics have been a success in the laboratory and may soon be employed as nurse and carer robots. However, consciousness in robots as yet has been in either a narrow concern or it is short lived — for a few seconds.
The unfortunate consequence of this triumphant robot revolution is the loss of human
jobs, and this has fueled a parley which is raging across newspapers, blogs, online forums and election manifestos. If the trend continues, we may soon have a modern-day Luddite revolution which might change the rules of our social and economic systems and call for a limitation in use of automation and AI. The irony of AI’s greatest achievement doesn’t end here and an apocalyptic future where robots annihilate the human race or alternatively dominate our world and reduce human beings to an inferior second-rate species, starts to seem all too real. Experts in the field foresee this as a neo-Darwinian ‘jump’ in our evolutionary track which will be discussed inChapter 10.
Will artificial consciousness lead us to super intelligent beings which may spell doom for humanity and eventual extinction of the human race ? The query reminds me of a Hindu mythological tale1 that my parents told me as a kid. The story is about four disciples who have learned physiology, anatomy and medicine and have set out to hone their skills on real-world problems. These four happen upon the carcass of a dead tiger, and in the hope of testing their skills the first disciple assembles the bones of the dead tiger in an upright position, the second disciple gives muscles to this structure of bones and, not to be undone, the third disciple adds the organs. The fourth one, who was supposedly the smartest of the lot, was unabashed of his skills and despite warnings from the other three, gives life to the tiger. As a tragic end, the tiger leaps up with a growl and gobbles up the four disciples.
Metaphorically, we are at the dare of the fourth disciple and AI may well pounce upon us
— sooner rather than later, if we are not careful enough.
7. AI as the New Definition of Science
Science is the study of the underlying principles governing the working of the universe, and is largely based on experimentation and observation. This consistent and unified body of knowledge is as perceived by our sensory organs and inferred by the processing power of our brain. As we move towards a future dominated by automation, self enriching AI agents and virtual reality, the process of experimentation and observation will be dictated by technology, AI in particular. Therefore, AI will be the tool and discipline to lead us to science. Further, it is believed that close to technological singularity, technological growth will be off the charts, way too fast for biological intelligence such as ourselves to grasp at. With such a crescendo of processing power and plethora of information in the artificial realm, our definition of science as a consistent body of information and principles drawn from logic, and cause relating to effect will start to be strongly tied to AI.
Super intelligent robots, which are foreseen to have incredible processing power and have access to a mind boggling amount of information, are at the crossroads of romance and horror and found a number of nom de guerre. Skynet, AGI/ASI, Good’s ultra intelligent self replicating machines and of course the moniker of technological singularity, which is discussed in detail in the last chapter. Kurzweil contends that by the 2040s human activities will be more in the virtual domain than the real world, and it will be accompanied with brain uploading which will eliminate death, at least as we known it, and thereby lead us towards a seamless merger between the biological and the artificial. Therefore, AI will be an overarching discipline encompassing all beings across known realms of knowledge and information, be it symbolic or sensory, and therefore indicate towards a paradigm shift and therefore a new definition of science.
Writing the book made me discover the part-time artist and the rookie cartoonist in
1This is one of the 25 tales which are conversations between King Vikramaditya and a ghost named Betal.
FIGURE 2 McDermott’s uncanny mountain.Humour underscores human social interactions [223] and has defied attempts to recreate it in the artificial domain. This can be seen as an equivalence of Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley [214]. Humour is a unique attribute of human beings, with most acceptance in the average human being (IQ: 125-140). It thins out with increasing IQ and is negligible for a robot with access to all sorts of information across the world.
me and a great number of the cartoons and schematics have been sketched by yours truly.
I found both laughter and wisdom in various webcomics, including the very popular ones, such as xkcd, Far Side, Dilbert, Oatmeal, smbc, Zen Pencils to the not so well known, such as Widder’s Geek and Poke, McDermott’s Red pen Black pen and Iyad Rahwan’s cartoons on his webpage.
The cartoons has been helped by the inherent humour expressed by AI scientists and roboticists in their research papers or marked by the idiosyncrasy or opinion of a person. For example, Asimov’s whiskers, Brook’s elephants, Kirsh’s earwig, PENGI’s model on penguin, Dennett’s illustration of the frame problem with variants of R2D2, the trolley problems, Hawking’s opinions on a moratorium for AI, Knowledge game, Sparrow’s test, Philosophical Zombie, Nagel’s Bat etc. have found their way into my cartoons. Another glowing reason is that the text is written for human beings and may lack a similar appeal to robots and other super intelligent entities who may dare to read the book in the years to come, as is shown inFigure 2. Humour, particularly cartoons helps to illustrate a concept, and the satire uniquely blends it into human memory, such hardly happens for rote information, and more traditional means to teach a concept.
