Machines of Loving Grace (35 page)

Homestead-Miami Speedway was no stranger to growling machines.
When it hosts NASCAR races, the stands are usually filled with good ol’ Southern boys.
In December of 2013, however, the Robot Challenge had a decidedly different flavor.
Raibert called it “Woodstock for robots.”
He was there to oversee both the supporting role that Boston Dynamics was playing in technical care and feeding for the Atlas humanoid robots and the splashy demonstrations of several Pentagon-funded four-legged running and walking robots.
These machines would periodically trot or gallop along the racecourse to the amazement of the audience of several thousand.
DARPA also hosted a robot fair with several dozen exhibitors during the two days of robot competition, which generated a modest crowd as well as a fairly hefty media contingent.

Google underscored the growing impact of robotics on all aspects of society when it publicly announced Rubin’s robotics division just weeks before the Robotics Challenge.
At the beginning of that month,
60 Minutes
had aired a segment about Jeff Bezos and Amazon that included a scene in which Bezos led Charlie Rose into a laboratory and showed off an octocopter drone designed to deliver Amazon products autonomously “in 30 minutes.”
¹²
The report sparked another flurry of discussions about the growing role of robots in society.
The storage and distribution of commercial goods is already a vast business in the United States, and Amazon has quickly become a dominant low-cost competitor.
Google is intent on competing against Amazon in the distribution of all kinds of goods, which will create pressure to automate warehouse processes and move distribution points closer to consumers.
If the warehouse was close enough to a consumer—within just blocks, for example, in a large city—why not use a drone for the “last mile”?
The idea felt like science fiction come to life, and Rose, who appeared stunned, did not ask hard questions.

Google, however, unveiled its own drone delivery research project.
Just days after the Amazon
60 Minutes
extravaganza, the
New York Times
reported on Google’s robotic ambitions, which dwarfed what Bezos had sketched on the TV news show.
Rubin had stepped down as head of Google’s Android phone division in the spring of 2013.
Despite reports that he had lost a power struggle and was held in disfavor, exactly the opposite was true.
Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, had opened the corporate checkbook and sent Rubin on a remarkable shopping spree.
Rubin had spent hundreds of millions of dollars recruiting the best robotics talent and buying the best robotic technology in the world.
In addition to Schaft, Google had also acquired Industrial Perception, Meka Robotics, and Redwood Robotics, a group of developers of humanoid robots and robot arms in San Francisco led by one of Rodney Brooks’s star students, and Bot & Dolly, a developer of robotic camera systems that had been used to create special effects in the movie
Gravity
.
Boston Dynamics was the exclamation mark in the buying spree.

Google’s acquisition of an R & D company closely linked to the military instigated a round of speculation.
Many suggested that Google, having bought a military robotics firm, might become a weapons maker.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
In his discussions with the technologists at the companies he was acquiring, Rubin sketched out a vision of robots that would safely complete tasks performed by delivery workers at UPS and FedEx.
If Bezos could dream of delivering consumer goods from the air, then how outlandish would it be for a Google Shopping Express truck to pull up to a home and dispatch a Google robot to your front door?
Rubin also had long had a close relationship with Terry Gou, the CEO of Foxconn, the giant Chinese manufacturer.
It would not be out of the realm of possibility to supply robots to replace some of Gou’s one million “animals.”

G
oogle’s timing in unveiling its new robotics effort was perfect.
The December 2013 Robotics Challenge was a preliminary trial to be followed by a final event in June of 2015.
DARPA organized the first contest into “tracks” broken broadly into teams that supplied their own robots and teams that used the DARPA-supplied Atlas robots from Boston Dynamics.
The preliminary trial turned out to be a showcase for Google’s new robot campaign.
Rubin and a small entourage flew into an airport north of Miami on one of Google’s G5 corporate jets and were met by two air-conditioned buses rented for the joint operation.

The contest consisted of the eight separate tasks performed over two days.
The Atlas teams had a comparatively short amount of time before the event to program their robots and practice, and it showed.
Compared with the nimble four-legged Boston Dynamics demonstration robots, the contestants themselves were slow and painstaking.
A further reminder of how little progress had been made was that the robots were tethered from above in order to protect them from damaging falls without hampering their movements.

The Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot, designed for the DARPA Robot Challenge.
Boston Dynamics was later acquired by Google and has designed a second-generation Atlas intended to operate without tether or power connection.
(
Photo courtesy of DARPA
)

If that wasn’t enough, DARPA gave the teams a little break in the driving task: they allowed human assistants to place the robots in
the cars and connect them to the steering wheel and brakes before they drove through a short obstacle course.
Even the best teams, including Schaft, drove the course in a stop-and-go fashion, pulling forward a distance and pausing to recalibrate.
The slow pace was strikingly reminiscent of the SRI Shakey robot many decades earlier.
The robots were not yet autonomous.
Their human controllers were hidden away in the garages while the robots performed their tasks on the speedway’s infield, directed via a fiber-optic network that fed video and sensor data back to the operator console workstations.
To bedevil the teams and create a real-world sense of crisis, DARPA throttled the data connection at regular intervals.
This gave even the best robots a stuttering quality, and the assembled press hunted for metaphors less trite than “watching grass grow” or “watching paint dry” to describe the scene.

