Technology

Timelapse image of Shakey in action

Robots are increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives and many roboticists believe that we are on the verge of a robot revolution that will do for goods and services what the Internet did for information. If so, then a lot of the credit goes to a 50 year old box on wheels called Shakey: the “world’s first electronic person.”

In the mid-1960s, computers were undergoing the first big jump in their evolution since “electronic brains” became practical in the 1940s. Computer architecture was much more sophisticated, scientists and engineers had a better grasp of the technology, transistors were shrinking mainframes so they filled a room instead of a really big room, and some researchers were convinced that computers and robots would soon be able to enter real world settings.

Among these was Charlie Rosen, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence and founder of SRI International’s Artificial Intelligence Center (then the Stanford Research Institute). He believed that computer simulations had reached the stage where they made it possible to produce problem-solving robots capable of working in factories.

 

At the same time ARPA, the ancestor of today’s DARPA, was interested in finding ways to use robots and artificial intelligence for military reconnaissance. One idea was that it might be possible to build some sort of a robotic scout for the Army, so, along with the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research, the agency hired SRI to look into such a scout.

The result was Shakey.

Officially, the timeline for project Shakey ran from 1966 to 1972, but like all complicated endeavors, the origins go back a bit further as the SRI team, consisting of project manager Rosen, Peter Hart, Marty Tenenbaum, Nils Nilsson, and others, gathered and drew up outlines and proposals for the project. Hart recently gave a keynote address at the ICRA conference in Seattle calling this year the 50th anniversary – and he was there.

Dates aside, what was remarkable about the Shakey project wasn’t just what it accomplished, but also but what its ambitions showed about the state of robotics. What Rosen et. al. set out to do indicated that they were either decades ahead of their time, or were in way over their heads.

The purpose of Shakey wasn’t just to produce a robot, but also one that was mobile, autonomous, equipped with vision, capable of mapping its surroundings, could solve problems, and could be addressed in natural-language English. Even today, combining only a fraction of these would ambitious. To combine them all using 1966 technology would have given Dr Frankenstein pause, but Shakey went on to become the first robot to combine motion, perception, and problem solving in one mobile package.

But why was it called Shakey? The answer was in its construction. Looking like a very early draft of R2D2, Shakey was a stack of gear. On the bottom was a motorized platform containing the drive wheels, push bar, and cat’s whiskers bump sensors. Above this was the electronic components box, then the “head” consisting of a black and white television camera, microphone, and a spinning prism rangefinder with the radio antenna on the very top. This arrangement was practical, but not very stable, hence the name.

According to Rosen: “We worked for a month trying to find a good name for it, ranging from Greek names to whatnot, and then one of us said, ‘Hey, it shakes like hell and moves around, let’s just call it Shakey,.'”

Even standing about five feet tall, Shakey didn’t seem very large until someone informed you that he (the team always called it “he”) actually weighed several tons. The visible part was just his mobile extension. The actual brain filled an entire room in another part of the lab with a second computer acting as a control interface. Originally, the mainframe was a 64K SDS-940 computer programmed in Fortran and Lisp, which was later replaced with a 192K PDP-10 around 1969. To put that into perspective, there are handheld games today with much more power than both of these put together.

Shakey lived in his own little world, which was made up of a series of rooms, doors, and objects. The walls had baseboards and everything was painted white and red to provide contrast for the monochromatic vision system. The robot’s job was to navigate these rooms, planning how to carrying out tasks, and solving any problems that might arise,

Early versions of Shakey envisioned manipulators, but this was later deemed unnecessarily complicated, so the final design worked by pushing objects around.

Much like other computers of the day, Shakey was given commands by teletype and responded via teletype and cathode ray tube. The robot was controlled by a tiered series of actions, which allowed Shakey to assess situations and find answers to problems.

At the bottom were low-level action programs, which were given to Shakey in plain English with commands like “go,” “pan,” and “tilt.” These were automatically translated into predicate calculus and provided the building blocks for intermediate-level actions, such as “go to” that told the robot to go to a particular location.

