The Robot With a Smart Phone Brain

One of the limitations of robot kits is that they can be complicated to use and build, and even the simplest ones require some hardware expertise. But now any smart phone can be a robot, thanks to the folks at Romotive.

NEWS: Salty Hard Drives Have More Bytes

The concept is quite simple: put a wheeled chassis on a smart phone or iPod Touch that allows for using the device as the “brain.” But that simplicity is what makes the robot, called Romo, powerful. Since the controls are contained entirely within the phone, they can be downloaded as apps. One can add new physical capabilities to Romo -– a claw, or a scoop -– but that doesn’t require any new additions to the phone.

Also, the controls are through the headphone jack. That simplifies the design and means that the robot doesn’t need to be linked with only one brand of smart phone.

BLOG: Robot Builds Itself With Foam

Romotive turned to Kickstarter to raise money, and had planned to raise $32,000. They have long since passed that (hitting $92,684 on Nov. 18) and they will stop taking pledges on Nov. 21. If you pledge $78 before then, you get a Romo and $141 gets two.

So what can you do with a smart phone-based robot? The founders of Romotive, Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen, have come up with a few applications. At this point they have a racing game and you can program your Romo to carry an iPhone around as a kind of spying tool (the view from the floor isn’t as useful as it might be, but that isn’t the point). On their site they ask both software and hardware hackers to come up with more software and share their findings with others.

Keller Rinaudo, CEO of Robomotive, told Discovery blogger Eric Rogell that while the Romo doesn't yet have many specific tasks in mind, that could change fast, just as it did with personal computers:

“It was basically geeks in garages playing with compouter chips and writing code,” says Rinaudo. “They were building computers that couldn’t do anything and the business people laughed. They’d say, ‘What is it good for? Why in the hell would anyone want a computer in their home?’ It took people hacking and believing and being nerdy enough to figure it out… and ignoring all the investors and business people. Now we say how ridiculously ignorant those investors and business people were.”

Japanese scientist unveils 'thinking' robot brain

But a Japanese researcher is working on making them science fact, with machines that can teach themselves to perform tasks they have not been programmed to do, using objects they have never seen before.

In a world first, Osamu Hasegawa, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has developed a system that allows robots to look around their environment and do research on the internet, enabling them to "think" how best to solve a problem.

"Most existing robots are good at processing and performing the tasks they are preprogrammed to do, but they know little about the 'real world' where we humans live," he said.

"So our project is an attempt to build a bridge between robots and that real world," he said.

The Soinn remains the same
The Self-Organising Incremental Neural Network, or "Soinn", is an algorithm that allows robots to use their knowledge -- what they already know -- to infer how to complete tasks they have been told to do.

Soinn examines the environment to gather the data it needs to organise the information it has been given into a coherent set of instructions.

Tell a Soinn-powered machine that it should, for example: "Serve water".

In a laboratory demonstration, the machine begins to break down the task into a series of skills that it has been taught: holding a cup; holding a bottle; pouring water from a bottle; and placing a cup down.

CONTINUES BELOW

Without special programmes for water-serving, the robot works out the order of the actions required to complete the task.

The Soinn machine asks for help when facing a task beyond its ability and crucially, stores the information it learns for use in a future task.

In a separate experiment, Soinn is used to power machines to search the internet for information on what something looks like, or what a particular word might mean.

Online research
Hasegawa's team is trying to merge these abilities and create a machine that can work out how to perform a given task through online research.

"In the future, we believe it will be able to ask a computer in England how to brew a cup of tea and perform the task in Japan," he said.

Like humans, the system can also filter out "noise" or insignificant information that might confuse other robots.

The process is similar to how people can carry on a conversation with a travelling companion on a train and ignore those around them, or can identify an object under different lighting and from various angles, Hasegawa said.

"Human brains do this so well automatically and smoothly so we don't realise that we are even doing this," he said.

Similarly, the machine is able to filter out irrelevant results it finds on the web.

"There is a huge amount of information available on the internet, but at present, only humans are making use of such information," he said.

Direct interface
"This robot can connect its brain directly to the internet," he said.

Hasegawa hopes Soinn might one day be put to practical use, for example controlling traffic lights to ease traffic jams by organically analysing data from public monitors and accident reports.

He also points to possible uses in earthquake detection systems where a Soinn-equipped machine might be able to aggregate data from numerous sensors located across Japan and identify movements that might prove significant.

In a domestic setting, a robot that could learn could prove invaluable to a busy household.

"We might ask a robot to bring soy sauce to the dinner table. It might browse the internet to learn what soy sauce is and identify it in the kitchen," said Hasegawa.

Robot revolution
But, cautions the professor, there are reasons to be careful about robots that can learn.

What kinds of tasks should we allow computers to perform? And is it possible that they might turn against us, like in the apocalyptic vision of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"A kitchen knife is a useful thing. But it can also become a weapon," he said.

While Hasegawa and his team have only benign intentions for their invention, he wants people to be aware of its moral limits.

"We are hoping that a variety of people will discuss this technology, when to use it, when not to use it.

"Technology is advancing at an enormous speed," he said.

"I want people to know we already have this kind of technology. We want people with different backgrounds and in different fields to discuss how it should be used, while it is still in its infancy." -- AFP