Beyond imagination: The reality of robotics
30 August 2010
The age of the robot is now with us! Tristan Jones takes a look at the progress being made in this field and the enabling technology behind it..
Inspirational science fiction authors, such as Isaac Asimov, whose concept “Three Laws of Robotics”, which formed the basis for the film “I, Robot”, paved the way for literature, films and TV shows that have fuelled our imagination when it comes to the applications that robots or automomous systems are capable of. Tasks such as complete home automation, “auto pilot” and navigation for land-based vehicles or military operations do not seem at all unrealistic.
Driven by large government and commercial funding projects, the current investment areas for robotics applications would suggest that the ubiquitous, intelligent humanoids of I, Robot are not yet just around the corner.
Military unmanned autonomous systems, pioneering lifesaving surgery procedures and biomimetic autonomous sub-sea reconnaissance robots, are already very much a reality. Right now, robotics is a hot topic in the UK and worldwide; so we'll look in more detail at these investment areas, their applications and the common challenges that face roboticists.
Next generation of autonomous unmanned systems
In the UK, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) invested £4.5m in 2008 on a major science and technology competition, “The Grand Challenge”, to search for the best ideas and innovations in defence technology. Aimed at helping to solve some of the evolving threats facing front line troops, this competition additionally created openings into the UK defence market for new suppliers and investors. The finale in August 2008 saw teams battle in tough conditions at the Army's Urban Warfare Training Facility at Porton Down, before the winning team “Stellar” was selected. Stellar blended civil and defence technologies to produce a fully autonomous multi-vehicle system. With a high level and medium level unmanned aircraft, an unmanned ground vehicle, and a control station fusing data from visual, thermal and radar systems, Stellar is a great example of what can be achieved in robotics.
In April 2009, the DoD reaffirmed its commitment to invest in autonomous robots by updating its Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, an official document that projects the evolution and transition of unmanned system technology over the next 25 years. This document forecasts the future of military robot capabilities, incorporating a vision and strategy for developing unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned maritime systems (UMSs) up to the year 2034.
Robotic search and inspection missions have also taken to the skies and seas with robots like Boston Engineering’s GhostSwimmer: a UMS that autonomously navigates underwater, gathers surveillance and detects potential hazards under the disguise of a tuna fish.
Robots will also enhance search and rescue missions by delivering aid and supplies where human intervention cannot reach. MESA Robotics’s Element robot, for instance, is a treaded UGV designed to navigate through rugged terrain and operate in extreme weather conditions with payload and towing capacities exceeding three times its weight.
Robotics in military applications
In the last decade, advancements in military robots have played an increasingly vital role in maintaining a competitive edge in defence.
Not only are they immune to fatigue, sleep deprivation, lack of visibility and other performance hindering conditions; robots are also performing tasks that are too dull, dirty or dangerous to warrant the risk of human life. However, with names like Predator and Reaper, it’s no surprise that the ethics behind the rapid advancement of military robots come into question. Autonomous unmanned systems equipped with machine guns, rocket launchers or other lethal weapons present the challenge of identifying responsible parties in the event of a malfunction. In P.W. Singer’s book, Wired for War, he raises an additional concern that as we find ways to remove the soldier from the battlefield, our willingness to use force becomes alarmingly greater.
To give an idea of scale, the US Department of Defense (DoD) plans to spend more than $8bn USD in unmanned systems research, development, test and evaluation by 2014. While the DoD expects to continue creating various levels of autonomy for unmanned systems in battle-space awareness and force application tasks, these robots will likely not become fully automated until legal rules of engagement and safety concerns have been thoroughly examined and resolved.
Rather, some alternative flavours of military robots, particularly those that aid in protection and logistics, are the unmanned systems the DoD defines as being ideally suited for autonomous tasks and will exhibit the greatest leaps of innovation in the near future.
Cutting edge medical applications
In the medical industry, robotic systems have become increasingly accepted by doctors, surgeons and, more importantly, patients, especially when they are used as an assistive technology. Robotics has already been used in applications as diverse as cancer therapy, attacking brain tumours, robot-assisted laparoscopy and stroke rehabilitation. For example, a group of researchers at the University of Leeds and Leeds Primary Care National Health Service Trust developed a robotic system for intelligent pneumatic arm movement (iPAM), to help with stroke patient rehabilitation. The end goal of the system is to reduce the cost of physiotherapy at rehabilitation facilities, which places a large burden on the UK NHS. iPAM is a dual-robot system designed to provide repeated therapeutic exercise to people who are deficient in upper limb movement as a result of stroke. iPAM consists of two pneumatically powered robots, each of which is attached to the upper limb in a similar manner to the way a therapist holds an arm when facilitating movements. The team designed and prototyped a novel realtime control scheme, modelled around the degrees of freedom of the human joints, using the LabVIEW Real-Time Module and NI hardware. iPAM has now completed two small-scale clinical studies, assisting more than 13,000 active-reaching movements during more than 300 hours of use. Common challenges of robotics applications.
The challenge that is common to all of the industries discussed is standardisation. A definitive set of application programming standards has been just beyond reach; repeatedly forced to build applications from scratch, roboticists must often reinvent the wheel with each new robot they build. A typical development cycle for a robotics system, such as an autonomous vehicle, requires a company to specify the system’s complete functionality before contracting with a platform vendor. This approach, utilised by many vendors, also prohibits end users from customising a solution after commissioning, if they discover that they require additional functionality.
Alternatively, when designing and prototyping in-house, the domain expert has a limited set of appropriate tools available to them, often using multiple software development tools and custom-designed printed circuit boards or other nonideal hardware platforms. These additional challenges increase development time and reduce the chance of success.
In addition to the challenges in standardisation, technological advancements now provide an exciting yet daunting landscape for unmanned and robotic system developers. Disruptive technologies, such as multicore processing and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), give developers access to computer processing that is smaller, faster and cheaper. Roboticists can also choose from the expanding variety of commercial off-the-shelf sensors – from inexpensive infrared microelectromechanical system (MEMS) sensors to highly complex laser rangefinders, or LIDARs, that produce intricate 3D models of a surrounding environment.
Graphical system design
Developers looking for a strategic advantage must use high-level, open, flexible and productive design tools when possible. Robotics design platforms, like NI LabVIEW Robotics, can provide engineers with rapid prototyping functionality such as support for multicore, real-time embedded and FPGA targets. In addition, LabVIEW facilitates seamless integration with hundreds of commercial sensors, actuators and instrument drivers along with support for hybrid programming solutions, such as integrating graphical software with ANSI C-based languages or importing m scripts to run on real-time operating systems.
Dr. David Barrett, who has over 25 years experience in the robotics industry and is currently director of the Senior Capstone Program in Engineering at Franklin W. Olin College, stated: “I have spent 15 years looking for a good robotics software development environment, I have evaluated everything on the market and LabVIEW is clearly, hands-down the best”.
In the coming years, experimentation will be key. Robot developers who can quickly and effectively prototype next generation systems will be the first to see their robots deployed on real applications. Combining COTS technologies with open, intuitive robot design platforms will be crucial in shortening time to market.
TRISTAN JONES is Technical Marketing Leader, National Instruments UK and Ireland
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