The Loneliest Humanoid in America

Walking, self-contained, adult-size robots are commonplace in robotics labs in Japan and South Korea, but there’s only one made here. Why are we falling behind?

By Jacob Ward Posted 07.20.2010 at 1:02 pm 32 Comments

Lightest Touch: John B. Carnett

HOW TO FIGHT A ROBOT WAR

The fact that Dennis Hong and his students were able to build CHARLI-L in such a short amount of time, on a donated budget, using donated parts, is a sign that America’s best and brightest are eager to create humanoids. But CHARLI-L—light enough to lift with one hand and fitted with just enough actuators to make it through RoboCup—cannot challenge Japanese and Korean supremacy in humanoid robotics on its own. Byoungsoo Kim is the founder and CEO of the Seoul-based company Robotis, which produces off-the-shelf parts for use in robotics systems, including CHARLI-L. Virginia Tech is a prized partner, as Hong’s students regularly put Robotis components into their inventions. Kim believes that an open-source community working on a standardized platform could transform American robotics the way open-source development has transformed computing. Without that community, he says, “the robot itself is nothing. The software is what’s important.”

Several American companies are vying to be that platform. Willow Garage’s PR2 robot, in use at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, is built around the same distribution model: The company builds the hardware, then sells or rents it to academic institutions that can then write and test algorithms for motion. And for the past three years, Paul Oh of Drexel University along with Lee and Hong have been developing their own open-source platform around Hubo.

Shortly after the WTEC report was issued, Drexel, in collaboration with Virginia Tech, UPenn, Bryn Mawr College and Colby College, won a National Science Foundation grant known as PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education). Drexel’s Oh, UPenn’s Lee and VT’s Hong are all second-generation Korean-Americans, and Oh is first cousins with Jun-Ho Oh, the creator of Hubo. “International collaborations require trust,” says Paul Oh. “Hubo is [Jun-Ho Oh’s] brainchild, and he won’t entrust it to just anyone. Being family makes those concerns immaterial.” Oh positioned Hubo, a South Korean–made robot, to the NSF as a research platform that would train American students in multinational cooperation, and the team is now developing three versions of Hubo for academic purposes: a Virtual, Mini and Online Hubo.

Virtual Hubo will be an online robot simulator, something that students without the necessary funds to purchase or build their own robot can download. The software enables basic onscreen robotics experiments.

If, however, an academic program wanted to experiment with outside forces on the robot—how it’s affected by picking up a weight, for instance—it needs a tangible prototype. The full-size Hubo is too expensive, “so we created Mini-Hubo,” Hong says. “We wanted a sub-$8,000 robot that has the same kinematics and proportions as the real Hubo, just smaller.” The idea is that Mini-Hubo is an open-source hardware platform. Virginia Tech, which was responsible for this part of the project, prepared blueprints, CAD drawings, and fabrication and assembly manuals, and the documents are now available free online to anyone. As a test of the system, Drexel students were asked to build a Mini-Hubo from the instructions. The robot accepts algorithms that let it do things like avoid obstacles and manipulate objects. “And it worked,” Hong says proudly. Orders have already arrived from two universities for pre-built Mini-Hubos.

Finally, Drexel will, as the last phase of the five-year grant, host the full-size Hubo in Oh’s lab. The robot, Online Hubo, will be surrounded by webcams. Other universities will be able to send algorithms to it and monitor the results remotely. “It’s like a time-share,” Hong explains. “And the best part is that Online Hubo, Mini-Hubo and Virtual Hubo all share the same [software]. It will be a full set of tools to conduct humanoid research.”

PRESSING NEED

The path forward from CHARLI-L to an all-in-one humanoid is not clear. But then, the field of humanoid robotics moves rapidly. In 2000, Kuffner remembers, “people were saying, ‘I wonder how long until we’ll figure out stable walking in robots.’ The prediction was that it would take 10 years. It happened in two and a half.”

Keep in mind that the roboticists who work on humanoids are not dreamers by nature. They tend to be practical people. When I ask Hanson how one defends the concept of developing self-aware humanoids in a grant proposal, his language tightens, and his logic suddenly seems less circular and the rewards not as distant. The practical benefits are, he believes, endless. “Automation is the future of an efficient society,” he says. “It results in more-affordable goods, more-efficient transportation and improved quality of life. It can increase what a civilization like ours can achieve with limited resources. Intelligent automation is our best hope for solving our big problems.”

On the long list of big problems facing the United States, there is one for which humanoid robots could present a very real solution. The baby-boomer generation will soon form the single biggest spike in retired and elderly Americans in history. In rural and suburban homes reachable only by car, that’s going to be a far-flung and very fragile population. As a result, the ratio of available caregivers to needy patients is expected to change from 4:1 to barely 1:1 in the next 20 years. Perhaps that’s the practical task for which humanoid robots are best suited [for a look at the state-of-the-art in human-assisting robots, see our companion feature from this issue, "Rise of the Helpful Machines"]. iRobot, for instance, perhaps the most widely known robot manufacturer in the country, has spun off a new division to meet the trend. (Angle is adamant that bipedal robots are not part of the company’s plan, however. He believes his existing tank-tread platform is the best option for climbing stairs, navigating obstacles, and someday carrying a human.)

There’s a great deal of difficult and painstaking work to be done before we’ll have anything close to an automated home health aide. And in the end, of course, it’s hard to avoid rolling one’s eyes over the notion of pouring time and effort into a bipedal humanoid robot that is barely able to kick a ball. But consider that this year an American-made humanoid may, for the first time, accomplish the task of walking forward and interacting with other objects without falling over. Until recently that task was considered practically impossible.

It’s the open-ended spirit of this research that’s important. That open-ended work, that near-religious zealotry, is what could someday put a robot helper in homes where they’re desperately needed. Put aside the idea of a robot that cleans out your gutters so you can spend a Saturday in the yard with your son. Imagine now that your son has children of his own, has taken you in, and works a ten-hour shift. Who will have the time to administer your medication? To schedule your next doctor’s appointment? To help you to the bathroom? Who will you rely on? Perhaps—if Hong and his peers can convince our country that their work could someday remedy a national crisis—you’ll rely on CHARLI.

Additional reporting from Japan and Korea by Brian Ashcraft

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