BOOK EXTRACT
n March 2011, an earthquake in Tokyo triggered a tsunami in the Pacific, flinging a wave the size of an apartment complex at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In the ensuring chaos, first the emergency power supply went haywire, then the pumps failed to pump, finally the cooling systems failed to cool. These three meltdowns were followed by a series of mid-air hydrogen explosions and a catastrophic mess. A month later, on a scale designed by the International Atomic Energy Agency to measure radiation levels after an accident, sensors were off the charts. Getting clean-up crews on site quickly was fundamental to containment, but Fukushima was too hot for humans. Yet Japan has long been one of the world leaders in robotics, so they sent in droids. And the droids failed miserably. The rough terrain acted like a minefield, the radiation fried their circuits. Within a few months, Fukushima was a robot graveyard. The disaster hit Honda especially hard. Since the start of the crisis, they’d been fielding phone calls and emails from thousands of people begging them to send in ASIMO, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot. Looking a lot like a teenager dressed up as a 1950s era astronaut (think big bubble white spacesuit), ASIMO was an international celebrity. Yet there’s quite a distance between strutting across a carpet and handling
the complex environment of a nuclear disaster. ASIMO, like the other robots sent into Fukushima, turned out to be too unreliable for disaster mitigation, creating a public relations nightmare for Honda and an uproar in the robotics community. In response to the roar, a few years later, DARPA launched their Robotics Challenge, a $3.5 million purse for a humanoid robot capable of “executing complex tasks in a dangerous, degraded, human engineered environment.” This last bit is key. Humanoid robots are critical because we live in a humanengineered world, one built to interface with our interface: two hands, two eyes, forward-facing bipedal posture. The results of the 2015 Challenge, viewable online, are a robot blooper reel. Robots fall down, robots fail to climb stairs, robots shoot sparks then short-circuit. But progress was swift. A year later, a video released online showed off Boston Dynamics’ robot Atlas, the second place winner from the 2015 DARPA Challenge, hiking through slick, snowy woods, stacking boxes in a warehouse, even regaining his balance after getting whacked with a hockey stick. A year after that, a different video showed Atlas navigating an obstacle course that included a backflip off a wooden crate and color commentary by a sports announcer: “A 360 spin onto the pallet, backflip gainer off . . .” Honda also got in on the action. By 2017, they’d created a prototype disaster-response bot that could climb ladders, shimmy sideways, and even get
Robots are now entering nearly every aspect of our lives. Today’s versions are AI-empowered, allowing them to learn on their own, operate solo and in swarms, walk on two legs, balance on two wheels, drive, swim, fly, and, as mentioned, backflip. Today, robots do jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. Tomorrow, they’ll show up anywhere accuracy and experience are key.
InBUSINESS | SPRING 2021
038 InBUSINESS Spring 2021_Book Extract_V1_Rev2.indd 39
39
16/04/2021 10:59