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Let's put an OS in this robot
Fighting for a standard for the future personal robots ... by Cyril Fievet
Just in case you didn't notice, a new techno-revolution is knocking at your door. It's robots, everybody.
With time, robots have become smaller, smarter, autonomous and cheaper. And, above all, they are now entering our homes. Robotic pets, smart toys, autonomous lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners, or mechanical security guards, among others, will lead the dance. Welcome in the \"domestic robots era.\"
In the years to come, we will all get one or many of these machines. Rodney Brooks, head af MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab (and founder of iRobot, a domestic robots manufacturer) envisions a future where dozens of tiny and autonomous machines will clean the windows, wipe the table or monitor our house when we're out, creating a new domestic ecology. British Telecom's own futurologist, Ian Pearson, predicts that by year 2020, a few million tiny, insect-like robots will populate the Earth. Right now, Sony boasts it has sold a mere 100,000 units of its Aibo robot-dog. And at least three US companies are selling autonomous machines able to mow your lawn alone.
For sure, PRs will become as present in our future lives as their cousins, PCs, were before. PRs? Personal Robots, dude.
But, if you've followed my point until now, you could ask yourself: \"OK. So a wide bunch of a new kind of machine is coming. What are they driven by? What makes them function?.\" Good question. The fact is that Personal Robots will be driven by Operating Systems. Or at least, they should be.
OSs again! Why?
The need to think at robots as OS-driven machines is not totally intuitive, though. After all, there isn't any OS in our cars, nor in our lawnmowers (so far, at least), and it does not prevent these machines from performing pretty well what they were made for.
But robots are different.
There are at least two reasons why, unlike your fridge, your Personal Robot will have an OS inside.
The first reason is that a robot is a computer. Take Sony's Aibo for instance. Sure, its moving tail and ears and its four legs don't make it look like the beige box on your desk. But don't get fooled by the \"shape-factor.\" Inside, the machine is more \"classical\": it is powered by a Lithium Ion battery, and has a 64bits RISC processor, 32 megs of SDRAM, In/Out slots for PC Card or Memory Stick, and even a built-in clock. Audio and image outputs are performed thanks to internal speakers and a small LCD screen. Basically, Aibo has almost everything that you normally imagine a regular computer should have. And it happens that all of the computers existing today are made usable by Operating Systems (probably because we decided to design them that way, I guess). Therefore, it will be the same for robots.
But the second reason why PRs will need operating systems comes from their actual raison d'ˆtre. A robot has to be able to do different things or tasks (unlike your fridge). It has to be able to move, without someone carrying it (unlike your desktop computer). And, in most cases of domestic use, it has to be - at least slightly - autonomous (unlike your car). That's the reasons why Aibo has many more features that the ones described above. In fact, it comes with many things that your computer probably does not have (at least if you're just a regular nerd), for instance: 16 to 20 motors (depending on the version), half a dozen sensors (including temperature, pressure or distance sensors) and artificial vision hardware.
If you admit that PRs will have to communicate with their owners in natural language, move alone in the house without bumping every two seconds into the walls or sofas, and react to requests we will submit to them, then you'll probably consider that the best thing to do is to write a suite of software to control their behavior. Next, you will want to an OS manage the whole thing.
OK then, show me the OS!
Since the domestic robot revolution has still to become a reality, there is not a single robot OS, but many. In fact, there are as many OSs as there are different kinds of robots.
When manufacturers started to think of building robots that could fit in our homes and become useful or entertaining artificial creatures, they imagined at the same time the software that would come inside. Just because there were no other solutions (I mean no robot-specific software available), and because the behavior of the robot, its aspect and its functionalities were tightly related.
It is not a surprise, then, that Sony created their \"Open-R\" architecture to give life to its robotic dogs.
Sony's Open-R software architecture is used to give the mechanical dog behavior and motion capabilities. It embeds a full set of software components, charged for instance to let the robot \"see\" (thanks to a CCD camera in its nose), express \"emotions\" (such as moving its head or tail when happy), or behave when confronted to changes in its environment (for instance, Aibo can play with a red ball, following it when it rolls on the floor). But other software can be uploaded into the beast. Called \"Aibo-ware\", these can upgrade the robot and make it smarter and \"older\" When purchased, the robot is a puppy; you have to \"grow\" it and it will, normally, become smarter and smarter over time. Didn't I tell you that these machines were very different from your computer? Plus, a \"Master Studio\" can be purchased from Sony, and will act as a software development set, allowing Aibo owners to program new capabilities or behavior for their mechanical pet.
As a whole, Open-R therefore offers a very complete architecture. At first, Sony wanted to keep this \"open\" architecture very \"closed.\" In November 2001, an Aibo enthusiast \"hacked\" its robotic pet, giving it the ability to dance, thanks to a garage-made piece of software, later released on the Web. Sony was quick to react, and forced the \"robot-hacker\" to remove the \"illegal\" code and close its website. But things changed recently, as Sony announced on May 7 that the Open-R specifications will be available online at the beginning of June. The specification will come with a Software Development Kit (Open-SDK); available for free, allowing Aibo enthusiasts and hackers to add new skills to their pets (provided that it's not for commercial purpose).
Other manufacturers are choosing different ways of thinking about hacking. Take Lego for instance. In the past few years the famous plastic bricks maker has become the first choice for robotics amateurs all around the world thanks to its Mindstorms products. The Mindstorm kits are a complete set of tools, motors, sensors, cogs, or wheels that allow kids and, above all, grown-ups to create complex, autonomous or vision empowered personal robots.
What's in the box? Apart from hundreds of mechanical and construction pieces, Mindstorms come with a RCX. This central piece is a programmable microcontroller-based component. From a regular PC equipped with the official SDK provided by Lego, users are able to talk to the RCX, and to download small codes in it's memory.
