sidcode - Robotics

Notes for this blog

2015-04-01T00:53:52+00:00

List - 0. GSoC as of now (1st May 2015) 1. Disqus comments integration 2. About me page 3. Blog name 4. 1pad - a post every two days 5. On Typeracing 6. On Movies and Literature 7. On writing. 8. on algorithms. 9. on research. 10. on mit media lab 11. on linux (arch), etc.

Tonight's Robot : TARS from Interstellar

2015-03-16T18:10:52+05:30

With this post, I’ve decided to flag off a new blog series, Tonight’s Robot whose raison-de-etre are the robots from real life research and fiction; what they can teach us about Robotics and its allied fields (Human-Robot Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Roboethics, etc).

So this post is about the U.S Marine Corps robot commanders from the 2014 blockbuster Interstellar named TARS, CASE, and KIPPS.

Robots of Interstellar (2014)

Picture by Jeorge B. George

Here’s what these KitKat bar shaped Bots teach us:

1. Companionship

The space missions on Interstellar were decades-long (yeah, relativity). In this scenario, with crew commanders single-manning a ship and spending years with no human around - things can get quite monophobic. The Artificially Intelligent and almost sentient robots shown in Interstellar showcase features like empathy, identification of needs, sarcasm, humour, honesty; just like one would expect a human to be.

2. One with the humans

The robots actually spend all their time with humans or other robots. They are as important as the human flight commanders. Equal responsibility and equal capability sans the Relativistic Math skills which Cooper didn’t possess. Treatment as equals was something I covered in the post on Big Hero 6’s Soft Intelligent Bots article as well. The robots of the future would not be limited to the 4Ds - Dangerous, Dirty, Daunting, Dull but would cohabitate with humans as equals.

3. Human-Centric, not Robo-Centric

Soft Intelligent Bots

2015-03-11T00:53:52+00:00

Disney doesn’t always make a robot movie, but when it does it creates a new yardstick for scientific research altogether.

Big Hero 6 - Disney (2014)

This post is not a run-of-the-mill regular weekly thing I do. I happened to stumble over Big Hero 6, a movie based on an adolescent roboticist’s life (enough to get me hooked). They say serendipity is a good thing. And they couldn’t be more right. What are the odds of bumping into a life-changing movie after watching Apple’s latest keynote presentation of the new MacBook (tactile trackpad) and the new medical research platform - ResearchKit.

The things I love about Big Hero 6

1. Inspired from Robotics research, not the other way round

The film’s producers trailed a non-existent path by learning from the research on Human-Robot interaction and Soft Robotics at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

2. Bot-fighting

Real Steel is passe now. ‘Big Hero 6’ starts with underground bot-fights in a conceptualized fusion town - San Fransokyo. And who wins the bot-fight. Not the strongest or goriest bot, but the agile bot with magnetic-bearing servos.

3. Puberty

Hiro Hamada - the protagonist wunderkind takes a sloppy decision multiple times, goes through mood-swings. He has the same tragic flaws that all of us can connect with. He almost loses his mind over making a career in the winning-money-comes-easy bot fights. This is when the role of his elder brother - Tadashi kicks in. And boy does his short-lived (no pun) role inspire all of us to push the boundaries of Robotics.

4. Parenting done right.

Hiro wouldn’t be the humble prodigy if not for his brother Tadashi and his aunt Cass. The film dabbles with the myriad aspects of teenage and parenting - scolding, concern, care, love, help, unconditional support. The elder brother is a parent to him - guiding Hiro on the right path whenver he goes wayward....till the very end. Tadashi doesn’t die. Tadashi is here. - says Baymax multiple times in the movie. And till the end, Tadashi lives through Baymax and Hiro. Later in the movie, it becomes quite prominent how Baymax becomes a parent to Hiro - Baymax to Hiro “Seatbelts save lives. Always fasten them.”

5. Robotics is hard, and rewarding

“I would lose my mind if I don’t apply here” - says Hiro when Tadashi gives him a trip of his university lab. Flying cats, Industrial Manipulators playing Table Tennis, Electro-magnetic suspension on bike wheels, Laser-induced plasma, 3-d printed carbon fibre armours, Body-tracking, Chemical Metal embrittlement - this film inspired the maker in me. It beats even Iron Man after a point, which by the way is/was my guide to Robotics. And the magnum opus - Baymax - your personal health care assistant. He is the star of the film, through and through.

6. Soft Robotics

The film gets infinite brownie points for treading into the territory of Soft Actuated Robotics. The huggable inflatable Robot that can lift a 1000 pounds - that is what the future should be about - not metallic humanoids. This field of study is only beginning to emerge, and using a concept like Soft Robotics with the use case of a healthcare robot - the filmmakers have done a fascinating outstanding job.

7. The Maker spirit

The MIT Media Lab Design Innovation workshop changed the way I look at hacking. It is about identifying problems, storyboarding ideas, thinking of solutions, and implementing them as efficiently as possible. Hiro Hamada, the quintessential maker - sees a need, and fulfills it in his garage. I would definitely have a garage like that soon.

8. Swarm Robotics

The cuteness of the Soft Robot is challenged by grey goo - neurotransmitter controlled Microbots developed by Hiro for the Robotics exhibition. As Hiro comments - “The applications for this tech are limitless; the only limit is your imagination.” He says it right. But a villainous imagination can only flip cars and kill people. And that’s what happens. Hiro battles this evil with his friends and Baymax till the very end.

9. Robots treated as equals

The title of the movie is Big Hero 6 . This includes the 5 humans and Baymax, the film is a great step forward in Roboethics. Our programming prevents us from injuring a human being.

10. Expectations from a Health Care robot

“I fail to see how this makes me a better healthcare companion “. Baymax voices this concern multiple times with his intimidating upgrades. The movie follows the lines of Robot and Frank where a personal robot attendant understands the needs of its user - right or wrong. Baymax is reticent when it comes to following harm-causing orders. From this, we can learn that AI can be controlled, and need not result in singularity. Even if it does result, the robots would be intelligent enuough to keep the humans that are good at heart.

So here’s to the robots of today and tomorrow - who can feel just like a human - social robotics and human-robot interaction are potential early adopters of the developments that sprout from this research.

Here are some Social Robots that might interest you:

Jibo - MIT Media Lab

Romeo - Aldebaran Robotics

Identifying Bots from above

2015-02-13T00:53:52+00:00

After a firm resolve to abstinate from using C++ for any programming project, I am back to square one - this time with a Robotics research project. The team at The Robotics lab is creating a testbed for swarm algorithms on epuck bots. This entails localization and communication. I have chosen to ID each of the bots while moving via a QR code. This will be done using OpenCV and C++. Learnt about -

CMake
g++ compatibility and flags
OpenCV warping and contours
Cascade Classifiers

The zbar library for linux makes decoding qr codes a breeze. All this while, figuring out the perfect library for this job was a red herring. It even turns out that ROS has its own wrapper library - roszbar to use the features of zbar as a ROS node, thus extending the scope of the lab to work with our TurtleBot much easier.

Here’s to visually identifying robots in a lab.