Telling Shakey where to go may seem simple, but if the location was in another room or behind an obstacle, that required him to set up subgoals or way points with a route to reach them. It was even more complicated if Shakey was told to find an object and move it somewhere else.

Shakey navigated by dead reckoning. That is, he counted turns of the drive wheels and deduced his location. However, this accumulated errors, so Shakey had to back it up with visual information. His pattern recognition algorithms could pick things like object outlines or room corners, allowing him to build up a map of his world and adjust his navigation.

The key to this was STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver), which is an artificial intelligence language for automated planning that allowed Shakey to map actions and subgoals to chart a plan of action. This also gave him the ability to recover from accidents, such as a misplaced box, an unknown room, an unexpected obstacle, or an obstructed door, and planning moves to recover from it, as well as learning from past mistakes by combining commands, intermediate actions, and preconditions to produce new actions.

Eventually, Shakey was able to solve surprisingly complex puzzles, such as the monkey and banana problem. In this, Shakey had to move a box on to a platform, which meant he had to figure out how to move a ramp into position first. It took the robot days to accomplish with many false starts and repetitions, but at the time, it was an unprecedented example of robotics and artificial intelligence.

The reaction to Shakey by the public and even by scientists was one of sensation. Shakey was described in Life magazine in 1970 as “the first electronic person,” and thinkers like Marvin Minsky were seriously predicting true artificial intelligence of superhuman power within three to eight years on the strength of Shakey’s performance.

If nothing else, it’s a cautionary tale about overestimating the state of the art. Bear in mind that this was a time when it was commonly believed that an invincible chess-playing computer would be built any day now instead of decades into the future – contemporary chess computers were lucky if they could manage a legal game, much less win one.

The Shakey project carried on until 1972 when the Defense Department started to get impatient for results. One general was even reported to ask: “Can you mount a 36-inch bayonet on it?” Unfortunately, despite remarkable advances, Shakey was still a creature of the laboratory and funding dried up.

Today, Shakey is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. However, it’s fair to say that without Shakey, today’s robots wouldn’t have been possible.
“Shakey, the first mobile robot to reason about its actions, was groundbreaking not only to robotics, but to artificial intelligence as well, as it led to fundamental advances in visual analysis, route finding, and planning of complex actions,” says Ray Perrault, PhD, director of SRI International’s Artificial Intelligence Center. “Shakey also helped open the possibilities of computer science to the public’s imagination, and put SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center on the map.”

More information about Shakey is available at SRI International and a video showing the robot in action can be found here.

References:http://www.gizmag.com/

 

Along with the arrival of touchscreens have come pundits’ predictions that in time the keyboard will go away. In 2015 the keyboard is still a much-desired component, though, pain points and all. Over the years, the headaches continue as users complain: “Why do they call them shortcuts when I have to remember so many of them?”

