Killbot Pilots May be Responsible for Their Actions

While it may seem obvious, the details, as usual, are the problem and this post over at the Wired Danger Room scratches the surface of some of the legal and ethical issues facing teleoperated robots. I am still unsure why the TLA is the ones flying the drones, but if it keeps them from dealing on the streets at least that’s something.

Operators of other armed robots may also find themselves facing charges in the event of a lethal malfunction while in co-op mode. I hope for everyones sake that the robots provide a way to prove if the equipment is or is not being teleoperated and provide a secure means of identifying the operator. At least some of the killbots have finally implemented encryption, so hopefully the inevitable unintended deaths don’t result in claims of hacking.

I am sure this will be an ongoing story of unintended consequences.

ArduPilot Mega

The ArduPilot Mega UAV autopilot is finally here, and just in time for flying season. Now that it has enough serial ports, I really should spend some time getting my airplane flying, but as my hobby project I find myself spending most of my time yak shaving and not enough flying. At least the yak shaving has been productive.

RoboChair?

Speaking of improving the lives of children through the use of robotics, this RoboChair, developed by the industrial technology center of SAGA, looks to be designed to provide mobility to handicapped children.

Though at 300,000 – 500,000 yen, it seems somewhat expensive for a device that the child will quickly outgrow.

For some reason, I think this QoLT thing is going to be a big part of robotics work in the future. It should also be slightly safer than working on building killbots.

[From: RoboNable]

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Roboethics

IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine is having the March 2011 special issue dedicated to Roboethics and has a call for papers up here. The deadline for papers is September 01, 2010.

After watching the movie Hardware again this weekend, I remembered that I wanted to mention this call for papers. I think it is important that the robotics community continues to think critically about the ethical issues involved with robotics. While in the long run the killbots will probably hunt down the last of the human survivors, in the short term the issues are fairly complex and demand serious consideration.

I think I saw a twilight zone episode where all the parents were replaced with robots, this could be our future. Imagine the nutritional improvements that can be made to children’s diets. What child would argue with a robot about eating their peas, especially a robot equipped with a 10 KiloVolt synaptic persuader. The robotic guardians would also be able to monitor and enforce critical educational tasks such as homework completion when interfaced with a household wireless mesh sensor network.

While the research is clear the robot guardians can enhance the lives of children who are lucky enough to have parents able to afford robotic supervision, what about those children whose parents are unable to afford such compaionship. Is it ethical to allow children to not be raised by robots?

The Roboethics website may have more information in the future after they recover from being hacked. Possibly by a malignant artificial intelligence. Fortunatly, time travelers have saved a copy of the information in hopes that one day someone can make use of it.

Magic and other programming tricks

This is some good stuff.

Normally, a dual-linked circular list would contain both previous and next pointer fields and the current position in the list would be identified by a single pointer. By using two current pointers, one to the node in question and the other to the one just before/after it, it becomes possible to store only a single pointer value in each node. The value stored in each node is the XOR of the next and previous pointers that normally would have been stored in each node. Decoding is obvious.

If you program and are unfamiliar with the dangers of floating point, then you should read this. Proper understanding of how floating point actually works is important because sometimes “cos(x) != cos(y) even though x == y“.

Turns out that the behavior can depend on how many instructions are between the cos() calls and the != comparison.

This is another example of the trickery of floating point. Thinking about this, I recently said to a friend of mine, “I’m surprised companies’ billing systems ever work”, his response was “maybe they don’t”. Which is kind of disturbing to think about. Though some have claimed that this is why we will be running Cobol code forever.

My personal rule of thumb is that closed source software needs to be at least two orders of magnitude better in performance then the equivalent open source program. Otherwise it is not worth all the hassles. On that note, Octave is a MATLAB replacement that on my list of software to try. Also, unlike MATLAB it can be connected to ROS, which is nice.

On another computational note, I liked the fifth edition of this textbook for an introduction to numerical methods. Which could be useful if you are trying to program complex math(s) on a microcontroller.

Random Thoughts: Further Testing Needed

In the past, we have covered camera calibration and the effects of autofocus. Now that calibration is easier, it looks like there may be some issues with the positional repeatability of the auto focus lens mechanism. Initial results seem to indicate that every time the focus of the camera changes not only does the focal length change but it looks like the orientation of the primary axis and position of the center of the lens relative to the principal point also change.

A little more testing is need but the long and the short of it is that the Logitech Quickcam 9000 may not be useful for many computer vision applications since you may not be able to rectify the image consistently unless you recalibrate the camera every time the focus changes. A lookup table won’t work since you have no way of determining how the orientation of the lens has changed.

Oh and that auto focus mechanism, it’s an electromagnet. As we have previously noted, magnetic fields have some implications for inertial navigation. One thought I had today was that often the intensity of the magnetic field is ignored because generally the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field is constant and you are only looking to determine the orientation relative to magnetic north.

Perhaps the covariance for the Kalman filter could be weighted based on the magnetic field strength relative to the nominal field strength of the Earth. That way, if there is magnetic interference, the sensor readings from the magnetometer will have less influence on the output. Maybe someone else has researched this problem.

Another Rovio Driver for ROS

Here is another Rovio driver for ROS. At the moment, this one seems to support a few more features than this driver.

Update: Behold the power of open source software, this apparently fixes the stupid brightness issue on the Rovio.

ROS Tutorials at ICRA

As a reminder, the tutorial signup information is here.

Playback: A case of the mondays.

Let me assure you, procrastination is harder than it looks.

National Robotics Week: Boston Block Party

Reporting in from Boston, the robot block party was in full swing at the Museum of Science.

Students from WPI brought their prize winning Moonraker 2.0 robot. WPI also has an undergraduate major in robotics engineering that may be of interest to readers.

The FIRST robotics team from Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Sciences at WPI sent some of their mentors to show off last years robot while they are in Atlanta.

These robotics bugs are from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab.

They are equipped with a flexible backbone and piezo electric actuation.

More information about their research can be found on their website.

Robonica brought some of the Roboni-i to the party.

No robot block party in Boston is complete with out Roombas.

The iRobot Packbot was also able to make it to the party.

Barrett Technology brought two robot arms. The arms looked very well built and are equipped with a zero backlash cable drive and custom low power electronics that somehow use less then 28 watts.

Students from Olin College brought one of their student projects built on the Lynxmotion hexpod base.

QinetiQ North America brought one of the Talon robots, a successor to the swords platform. It was fortunate that it was unarmed.

Artaic is a Boston based startup with what looks to be a solid business model. Designed to be compatible with standard installation techniques, their robots can produce low cost tile mosaics.

Nao came by the party to show of its dance moves. Fortunately for Nao we did not have any tools with us so we were unable to get any disassembly photos.

There was also a design challenge for building your own bristlebot.

Kiva Systems also gave a presentation on the order fulfillment system.

At talk by Mike Ciaraldi about “Getting Started in Robotics at Any Age”. One of the many great presentations at the block party.

We are already looking forward to the next National Robotics Week.