Machines of Loving Grace (38 page)

Meanwhile, Bradski found Intel’s bureaucracy more and more overbearing.
He knew it was time to leave and quickly
negotiated a deal to join an Israeli machine vision start-up based in San Mateo.
He took the OpenCV project with him.
The machine vision start-up, however, turned out to be a less than perfect match.
The Israelis loved conflict and Bradski was constantly butting heads with the CTO, a former sergeant in the Israeli Army.
He would usually win the arguments, but at a cost.
He began job hunting again after being at the new company for just a year.

It was hard to search for a job clandestinely.
He toyed with working at Facebook, who had offered him a job, but they weren’t doing anything interesting in computer vision.
“Come anyway,” they told him.
“We’ll find something for you to do.”
To Bradksi, their recruiting seemed highly disorganized.
He showed up for his interview and they told him he was late.
He showed them the email that indicated that he was, in fact, on time.

“Well,” they said, “you were supposed to be down the street an hour ago.”

Down the street he found the building locked, closed, and dark.
It occurred to him that perhaps this was some kind of weird job test, and that a camera might be following him to see what he was going to do.
He kicked the door and finally someone came out.
The man didn’t say anything, but it seemed obvious to Bradski that he had woken him up.
The guy held the door open so Bradski could go inside, then walked off silently.
Bradski sat down in the dark building and before long an admin arrived and apologized for being late.
There was no record of a scheduled interview and so he called the recruiter who had supposedly set everything up.
After a lot of apologizing and some more runaround, Bradski had his interview with Facebook’s CTO.
A few days later, he had his second interview with a higher-ranking executive.
The Facebook offer would have given him a lot of stock, but going to work for Facebook didn’t make much sense.
Miserable with the Israelis, Bradski realized he would also be miserable at Facebook, where he would
most likely be forced to work on uninteresting projects.
So he kept hedging.
The longer he held out, the more stock Facebook offered.
At that point, the job was probably worth millions of dollars, but would cause Bradski great unhappiness in what seemed like a pressure cooker.

One day, Andrew Ng called Bradski and told him he needed to meet an interesting new group of roboticists at a research lab called Willow Garage.
Founded by Hassan, it was more of a research lab than a start-up.
Hassan was preparing to hire seventy to eighty roboticists to throw things against the wall and see what stuck.
It fit within a certain Silicon Valley tradition; labs like Xerox PARC and Willow Garage were not intended to directly create products.
Rather they experimented with technologies that frequently led in unexpected directions.
Xerox had created PARC in 1970 and Paul Allen had financed David Liddle to “do PARC right” when he established Interval Research in 1992.
In each case the idea was to “live in the future” by building technologies that were not quite mature but soon would be.
Now it looked like robotics was ripe for commercialization.

Initially Bradski was hesitant about going by for a quick lunchtime handshake.
He would have to race down and back or the Israelis would notice his absence.
Ng insisted.
Bradski realized that Andrew was usually right about these things and so decided to give it a shot.
Everything clicked.
At the end of the afternoon, Bradski was still there and he no longer cared about his start-up.
This was where he should be.
At the end of the day, while he was still sitting in the Willow Garage parking lot, he called Facebook to say he wasn’t interested.
Shortly afterward, he quit his start-up.

In December of 2007 Bradski was hired to run the vision group for the next generation of Salisbury and Ng’s earlier robot experiments, morphing PR1 into PR2.
They built the robot and then ran it through a series of tests.
They wanted the robot to do more than retrieve a beer from the fridge.
They “ran” a marathon, maneuvering the robot for twenty-six miles
inside the company office while Google cofounder Sergey Brin was in attendance.
Afterward, they instructed the robot to find and plug itself into ten wall sockets within an hour.
“Now they can escape and fend for themselves,” Bradski told friends via email.

PR2 wasn’t the first mobile robot to plug itself in, however.
That honor went to a mobile automaton called “The Beast,” designed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in 1960—but it could do little else.
¹⁶
PR2 was Shakey reborn half a century later.
This time, however, the robot was far more dexterous.
Pieter Abbeel, a University of California at Berkeley roboticist, was given one of eight PR2s that were distributed to universities.
With his students, he taught the machine to fold laundry—albeit very slowly.

Though the Willow Garage team had made a great deal of progress, their research revealed to them just how far they were from developing a sophisticated machine that could function autonomously in an ordinary home.
Kurt Konolige, a veteran SRI roboticist recruited by Bradski to Willow Garage, had told Bradski that these were decadelong technology development projects.
They would need to refine each step dozens of times before they got everything right.

In the end, however, like Paul Allen, who had decided to pull the plug on Interval Research after just eight years of its planned ten-year life span, Scott Hassan proved not to have infinite patience.
Bradski and Konolige looked on in dismay as the Willow Garage team held endless brainstorming sessions to try to come up with home robot ideas that they could commercialize relatively quickly.
They both realized the lab was going to be closed.
Bradski believed he knew what people really wanted in their homes—a French maid—and that wasn’t going to be possible anytime soon.
In his meetings with Hassan, Bradski pleaded for his team to be permitted to focus instead on manufacturing robotics, but he was shot down every time.
Hassan was dead-set on the home.
Eventually, Konolige didn’t
even bother to show up at one of the meetings—he went kayaking instead.