A mention needs to be made for the cartoon featuring Stephen Hawking and a growling Roomba robot which has a placard with ones and zeroes scribbled on it. This is now on the title page and it tells the story of how we are contemplating a moratorium on AI.
Other than my cartoons, there are breathtaking contributions from renowned animator and emmy prize winner, Maciek Albrecht with reproductions of 3 of his sketches2inChapter 3 and a cheeky cartoon by Mark Shrivers in Chapter 2. There are also 4 one-on-one interviews, (1) STDR team from Aristotle University in Greece and (2) Daniel and Marcus at Yujin Robot, Seoul (3) Elizabeth Broadbent at University of Auckland, New Zealand, and (4) Junichi Takeno at Meji University, Japan. While interesting anecdotal references have been graciously provided by the Cool Farms team, Antony Beavers (Genesis at Twin
2The captioning for his 3 sketches have been done by me.
FIGURE 3 Toby — first sketches. These are the earliest sketches of the comic strip which I drew in the summer of 2015. The four-part comic strip illustrates various salient features of agent based robotics, and speculates on the future of human-robot interaction. A comic strip may seem out of place in a textbook, but the light humour helps to bring forth various themes, such as the semi-sentient paradigm, ethics in artificial agents, current issues in human-robot interaction, open source robotics, a future with robots with near-human mannerisms and social values, etc.
The four-part Toby comic strip has been designed, developed and sketched by me, CC-by-SA 4.0 license.
Earth), Alan Winfield (The Walterians), Owen Barder’s blog (Trolley Problems) and Kevin Kelly’s blog (Maes-Garreau Law). For the software, Matt Zucker at Swarthmore College allowed me to use his web based Braitenberg vehicle simulator and my good friend and collaborator Luke Dunn let me use his Wall-E/Eva python chat script.
Two tools that I have used to convey ideas and information to the reader are:
1. Toby & the Walkers
Toby is a personal robot who is a mascot of sorts for the book and appears across four short comic strips. My early sketches for the robot are shown in Figure 3. This is the 2015 version of Toby and it is derived from the anthropomorphic motivations of a penguin without the beak, with a differential drive, interactive touchscreen, a mini keyboard, a camera and an array of sonars. It is priced at $600, and while the 2036 version is not discussed at length, it is left more to the reader’s imagination and the promise of the future. In the first of the comic strips in the first Chapter, the Walkers are amused at the news about Philae, a robot which is exploring a comet. In the second comic strip, the Walkers purchase a C3-90 robot as a Christmas family present, and the robot connects with the little kid over bonds of perceived and apparent congeniality, while in contrast the father and the older kid approach it as a technological curio. In the third comic strip, Toby is instrumental in attending to a medical emergency of the mother. In the last comic strip, in 2036, the robot is obsolete and is given a new design and new age hardware, with a humanoid exoskeleton and the ability to communicate in near human mannerisms. This gives Toby a new avatar
— more like a human being, than a mere piece of machinery. Toby’s story spreads across 21 years, is a reflection of the endearing relationship a robot may have with human beings and also illustrates various facets of modern day and futuristic robotics, and hints towards the seven themes discussed previously.
2. Nomenclature for Boxed and Shaded Information
To illustrate an important piece of information, I have used 4 types of boxes, a nomenclature followed throughout the book is as follows:
1. Boxed Braces — this is used to mention a definition or a rule. They contain very important information and are closely related to the text.
2. Short Box — this is meant to illustrate a piece of information that may be interesting, but cannot be expressed in great detail in the current scope of the chapter. Makes for appealing reading, but is not very closely tied with the text.
3. Roof & Floor Box - this is used for examples and illustrations.
4. Shaded Portions — contain very interesting information, many of which I have had the privilege of personally acquiring such. Content covers interviews and information acquired over personal emails.
Our greatest reach in the known universe has been to comet 67P helped by a robot.
Newer frontiers of medicine boasts of state-of-the-art robots, the Da Vinci and Zeus system.
The nurse robot and Paro are the latest cutting-edge applications in the care industry and therapeutics, respectively. In warfare DARPA has provided various advanced options for the use of robots in the US military and the matter has fueled an ethical debate.
Automated vehicles and delivery robots such as Starship etc. stand as the latest innovation in transportation. It is obvious that robots are getting woven into the fabric of our lives and the personal robot industry is probably one of the most potent for the next decade.
In conclusion, robots are a joy to behold. Not only are they a reflection of the convergence of human endeavour and mental faculties of design, aesthetics, logic and social interaction but they are the best examples of the handshake between technology and mother nature, and the following ten chapters reinforce these ideas.
