9- the swarm bots are coming; social robots
A: ANT ALGORITHMS GET DOWN TO BUSINESS
Ants are simple creatures, yet they can perform complicated tasks. They create highways leading to food, organize the distribution of larvae in the anthill. form cemeteries by clustering dead ants, build living bridges to cross gaps in their way, and assign and shift tasks as needed without any centralized control. Thus. ants provide an excellent illustration of how simple devices can achieve complex results.
Boil down ant behavior and what do you get? A new set of business tools known as ant algorithms: basic behaviors that can be programmed into a large number of independent software agents to solve human problems.
Consider the way ants forage. When an ant comes across food, it returns to the nest, leaving a scent trail. Other ants follow the trail, find the goods, and carry them back to the nest, reinforcing the path with their own scent, which attracts still more ants. Shorter routes get more traffic, so the scent becomes stronger along these, while it dies away on longer, lesser-used ones. Using this method, ants follow the shortest paths between their nest and nearby food sources.
This route-finding capability is remarkably handy. Colonies of simulated ants laying down digital scent trails can find the best way to send delivery trucks through city streets or data packets through communication networks. More generally, ant algorithms can be used to find minimum-cost solutions to a variety of logistical problems in distribution and scheduling. Unilever uses them to allocate storage tanks, chemical mixers, and packaging facilities. Southwest Airlines uses them to optimize its cargo operations. Numerous consulting houses, such as the Swiss firm AntOptima, have embraced them as an indispensable tool.
But logistics are just the beginning. Ant algorithms are also being used to control a class of robots called swarm bots. Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants. For example, if an s-bot encounters an object too heavy or bulky to carry on its own, other s-bots will grasp either the object or other s-bots until they get it under control. Two or more can link up to cross a gap that exceeds a single s-bot's stride. With this ability to temporarily mass together or spread out, a swarm bot's form depends on its surroundings and the job it's doing. Such devices might prove helpful in activities like search-and-rescue and planetary exploration.
The ability to swarm, adapt. and optimize—all the skills implied by ant behavior—makes ant algorithms a crucial technology for the information age, especially as everyday objects become ever smarter. The rules that insects live by turn out to be perfectly suited to the high-tech anthill.
B: A ROBOT DESIGNER WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO SOME OF HIS FRIENDS
Science fiction stories have long imagined a world populated with robots. In The Jetsons, a family-oriented cartoon from television's early days. Rosie the robot was a helpful, middle-aged servant. The Jetson family loved her so much that they could never bring themselves to replace her with a newer model. In more dystopian stories, robots are heartless machines of chilling efficiency. In the film Minority Report (2002), spider-like robots swarm an apartment building systematically looking for a fugitive wanted by the police. A mother calmly reassures her terrified child that the robots are not looking for her. The scene, both touching and frightening, makes us wonder if robots will be our enemies or our friends.
Dr. David Hanson, a robot designer, thinks robots can be our friends, maybe even our best friends, but not if they look and act like spiders. To make robots more acceptable to humans, he is working on a long-term project to develop affordable "robots with character." He wants robots that empathize with you—that is, robots that understand you and build a relationship. To do this, robots must be able to see your face, differentiate you from others, and understand your moods. Furthermore, these sociable robots must be able to make appropriate facial expressions. They must look similar to humans.
Several of Hanson's robots are incredibly tifelike. His Albert Humo robot consists of a head, which he developed, and a walking robot body made at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The head looks just like the famous physicist Albert Einstein and has amazingly realistic facial expressions. But more importantly, it makes these expressions in response to how people around it behave. In a demonstration at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) Conference in Long Beach, California in 2009, Hanson's robot smiled and frowned in response to Hanson's facial expressions.
Getting robots to smite at a smile took some doing. Says Hanson, "I developed a series of technologies that allowed robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved." Human facial expressions are powered by several dozen muscles. To mimic the action of these muscles, Hanson's robot faces contain 28 tiny motors covered by a spongy material he developed, called Frubber. When attached to the motors. Frubber moves and wrinkles just like human skin.
The robots also need to recognize facial expressions quickly. At the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California at San Diego, researchers are developing technology that can detect and follow human faces. Working with that group. Hanson developed the Character Engine, software that allows the machine to recognize where people are looking, track head positions, and mimic or learn facial expressions.
And of course the robots must be able to speak and give relevant responses. Sometimes Hanson's robots give answers that seem memorized. The question "Do you think?" triggers a playful answer that reminds us that much of what humans say is predictable and does not require much thinking. Obviously, that is the programmer teasing us. But as the robot learns more about us, it uses that knowledge and information from the Internet to come up with new things to say.
By combining programming genius with movie- inspired animatronics, Hanson has launched an ambitious effort to make robots seem like us. Even more extreme is Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's work at Osaka University in Japan. His animatronic "Geminoid" robots are so lifelike that many people find them "creepy." Others favor a less lifelike approach. At the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are making robots with cute, childlike faces and humanlike movements, but the machines are obviously robots. Hanson has favored this approach in designing Zeno, a smaller, doll-like robot suitable as a playmate for children.
Are friendly robots dangerous? Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks so. In her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), she warns that robots may disappoint us and leave us lonelier if they take our attention away from human friends. Turkle's concerns may seem overstated. The same complaint, after all, could be made about books or television. But before dismissing her, are you sure you will be able to resist those big adoring robot eyes hanging on every word you say? In the end, we may be better served by scary spiders than a lovable Rosie.