For a while Bradski tried to be a team player, but then he realized he was in danger of reentering the world of compromises that he had left at Intel.

“What the hell,” he thought.
“This isn’t me.
I need to do what I want.”

He started thinking about potential applications for industrial robotics integration, from moving boxes to picking up products with robot arms.
After discussing robotics extensively with people in industry, he confirmed that companies were hungry for robots.
He told Willow’s CEO that it was essential to have a plan B in case the home robot developments didn’t pan out.
The executive grudgingly allowed Bradski to form a small group to work on industrial applications.

Combining robot arms with new machine vision technology, Bradski’s group made rapid progress, but he tried to keep word of the advances from Hassan.
He knew that if word got out, the project would quickly be commercialized.
He did not want to be kicked out of the Willow Garage “nest” before he was ready to launch the new venture.
Finally, early in 2012, one of the programmers blabbed to the Willow Garage founder about their success and the industrial interest in robotics.
Hassan sent the group an email: “I will fund this tomorrow, let’s meet on Friday morning.”

With Konolige and several others, and with start-up funding from Hassan, Bradski created Industrial Perception, Inc., a robotic arm company with a specific goal—loading and unloading boxes from trucks such as package delivery vehicles.
After Bradski left to cofound Industrial Perception, Willow gradually disintegrated.
Willow was divvied up into five companies, several robot standards efforts, and a consulting group.
It had been a failure, but home robots—except for robotic vacuum cleaners—were still a distant goal.

Bradski’s new company set up operations in an industrial
neighborhood in South Palo Alto.
The office was in a big garage, which featured one room of office cubicles and a large unfinished space where they set up stacks of boxes for the robots to endlessly load and unload.
By this point, Industrial Perception had garnered interest from giant companies like Procter & Gamble, which was anxious to integrate automation technologies into its manufacturing and distribution operations.
More importantly, Industrial Perception had a potential first customer: UPS, the giant package delivery firm, had a very specific application in mind—replacing human workers who loaded and unloaded their trucks.

Industrial Perception made an appearance at just one trade show, Automatica, in Chicago in January 2012.
As it turned out, they didn’t even need that much publicity.
A year later, Andy Rubin visited their offices.
He was traveling the country, scouting and acquiring robotics firms.
He told those he visited that in ten to fifteen years, Google would become the world’s delivery service for information
and
material goods.
He needed to recruit machine vision and navigation technologies, and Industrial Perception had seamlessly integrated these technologies into their robotic arms so they could move boxes.
Along with Boston Dynamics and six other companies, Rubin secretly acquired Industrial Perception.
The deals, treated as “nonmaterial” by Google, would not become public for more than six months.
Even when the public found out about Google’s new ambitions, the company was circumspect about its plans.
Just as with the Google car, the company would keep any broader visions to itself until it made sense to do otherwise.

For Rubin, however, the vision was short-lived.
He tried to persuade Google to let him run his new start-up independently from what he now saw as a claustrophobic corporate culture.
He lost that battle, so at the end of 2014 he left the company and moved on to create an incubator for new consumer electronics start-up ideas.

The majority of the Industrial Perception team was integrated
into Google’s new robotics division.
Bradski, however, turned out to be too much of a Wild Duck for Google as well—which was fortuitous, because Hassan still had plans for him.
He introduced Bradski to Rony Abovitz, a successful young roboticist who had recently sold Mako Surgical, a robotic surgery company that developed robots to provide support to less-experienced surgeons.
Abovitz had another, potentially even bigger idea, and he needed a machine vision expert.

Abovitz believed he could reinvent personal computing so it could serve as the ultimate tool for augmenting the human mind.
If he was right, it would offer a clear path to merging the divergent worlds of artificial intelligence and augmentation.
At Mako, Abovitz had used a range of technologies to digitally capture the skills of the world’s best surgeons and integrate them into a robotic assistant.
This made it possible for a less-skilled surgeon to use a robotic template to get consistently good results using a difficult technique.
The other major robot surgery company, Intuitive Surgical, was an SRI spin-off that sold teleoperated robotic instruments that allowed surgeons to operate
remotely
with great precision.
Abovitz instead focused on the use of haptics—giving the robot’s operators a sense of touch—to attempt to construct a synthesis of human and robot, a surgeon more skilled than a human surgeon alone.
It helped that Mako focused on operations that dealt with bone instead of soft tissue surgery (which, incidentally, was the focus of Intuitive’s research).
Bone, a harder material, was much easier to “feel” with touch feedback.
In this system, the machine and the human would each do what they were good at to create a powerful symbiosis.

It’s important to note that the resulting surgeon isn’t a “cyborg”—a half-man, half-machine.
A bright line between the surgeon and the robot is maintained.
In this case the human surgeon works with the separate aid of a robotic surgery tool.
In contrast, a cyborg is a creature in which the line between human and machine becomes blurred.
Abovitz believed that
“Strong” artificial intelligence—a machine with human-level intelligence—was an extremely difficult problem and would take decades to develop, if it was ever possible.
From his Mako experience designing a robot to aid a surgeon, he believed the most effective way to design systems was instead to use artificial intelligence technology to enhance human powers.