The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has a project where people with impaired mobility control a mobile robot with their thoughts. Nine disabled people and 10 people with normal mobility were fitted with a brain-computer interface, (a cap fitted with electrodes). They could make the robot turn right and left and walk by thinking. Their thoughts were picked up by the interface, which transmitted real-time instructions.
The controllers were in multiple different locations. The robot is just a laptop on wheels at the moment. The science exploits the fact that specific thoughts lead to enhanced activity in specific parts of the brain and the interface can pick and transmit such activity as an order.
Once a user has been trained to think, he or she can move the robot. The researchers claimed that there was no difference between the ability of the two groups in learning how to control the robot. About 10 days training was needed.
The laptop camera allows the user to see. The robot is also fitted with sensors that can help it locate nearby objects. This project is part of the larger Tools for Brain-Computer Interaction (Tobi) initiative and eventually, it could lead to such robots being assigned to people with impaired mobility.
This is one of many different initiatives involving robots, which are being explored by different teams of researchers. Industrial robots have been around for decades, but those are specialised machines doing specific tasks on factory floors. There is now more interest in using highly mobile robots for a variety of tasks.
The US military research foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has funded a lot of research. Google subsidiary, Boston Dynamics, for example, has produced several robots inspired by animals, with DARPA funding.
BigDog is the most famous. This rough terrain quadruped has been deployed in many places with the US military. It can climb slopes, walk across rubble and carry a payload of 150 kg. More recently, Spot, another dog-like robot was unveiled. Spot is smaller, quicker and has great balance. There is a video where it jogs along while being kicked.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has produced the cheetah, another quadruped. The cheetah is capable of jumping over obstacles thrown into its path. There has also been research involving designs inspired by cockroaches and scorpions.
The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Bremen has a robot called Charlie, based on the chimpanzee. Charlie is designed with a lunar environment in mind. Chimpanzees are, of course, capable of both two-legged and four-legged movement and they can use their upper limbs to grasp and manipulate tools. They are also intelligent enough to make judgement calls as to which mode to use. Charlie hopes to emulate this.
DARPA responded to the Fukushima disaster with a challenge where teams were invited to build robots to handle post disaster environments. The contestants have to complete a sequence of tasks within 60 minutes.
The robots must drive a car, get out of the car (this involves a design that can uncurl out of the driver's seat, and get to the ground undamaged), open the door of a building, turn a valve, drill a circle in a wall, deal with a "surprise" (a sparking electric switch, for instance), remove and navigate rubble, and climb stairs.
These are all obviously tasks that humans perform efficiently. The assumption is that robots will be used in hazardous environments, where humans cannot be risked. As of now, there are tele-operators controlling them but ideally, the robots will be autonomous.
A team from Korea's KAIST University won, with a robot that completed the DARPA course in about 45 minutes. Similar challenges of navigating disaster environments have involved flying drones in the Drones for Good Programme.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to predict which of these programmes will scale up most rapidly into viable off-the-shelf devices. But it is pretty clear that robots will be part of normal civilian life very soon and the implications are far-reaching.
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