Paris, Monday, September 18, 2000
The Robot Revolution Is on the Way
>From Cyberpooches to Nursebots, Devices Are Entering Everyday Life
By Curt Suplee Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a larger-than-life-size android named Cog locks its video eyes on the faces of visitors while smoothly slithering a Slinky toy from hand to hand. At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a gregarious, self-propelled gizmo that looks like a glorified vacuum cleaner has taken visitors on tours of the museum.
In Pittsburgh, a faceless but matronly ''nursebot'' named Flo briskly answers questions, such as ''Hey, Flo! What's on NBC tonight?''
After decades of promises, hopes and disappointments, it appears that the long-awaited ''robot revolution'' may at last be under way.
Around the globe, quasi-autonomous devices have become increasingly common on factory floors, hospital corridors and farm fields. Scores more are in development or for sale.
Physicians can use robotics to aid in ultraprecise bone and brain surgery.
Affluent parents can pick up a Sony cyberpooch to amuse the kids or an ottoman-sized, video-equipped ''AmigoBOT'' to follow and monitor them while they play. The Pentagon is researching a dozen ways to put robots in the battlefield, from self-driving vehicles to swarms of tiny surveillance robots that would pool their information to create a comprehensive, multiangle view of combat zones. And this autumn, the first interactive robot baby dolls will hit toy stores.
Just last month, researchers at Brandeis University announced a major milestone: a computerized system that automatically creates, evolves, improves and builds a variety of simple mobile creatures without any significant human intervention.
The rise in robot technology has been fueled by several factors, including spectacular advances in computer power, miniaturization of components, the availability of inexpensive sonar, infrared or laser sensors, improvements in speech-recognition and voice-generation technology, and - perhaps most important - the emergence several years ago of a new paradigm for designing quasi-autonomous objects.
''For 30 years, we've had no results to speak of,'' said Hans Moravec, a pioneer in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ''But that's all going to change in the next 10 years.''
In the near future, it is not unreasonable ''to imagine multiple robotic devices in every business, home and office,'' says James Hendler, head of the University of Maryland's Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory who is now working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Mr. Moravec and several other experts are convinced that exponential growth in computing power may soon put robotic systems within reach of the kind of brainpower that could ultimately put humanity out of business.
''Over the next several decades, machine competence will rival - and ultimately surpass - any particular human skill one cares to cite,'' wrote Ray Kurzweil, inventor of computerized speech-recognition, reading and music systems, in his new book, ''The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.''
The emergence of these new creatures, Mr. Kurzweil wrote, ''will be a development of greater import than any of the events that have shaped human history.''
Whether sheer computer power can translate into genuinely human capability, however, is a hotly debated matter. A true android of the R2D2 variety featured in the Star Wars films - that is, an autonomous robot that can make lots of decisions for itself, handle unfamiliar surroundings and situations, and converse usefully with people - may be a very long way off.
One major obstacle is that scientists have not yet created a device that can do what any young child does automatically: recognize grandma when she's wearing sunglasses, has a new haircut, and is standing in a crowd with her face turned aside.
By the age of 2, any human can see the difference between a hole in the floor and a black spot painted on the floor.
Thanks to miniaturization of the kinds of infrared, laser-light and ultrasound sensors widely used as range finders for consumer cameras, today's robots can discern the distance to the object accurately. But so far, robots have no dependable way to tell a hole from a spot, much less a boy from a girl.
Another impediment to rapid progress, experts say, is that until the late 1990s, the price of components has been so high that few have been able to do the kind of creative, blue-sky research that often produces breakthroughs.
That is changing. Small muscle-like motors and miniaturized joints are becoming less expensive all the time, and the spread of video cameras, laser devices and ultrasound range-finder technologies has driven down the cost of items once thought exotic.
''I feel like we're on the cusp,'' said Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Even if robots do not become as ubiquitous as the PC, less grandiose but extremely useful goals are being achieved.
Carnegie Mellon has devised self-directing tractors that harvest around the clock in California, combining location information from global positioning sensors with video image processing that identifies rows of uncut crops.
In the long run, many planners are assuming that demand for personal-care robots is bound to explode as the population ages and the cost of nursing home care (already averaging $50,000 a year) continues to increase.
''Seniors may be prone to forget to take their medications or therapies, and caregivers may be too overworked to remember,'' said Nicholas Roy, one of the developers of Flo, the nursebot. But ''these are the sorts of tasks that computers and robots are really good at.''