The Sonder keyboard wants to redefine the keyboard as a tool for possibilities beyond those words, numbers and quotation marks in places you have memorized along with the list you keep when you forget certain shortcuts. Sonder’s keyboard changes its keys to fit the range of a user’s application needs.
Utilizing e-ink technology, all of its letter, number and function keys can change appearance and function, depending on the application being used, said Ben Coxworth in Gizmag.
“With Sonder you can establish game-specific hotkeys, macros and specific in-game commands,” said the company. “Customize each key to have their own individual iconography,” it added, and “create your very own keys to perform whatever command you wish.”
Hills, technology providers, has a Hills Young Australian Design Awards site, which expressed a view of how the Sonder concept could ease the work of designers:
“Sonder’s E-ink keyboard is the inevitable solution to a compelling design sector need. Designers are required to memorize hundreds of application-specific shortcuts, etc. Not only is this inefficient and costly for the sector, it’s frankly frustrating.”
Evan Killham wrote in Cult of Mac that the keyboard “features the 78 keys you’d expect from a standard, keypad-less typer, but the cool part is that about 50 of them include little screens that can show any symbol or icon you want.”
The keys can be changed for different language settings and key layouts—such as from QWERTY to DVORAK, English to Chinese and typing emoticons to text.
Michael Zhang gave some examples in PetaPixel of what work might be like in design mode, using the keyboard. “When you’re using Photoshop, you can have the icon on each key reflect the particular tool or feature that key is used for while editing your photos. Need to switch over and do a little work in Adobe Illustrator? The keyboard will adjust the keys to reflect the new shortcuts you have at your disposal.”
Sonder considered the users who may need to work in the dark; front lighting is provided through “a fiber optic waveguide” for working in the dark, said the company.
The keyboard works with a Mac or PC, tablet or smart phone through Bluetooth. After pairing them, you move your keyboard anywhere within range and go to work. Sonder said the internal battery is charged by plugging in braided fiber cables.
The company founders and directors are Francisco Serra-Martins, CTO, and Felipe Serra-Martins, COO. At what stage of readiness is the keyboard? They are taking pre-orders at $199.
Sonder sent an e-mail to Cult of Mac saying “Given the insane interest to date from some pretty big names in tech, we will be launching an epic Kickstarter campaign later this year, and will be shipping internationally thereafter.” The message also said, “With the assistance of NSW Trade & Investment, we are developing our E-ink keyboard and have already commenced pilot production in Sydney and Shenzhen.”
The message also said where they want to take their concept next. The keyboard, they said, “adapts intuitively to the user to display any application-specific shortcuts, in addition to any language or custom icons. Later, we will launch an online library where users can freely access and share cool new user-generated content.”

References:http://phys.org/

Ello, the ad-free social network which gained prominence last year with an invitation-only launch, announced Thursday it was opening to the public with an application for iPhone users.

The startup got attention with its “anti-Facebook” policy of promising to never use advertising or to sell customer data to third parties.

Last September, a surge in interest made Ello membership a hot ticket, with invitations selling on eBay at prices up to $500.

In announcing the public launch, Ello provided no details on numbers of members but said there were “millions” using the platform.

“The new app is beautiful with dozens of unique features,” said Ello co-founder and chief executive Paul Budnitz.

“With so much positivity on Ello, and with awareness of the negative effects of ads and data collection by other networks coming to the forefront of the news, the timing of our app release couldn’t be better.”

Ello has upgraded the service to include new ways to find friends, full search, real-time alerts, private messaging, private groups and “loves” instead of likes.

It received $5.5 million in funding last year as it changed its charter to back a promise to remain ad-free, becoming a “public benefit corporation.” While the services is free, Its future plans include premium features which would be paid.

Ello was launched by a group of artists and programmers led by Budnitz, whose previous experience includes designing bicycles and toys.

References:http://phys.org/

If you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change. Without a commute or workspace, it stands to reason, most people will make a higher portion of their calls from home—and they might make fewer calls, too.

Now a study co-authored by MIT researchers shows that mobile phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, precisely because people’s communications patterns change when they are not working.
Indeed, using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for their study, the researchers found that in the months following layoffs, the total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51 percent compared with working residents, and by 41 percent compared with all phone users. The number of calls made by a newly unemployed worker to someone in the town where they had worked fell by 5 percentage points, and even the number of individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers dropped by around 20 percent.
“Individuals who we believe to have been laid off display fewer phone calls incoming, contact fewer people each month, and the people they are contacting are different,” says Jameson Toole, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, and a co-author of the new paper. “People’s social behavior diminishes, and that might be one of the ways layoffs have these negative consequences. It hurts the networks that might help people find the next job.”
When the factory closes

The paper, just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, builds a model of cellphone usage that lets the researchers correlate cellphone usage patterns with aggregate changes in employment. The researchers believe the phone data closely aligns with standard unemployment measures, and may allow analysts to make unemployment projections two to eight weeks faster than those made using traditional methods.
“Using mobile phone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, and at very fine spatial granularities … both of which are impossible given current methods of collecting economic statistics,” says David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.
In addition to Toole and Lazer, the co-authors of the paper are Marta Gonzalez, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; Yu-Ru Lin of the University of Pittsburgh; Erich Muehlegger of the University of California at Davis; and Daniel Shoag of the Harvard Kennedy School.

References:http://phys.org/