Robotics
Since Team IHMC's second place in last year's DARPA Robotics Challenge, they have been busy training their ATLAS robot to do something we all want a robot to do—the chores!
IEEE Spectrum recently shared video (see below) of what many of us really want to see humanoid robots practicing—household chores. The video was prepared by the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) team. Performing rescue and disaster operations at sites like Fukishima is a noble pursuit, but let's face it, who else is tired of waiting for our robot butlers and maids?
John Carff, ATLAS robot operator at IHMC, told IEEE about what it took to have the bot perform the functions shown in the this video. (To burst your bubble a little, the video is sped up 20x normal speed).
Unfortunately the robot is not being prepped to enter our homes soon and take care of the drudgery. The work is part of a maintenance routine intended to keep the Google-owned ATLAS running often to verify code updates and regression tests. Running the same tasks like the routines set up for the DRC, were getting boring for the team, so IHMC just came up with a bunch of fun ideas, and tried to get ATLAS to do them.
"In the future, I can see a lot of what was done in this video moving more to the autonomous side."
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"Most of the stuff in this video is controlled by me, but in a co-active way. I’m not simply sitting there with a joystick teleoperating the robot: I tell the robot through the UI that I want to grab a bottle off the table by clicking the bottle and making sure that the resulting hand is in the correct place," says Carff. "Then, the robot tells me how it’s going to move its entire body to reach that location, through a preview in the UI. If I’m okay with the plan the robot has come up with, I tell it to execute that motion. In the future, I can see a lot of what was done in this video moving more to the autonomous side, but I always see there being a human in the loop.”Carff says that the hardest task was using the pallet jack because it is on rollers, ATLAS couldn’t jack it up from the back, as the jack just rolls back and forth. Carff’s solution was to move the robot off to the side, and then use its foot to pin the jack down as ATLAS pumps the handle.
While a Roomba still can probably do a better job for a fraction of the cost, our conviction in the Law of Accelerating Returns has us eagerly anticipating the availability of our own robot servant in the not-to-distant future.
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