Machines of Loving Grace (33 page)

The success of this robot set the tone for Whittaker’s can-do style of tackling imposing problems.
After years of bureaucratic delays, his first company, Redzone Robotics, supplied a robot to help with the cleanup at Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine.
By the early 1990s Whittaker was working on a Mars robot for NASA.
The Mars robot was
large and heavy, so it was unlikely to make the first mission.
Instead, Whittaker plotted to find an equally dramatic project back on Earth.
Early driverless vehicle research was beginning to show promise, so the CMU researchers started experimenting letting vehicles loose on Pittsburgh’s streets.
What about driving across an entire state?
Whittaker thought that that idea, which he called “the Grand Traverse,” would prove that robots were ready to perform in the real world and not just in the laboratory.
“Give me two years and a half-dozen graduate students and we could make it happen,” he boasted to the
New York Times
in 1991.
⁵
A decade and a half later at DARPA, Tony Tether lent credence to this idea by underwriting the first autonomous vehicle Grand Challenge.

Although the roboticists finally made rapid progress in building useful robots in the early 1990s, it was only after decades of disappointment.
The technology failure at Three Mile Island initially cast a pall over the robotics industry.
In the June 1980 issue of
Omni
magazine, Marvin Minsky wrote a long manifesto calling for the development of telepresence technologies—mobile robots outfitted with video cameras, displays, microphones, and speakers that allow their operator to be “present” from a remote location anywhere in the connected world.
Minsky used his manifesto to rail against the shortcomings of the world of robotics:

The absence of wireless networking connectivity was the central barrier to the development of remote-controlled robots at the time.
But Minsky also focused on the failure of the robotics community to build robots with the basic human capabilities to grasp, manipulate, and maneuver.
He belittled the state of the art of robotic manipulators used by nuclear facility operators, calling them “little better than pliers” and noted that they were not a match for human hands.
“If people had a bit more engineering courage and tried to make these hands more like human hands, modeled on the physiology of the palm and fingers, we could make nuclear reactor plants and other hazardous facilities much safer.”
⁷

It was an easy criticism to make, yet when the article was reprinted three decades later in
IEEE Spectrum
in 2010, the field had made surprisingly little progress.
Robotic hands like those Minsky had called for still did not exist.
In 2013 Minsky bemoaned the fact that even at the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns, there wasn’t yet a robot that could easily open a door in an emergency.
It was also clear that he remained bitter over the fact that the research community had largely chosen the vision charted by Rod Brooks, which involved hunting for emergent complex behaviors by joining simple components.

One person who agreed with Minsky was Gill Pratt, who had taken over as director of the MIT Leg Lab after Marc Raibert.
Later a professor and subsequently dean at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts, Pratt arrived at DARPA in early 2010 as a program manager in charge of two major programs.
One, the ARM program, for Autonomous Robotic Manipulation, involved building the robotic hands whose absence Minsky
had noted.
ARM hands were specified to possess a humanlike functionality for a variety of tasks: picking up objects, grasping and controlling tools designed for humans, and operating a flashlight.
A second part of ARM funded efforts to connect the human brain to robotic limbs, which would give wounded soldiers and the disabled—amputees, paraplegics, and quadriplegics—new freedoms.
A parallel project to ARM, called Synapse, focused on developing biologically inspired computers that could better translate a machine’s perception into robotic actions.

Pratt represented a new wave at DARPA, arriving shortly after the Obama administration had replaced Tony Tether with Regina Dugan as the agency’s director.
Tether had moved DARPA away from its historically close relationship with academia by shifting funding to classified military contractors.
Dugan and Pratt tried to repair the damage by quickly reestablishing closer relations with university campuses.
Pratt’s research before arriving at DARPA had focused on building robots that could navigate the world outside of the lab.
The challenge was giving the robots practical control over the relatively gentle forces that they would encounter in the physical world.
The best way to do this, he found, was to insert some elastic material between the robot’s components and the gear train that drives them.
The approach tried to mimic the function played by biological tendons located between a muscle and a joint.
The springy tendon material can stretch and, when measured, indicates how much force was being applied to it.
Until then the direct mechanical connection between the components that made up the arms and legs used by robots gave them both power and precision that was too inflexible—and potentially dangerous—for navigating the unpredictable physical world populated by vulnerable and litigious humans.

Pratt had not initially considered human-robot collaboration.
Instead, he was interested in how the elderly safely move about in the world.
Typically, the infirm used walkers
and wheelchairs.
As he explored the contact between humans and the tools they use, he realized that elasticity offered the humans a measure of protection against unyielding obstacles.
More elastic robots, Pratt concluded, could make it possible for humans to work close to the machines without fear of being injured.

