Robots Compilation Dr. Thomas Lairson

Domestic service robots

Seal of approval

A robot around the house doesn’t just have to be handy. It has to be likeable too

WHEN TAKANORI SHIBATA began working on robots in the early 1990s, he had something practical in mind, perhaps to help the elderly with their daily chores. But he soon realised that robots were not really able to do anything useful, so he decided to make a robot that did not even try—but that could nevertheless deliver real benefits.

The result of his labours, Paro, has been in development since 1998. It is 57cm long and looks like a baby harp seal. Thanks to an array of sub-skin sensors, it responds amiably to stroking; and though it cannot walk, it can turn its head at the sound of a human voice and tell one voice from another. It is a comforting and gentle presence in your arms, on your lap or on a table top, where it gives the impression of following a conversation. The best thing about it is that it seems to be helping in the care of people with dementia and other health problems.

You could see Paro as a very well-designed $5,000 pet that will never turn on the person holding it, and will never be hurt if its master flies into a rage. It is as happy in one lap as the next, needs no house-training, can be easily washed and will not die. This makes it a much more practical proposition to have in a nursing home or hospital than a live pet. It is used in such homes in Japan, in parts of Europe and in America. As well as simply making people happy—no mean goal—it can act as a source of reassurance and calm. People with Alzheimer’s often suffer from “sundowning”—a distressed urge to wander that comes on towards the end of the afternoon. Mr Shibata has found that a seal in the arms tends to reduce such wandering, which means fewer falls. Experience in Italy, Denmark and America indicates that care homes equipped with Paro need less medication for their residents. Larger trials now under way in Australia should establish whether this and other benefits can be provided simply by a soft toy, or whether Paro’s ability to interact with the world makes a clinical difference.

If Paro proves to be more useful than a plush animal, there is a huge market for it. Akifumi Kitashima, who works on Japan’s robotics strategy at the Ministry for the Economy, Trade and Industry, points out that in 2025 Japan will have 10.7m more elderly people than it did in 2005. Though Japan is ageing particularly quickly, a lot of the rest of the world is on a similar course. Some will long remain spry; most will eventually need care.

Looking after old people in homes might become easier with robots, be they mood enhancers like Paro or something more practical that can help careworkers lift and reposition their charges (Mr Kitashima says 70% of carers have bad backs). Yoshiyuki Sankai, perhaps Japan’s best-known robotics entrepreneur, has set up a company called Cyberdyne to make wearable systems that help people walk and lift things by adding artificial strength to their limbs.

Robots may also make it possible for old people to stay independent in their own homes for longer. Mr Angle says this is iRobot’s “long-term guiding star”, towards which the Roomba is a small step. Mr Gupta at the NSF thinks that general-purpose home-help robots would be a big advance which, given a push, could be achieved in a couple of decades (though that, he stresses, is his own view, not the foundation’s). Mr Thrun reckons it could be done more quickly. Mr Ng points out that if you get a graduate student to teleoperate a PR2 robot, it can already do more or less everything a home-help robot might be required to do, so all that is needed is better software and more processing power, both of which are becoming ever more easily available.

Cloud robotics can probably provide much of the required software. Mr Pratt says that if there were dramatic performance improvements in the finals of the DRC, he would expect them to come from the cloud. But specific robot hardware will need upgrading, too. No robot hand yet comes close to the utility of the human hand. Tasks that require feedback in terms of force and fit—like putting a plug into a socket—remain particularly hard for robots, and there are a lot of such tasks around a house. General technological progress will not help; the only way to find a solution to this sort of problem is to work specifically on it.

Needing help with something can engender affection. People do not resent Paro’s need to be stroked; it is one of the things they like about it

Voice would be an obvious choice, but it has its drawbacks: give a robot a voice, says Mr Hassan, and the user will think it is smart. An interface that allows the robot to be dumb and the user not to care might be preferable. Indeed, small errors can be endearing, and needing help with something can engender affection. People do not resent Paro’s need to be stroked; it is one of the things they like about it. CoBot’s need for help with the lifts at Carnegie Mellon makes people warm to it, though being pestered for help by random robots in offices and shopping malls would probably not work so well. But if the interface is properly designed, teaching a robot home help to do the job better might make it more welcome.

It may also be a good idea to let the robots turn for help to people other than those they are working for. As Mr Goldberg at Berkeley points out, the cloud does not just contain computers; it provides access to a lot of humans, too. One of the things that make Aethon’s Tugs a success in hospitals is that the company’s headquarters has a small but always staffed help desk which deals with queries from robots. If one gets stuck or lost, a remote operator can look through its eyes, check its logs and sort things out before the hospital concerned even becomes aware that anything is wrong. If similar support could be provided for robot home helps, the occasional mistake might not matter.