Thus, the RCX is the brain of the future artificial creature. Inside is some firmware, a small piece of code embedded on a 32K chip, that controls the other mechanical parts of the robots.
RCX is not supposed to be changed by user. But it is. In fact, back in 1998, the RCX was entirely reverse-engineered by robotics enthusiasts. Alternative solutions can now easily be found on the Web. Among them, TinyVM, lejOS and legOS have been developed for years by hackers around the world, all with the same agenda: set your robots - or at least their RCX - free. TinyVM and leJOS are Java Virtual Machines allowing users to code their Lego bots in Java, while legOS is an open-source embedded OS also able to replace the official code. Obviously, the Lego folks do not mind.
A standard, anyone?
But is being hacked the ultimate destiny for robot OS? And, if we are to live a personal robots revolution, will it be such a heterogenic mess, with a different OS for each robot?
Wait. Enter Evolution Robotics. Created in March 2001, the California company has raised $3 million from Idealab!'s Bill Gross and Ben Rosen, founding investor in Compaq and Lotus. They have an ambitious, yet precise, agenda: \"to establish a software standard for the personal robotics industry.\" Sometimes dubbed \"the Microsoft of robotics,\" the start-up released the first version of its Evolution Robotics Software Platform this past February. Targeting professionals as well as amateurs, the platform consists of a proprietary software architecture, software modules and developer tools, a hardware kit for testing purposes, and enables the integration of advanced robotic applications. \"We are not the only company that has developed a robot control system and brought it to market, and, undoubtedly, we won't be the last. However there are many reasons we believe that the Evolution Robotics Software Platform has the best chance to become the standard for the emerging personal robotics industry,\" insists Bernard Louvat, President and COO of the company. Among those reasons: a dream team composed of professional roboticists, former researchers and businessmen, some strong partnerships with first class institutions (Caltech, JPL or USC, to quote a few), and a good \"hype\" factor.
However, some players do not buy the \"take-my-standard!\" talk. Evolution, like it's competition, is a commercial, privately held company. Their software, despite claims of being \"open,\" is fully proprietary. The company provides APIs allowing developers to write applications that will run on the Platform, but that's all. The OS and its source code will remain private and proprietary.
Other people are therefore acting to provide other means to have a robotic OS. Several open-source projects are on their way. One of the most ambitious is perhaps OROCOS, which comes for Open source RObot COntrol Software. \"The Orocos framework should appeal to all roboticists, whether they are 'just' students [...] or a large robotics research lab working hard to get a five-finger robot hand to work together with a redundant manipulator on a planetary rover under vision-guided teleoperation,\" claims the official website of the project. Started more than a year ago in Europe, OROCOS is progressing thanks to dozens of independant developers, looking forward to seeing someday a complete robot OS (and a set of tools) based upon OpenSource and Free Software licensing. Of course, the resulting control software has to be fully independent of any specific architecture, not to mention any commercial robot manufacturer. So far, the project has focused on the definition of its scope, as well as precise design guidelines. Software components and libraries - allowing, for instance, the control of real-time motion systems or the processing of sensor data - should follow.
Holy War 2.0
Thus, it seems as if History is repeating itself. On one side of the line are hopeful manufacturers with their proprietary formats. On the opposite side, free software advocates that will create truly open solutions, with or without hacking existing OS on their way.
You've got it. We are going to live another episode of the everlasting saga: a new \"OS war.\"
But the problem comes when you consider the complexity and the diversity of robots. Take Japan, for instance. They are not creating lawnmowers or insect-like funny creatures. The Japanese want to conceive human-shaped robots. Anthropomorphic robots have been the major goal - some may say \"major obsession\" - of Japanese robotics research since the sixties. And Japanese are making what would probably become a new kind of labor power, as well as domestic biped machines.
During the first quarter of this year alone, three new human-like ground breaking robots were presented in Japan. One of them, HRP-2, is the result of an ambitious government supported project named the Humanoid Robotics Project. Its creators boast that it runs on a truly open software architecture, named \"Open HRP,\" contrary to Asimo, the rival android star created by Honda. Asimo is powered by, guess what, a proprietary OS.
At the same time, one of the main inventors of a bipod machine, Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project (KSSP) last year demonstrated a small android named Pino, who is able to walk and play football. KSSP released the core software of the project and made it available for free on its web site. With their \"open Pino\" platform designed to help all creators of biped machines, KSSP hopes to give birth to the \"Linux of humanoid robotics.\"
What is certain is that we still have time before our robot-nanny is able to \"speak\" to our robot-dogs.
By the way, if you've read this article this far you may have noticed something weird. We have been talking about Operating Systems since the beginning of this article, without even mentioning the word \"Windows\" once. Strange, yeah? Come on Bill, wake up! There is a robot in your future!
Here are some web sites referenced in Cyril's article.
Aibo, http://www.aibo.com
Evolution Robotics, http://www.evolution.com
Lego Mindstorms, http://www.legomindstorms.com
lejOS / TinyVM, http://www.sourceforge.net
OROCOS, http://www.orocos.org
Pino, http://www.symbio.jst.go.jp/PINO/
About the Author
Cyril is a gen-X French freelance writer, specialized in very advanced technologies. He has published some 300 articles about the Internet, robotics, or nanotechnology in the past few years, and he's working on his third book. When he's not sleeping under a palm tree on a cool Asian beach, he is also the sole editor and publisher of several information websites about forthcoming revolutions, such as RobotsLife.com and nanogloss.com. His personal website is at http://www.6711.com
Please feel free to email the author with your comments about this article: Cyril Fievet |
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发表于 2004-9-26 17:38:16
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