They were working with Cog, an early humanoid robot designed by Rodney Brooks’s robot laboratory during the 1990s.
A graduate student, Matt Williamson, was testing the robot’s arm.
A bug in the code caused the arm to repeatedly slap the test fixture.
When Brooks inserted himself between the robot and the test bench, he became the first human to ever be spanked by a robot.
It was a gentle whipping and—fortunately for his graduate students—Brooks survived.
Pratt’s research was an advance both in biomimicry and human-robot collaboration.
Brooks adopted “elastic actuation” as a central means of making robots safe for people to work with.

When Pratt arrived at DARPA he was keenly aware that despite decades of research, most robots were still kept inside labs, not just for human safety but also to protect the robot’s software from an uncontrolled environment.
He had been at DARPA for a little more than a year when on March 12, 2011, the tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The workers inside the plant had been able to control the emergency for a short period, but then high radiation leakage forced them to flee before they could oversee a safe shutdown of the reactors.
DARPA became peripherally involved in the crisis because humanitarian assistance and disaster relief is a Pentagon responsibility.
(The agency tried to help out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by sending robots to search for survivors at the World Trade Center.) DARPA officials coordinated a response at Fukushima by contacting U.S.
companies who had provided assistance at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
A small armada of U.S.
robots was sent to Japan in an effort to get into the plant and make repairs, but by the time power plant
personnel were trained to use them it was too late to avoid the worst damage.
This was particularly frustrating because Pratt could see that a swift deployment of robots would almost certainly have been helpful and limited the damage.
“The best the robots could do was help survey the extensive damage that had already occurred and take radiation readings; the golden hours for early intervention to mitigate the extent of the disaster had long since passed,” he wrote.
⁸

The failure led to the idea of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which was announced in April 2012.
By sponsoring a grand challenge on the scale of Tether’s autonomous vehicle contest, Pratt sought to spark innovations in the robotics community that would facilitate the development of autonomous machines that could operate in environments that were hostile for humans.
Teams would build and program a robot to perform a range of eight tasks
⁹
that might be expected in a power plant emergency, but most of them would not build the robots from scratch: Pratt had contracted with Boston Dynamics to supply Atlas humanoid robots as a joint platform to jump-start the competition.

I
n the dark it is possible to make out the blue glow of an unblinking eye staring into the evening gloom.
This light is a retina scanner that uses the eye as a digital fingerprint.
These pricey electronic sentinels are not yet commonplace, but they do show up in certain ultra–high security locations.
Passing beneath their gaze is a bit like passing before the unblinking eye of some cybernetic Cerberus.
The scanner isn’t the only bit of info-security decor.
The home itself is a garden of robotic delights.
Inside in the foyer, a robotic arm gripping a mallet strikes a large gong to signal a new arrival.
There are wheeled, flying, crawling, and walking machines everywhere.
To a visitor, it feels like the scene in the movie
Blade Runner
in which detective Rick Deckard arrives at the home of the gene-hacker
J.
F.
Sebastian and finds himself in a menagerie of grotesque, quirky synthetic creatures.

The real-life J.F.
lording over this lair is Andy Rubin, a former Apple engineer who in 2005 joined Google to jump-start the company’s smartphone business.
At the time the world thought of Google as an unstoppable company, since it had rapidly become one of the globe’s dominant computing technology companies.
Inside Google, however, the company’s founders were deeply concerned that their advantage in Web search, and thus their newly gained monopoly, might be threatened by the rapid shift away from desktop to handheld mobile computers.
The era of desktop computing was giving way to a generation of more intimate machines in what would soon come to be known as the post-PC era.
The Google founders were fearful that if Microsoft was able to replicate its desktop monopoly in the emerging world of phones, they would be locked out and would lose their search monopoly.
Apple had not yet introduced the iPhone, so they had no way of knowing how fundamentally threatened Microsoft’s desktop stranglehold would soon be.

In an effort to get ahead, Google acquired Rubin’s small start-up firm to build its own handheld software operating system as a defense against Microsoft.
Google unveiled Android in November 2007, ten months after the iPhone first appeared.
During the next half decade, Rubin enjoyed incredible success, displacing not just Microsoft, but Apple, Blackberry, and Palm Computing as well.
His strategy was to build an open-source operating system and offer it freely to the companies who had once paid hefty licenses to Microsoft for Windows.
Microsoft found it impossible to compete with free.
By 2013 Google’s software would dominate the world of mobile phones in terms of market share.

Early in his career, Rubin had worked at Apple Computer as a manufacturing engineer after a stint at Zeiss in Europe programming robots.
He left Apple several years later with an elite group of engineers and programmers to build one of the early handheld computers at General Magic.
General Magic’s efforts to seed the convergence of personal information, computing, and telephony became an influential and high-profile failure in the new mobile computing world.