If the robot can call on a help desk, it can communicate with other people too, perhaps providing a way for friends and relatives to stay in touch. Some home-automation products already allow a degree of monitoring, notes Oz Chambers of Carnegie Mellon’s Quality of Life Technology Centre, but what they offer leaves much to be desired. It makes the adult offspring feel greater responsibility—which they often cannot exercise—rather than giving them reassurance. The elderly, for their part, can feel snooped upon. A robot with a defined presence in the house might make a better intermediary.

What matters, as iRobot and other practically minded companies have learned, is not so much having robots but having a business model that does a job, be it washing the dishes, checking that medication is being taken or providing telepresence. Producing something reliable and likeable that can be sold in large numbers and does not get its makers sued may prove a lot more difficult than simply developing the required robotic skills, but not impossible. To be sure, robots will not spread as quickly or relentlessly as mobile phones have done. Over a decade they may not achieve much. Over a century, though, they could turn everyday life upside down.

Regulation

That thou art mindful of him

Robots are as good, or as bad, as the people who make them

Mar 29th 2014 | From the print edition

ISAAC ASIMOV WAS wrong to think that the laws of robotics would be hard-wired into every robot brain. He was right, though, to think that robots would need regulation, and that such regulation would cause heated debate on the role that they might play.

In many of the areas touched on by this special report, laws and regulations will be crucial to the way that markets for robots develop. The uptake of industrial robots has always been constrained by health-and-safety considerations. Autonomy for lethal military robots remains a serious concern, soon to be discussed at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva. The spread of civilian drones will depend on freeing up airspace, along with bandwidth for their control. The advent of self-driving cars opens up all sorts of legal and regulatory issues.

As Mr Gupta of the NSF points out, manufacturers’ technical ability to produce robots that can help in the home might easily outrun their capacity to deal with the resulting liability issues, especially if the robots operate in the homes of elderly people with cognitive difficulties. Sweet little Paro, rated as a consumer product in some places, is regulated in others.

Denmark’s Council of Ethics—an advisory rather than a regulatory body—has looked at how acceptable it is for robots to be designed to fool people into thinking that they have feelings. The council decided that such robots were not a problem in themselves, but that carers responsible for people who might be easily fooled had to be vigilant in safeguarding the dignity of their charges. That seems to be a good general principle.

Robots have no will of their own; they are machines designed for an end, and it is that end which regulators need to concentrate on. In “Das Kapital”, Karl Marx argued that fetishising money and commodities as “figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race” blinds people to the social relationships built into the world of trade and economics. Subsequent generations have noted that technology is often similarly fetishised. Robots could serve as the nec plus ultra of this fetishisation, forms of capital seemingly so “endowed with a life of their own” that their nature as unfeeling mechanisms built for particular purposes is hard to lay bare. But that is what lawmakers, along with those seeking to make money out of practical robots, must learn to do.

In a weapons system, the precise level of autonomy is probably less important than the discrimination and care with which the person responsible for the system handles it. If a civilian drone is used as a tool by a Peeping Tom, it is the peeping, not the drone, that should be penalised.

Means and ends

Keeping the ends rather the means in mind, though, will be hard—and in everyday life perhaps unnecessary. The effort it takes not to anthropomorphise robots will often not be worth making. Most of the people who buy iRobot’s Roombas, says Colin Angle, tell the sales staff that they are just buying a machine to clean the floor; it may be a nifty machine, but they wouldn’t go as far as, say, giving it a pet name. Yet some 80% of owners go on to do just that.

It may be that, in time, such charms in robots wear off and they become part of the scenery. But as quickly as that happens, robots with even richer repertoires of behaviour will arrive to engage humans anew.

Robots will get better at seeing things, manipulating things and moving things around, just as they have got better at walking. When Japanese engineers first started working seriously on walking robots in the 1980s, there weren’t any. Now Honda’s ASIMO can walk quite well, as can other humanoid robots. AIST’s Mr Kajita reckons that within 20 years they may do it as well as people. Others expect it to take longer; no one rules it out.

And they will continue to get better beyond that. Man may be the measure of many things, but not of the ultimate capabilities of robots—or, to put fetishisation aside, the ultimate capabilities of humans working together, with and through robots, to enhance their abilities. Clearly there will be limits to the things robots can do. But such limits are not yet in sight.

The future, like “technology” and “robots”, is by its nature an ill-defined residue of hope or fear left behind when the seamlessly working, unconsciously accepted and apparently inevitable parts of the world are taken out of the picture. Sometimes, in some ways, it seems to be already present: there are robots doing the bidding of scientists on the surface of Mars right now. Sometimes it feels permanently deferred, with dreams of progress borne back ceaselessly into the past. But for all its strangeness and contradiction, we already know its natives. They are coming to work and play among us in ever greater numbers.

NYT

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