Nevertheless, the DARPA Robotics Challenge did what it was designed to do: expose the limits of today’s robotic systems.
Truly autonomous robots are not yet a reality.
Even the prancing and trotting Boston Dynamics machines that performed on the racetrack tarmac were wirelessly tethered to human controllers.
It is equally clear, however, that truly autonomous robots will arrive soon.
Just as the autonomous vehicle challenges of 2004 through 2007 significantly accelerated the development of self-driving cars, the Robotics Challenge will bring us close to Gill Pratt’s dream of a robot that can work in hazardous environments and Andy Rubin’s vision of the automated Google delivery robot.
What Homestead-Miami also made clear was that there are two separate paths forward in defining the approaching world of humans and robots, one moving toward the man-machine symbiosis that J.
C.
R.
Licklider had espoused and another in which machines will increasingly supplant humans.
Just as Norbert Wiener realized at the onset of the computer and robotics age, one of the future possibilities will be bleak for humans.
The way out of that cul-de-sac
will be to follow in Terry Winograd’s footsteps by placing the human in the center of the design.

Darkness had just fallen on the pit lane at Homestead-Miami Speedway, giving the robotic bull trotting on the roadway a ghostlike form.
The bull’s machinery growled softly as its mechanical legs swung back and forth, the crate latched to its side rhythmically snapping against its trunk in a staccato rhythm.
A human operator trailed the robot at a comfortable pace.
Wearing a radio headset and a backpack full of communications gear, he used an oversized video game–style controller to guide the beast’s pace and direction.
The contraption trotted past the garages where clusters of engineers and software hackers were busy packing up robots from the day’s competition.

The DRC evoked the bar scene in the Star Wars movie
Episode IV: A New Hope
.
Boston Dynamics designed most of its robots in humanoid form.
This was a conscious decision: a biped interacts better with man-made environments than other forms do.
There were also weirder designs at the contest, like a “transformer” from Carnegie Mellon that was reminiscent of robots in Japanese sci-fi films, and a couple of spiderlike walking machines as well.
The most attractive robot was Valkyrie, a NASA robot that resembled a female Star Wars Imperial Stormtrooper.
Sadly, Valkyrie was one of the three underperformers in the competition; it completed none of the tasks successfully.
NASA engineers had little time to refine its machinery because the shutdown of the federal government cut funds for development.

The star of the two-day event was clearly the Team Schaft robot.
The designers, a crew of about a dozen Japanese engineers, had been the only team to almost perfectly complete all the tasks and so they easily won the first Robotics Challenge.
Indeed, the Schaft robot had only made a single error: it tried to walk through a door that was slammed shut by the wind.
Gusts of wind had repeatedly blown the door out of the Japanese robot’s grasp before it could extend its second arm to secure the door’s spring closing mechanism.

While the competition took place, Rubin was busy moving his Japanese roboticists into a sprawling thirty-thousand-square-foot office perched high atop a Tokyo skyscraper.
To ensure that the designers did not disturb the building’s other tenants—lawyers, in this case—Google had purchased two floors in the building and decided to leave one floor as a buffer for sound isolation.

In the run-up to the Robotics Challenge, both Boston Dynamics and several of the competing teams had released videos showcasing Atlas’s abilities.
Most of the videos featured garden-variety demonstrations of the robot walking, balancing, or twisting in interesting ways.
However, one video of a predecessor to Atlas showed the robot climbing stairs and crossing an obstacle field that involved spreading its legs across a wide gap while balancing its arms against the walls of the enclosure.
It moved at human speed and with human dexterity.
The video had been carefully staged and the robot was being teleoperated—it was not acting autonomously.
¹³
But the implications of the video were clear—the hardware for robots was capable of real-world mobility when the software and sensors caught up.

While public reaction to the video was mixed, the Schaft team loved it.
In the wake of their victory, they watched in amazement as the Boston Dynamics robotic bull trotted toward their garage.
It squatted on the ground and shut down.
The team members swarmed around the robot and opened the crate that was strapped to its back.
It contained a case of champagne, brought as a congratulatory offering from the Boston Dynamics engineers in an attempt to bond the two groups of roboticists who would soon be working together on some future Google mobile robot.

Several of the company’s engineers had considered doing
something splashier.
While planning for the Boston Dynamics demonstrations at the speedway, executives at another one of Rubin’s AI companies came up with a PR stunt to unveil at the Boston Dynamics demonstrations during both afternoons of the Robotics Challenge.
The highlight of the two-day contest had not been watching the robots as they tried to complete a set of tasks.
The real crowd-pleasers were the LS3 and Wildcat four-legged robots, both of which had come out on the raceway tarmac to trot back and forth.
LS3, a robotic bull-like machine without a head, growled as it moved at a determined pace.
Every once in a while, a Boston Dynamics employee pushed the machine to set it off balance.
The robot nimbly moved to one side and recovered quickly—as if nothing had happened.
Google initially wanted to stage something more impressive.
What if they could show off a robot dog chasing a robot car?
That would be a real tour de force.
DARPA quickly nixed the idea, however.
It would have smacked of a Google promotional and the “optics” might not play well either.
After all, if robots could chase each other, what else might they chase?