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www.metroworldnews.com Xxxday, Month xx, 2013
How robots are moving in to our homes – for good
Automatons that will come to stay at our house
FURO-i
Pepper
It’s an emotional interaction robot created by the South Korean company Future Robot. The Furo-i Home has a tablet and shows an amiable android face and is augmented with a variety of sensors and capable of receiving direct commands from a user verbally. The user can instruct the robot to adjust room temperature or turn on and off lighting fixtures or appliances.
Pepper is a humanoid robot created by the Japanese company SoftBank that takes his surroundings into consideration to react pro-actively using proprietary algorithms. Pepper also comes equipped with capabilities and an interface that enables communication with people, including the latest voice recognition technology, superior joint technology to realize graceful gestures, and emotion recognition that analyzes expressions and voice tones.
FURo-S smart service robot from Future Robot is displayed at the 2015 International CES / GETTY IMAGES
Robotics. 2015 is quickly shaping up to be the year of the personal robot, with at least domesticallyfocused automaton prototypes set for release. For decades and inspired by Hollywood movies, humans have wanted a robot to our service, but we almost always have been disappointed with the progress of robotics. However, in recent weeks a number of automatons have been unveiled created to help humans in some housework, while experts foresee significant growth in the creation and sale of so-called ‘domestic robots’. Specialists agree that the robot industry has recently passed an important milestone, what is called an “inflection point”, enabling to comply with the consumer expectations. “Now, robots are in position to easily overcome the zone of disappointment. Consumer expectations can begin to measure up to what consumers have seen for years in Hollywoodinspired robots,” Thomas Green, Editor-in-Chief of Robotics Business Review told Metro. Last year the robot industry proved to be very versatile. “Industrial robotics was a USD$29 billion dollar business in 2014 (according to the International Federation of Robotics); sales of service
robots were USD$3.5 billion; and personal/home robot sales were $1.8 billion. All are forecast to grow by 14 percent annually through 2020,” revealed Green. The developers of automatons see huge windows of opportunity for their machines to be a part of households and help humans in their daily tasks, especially for the elderly or disabled persons. “First of all, these robots are needed for people with disabilities and the elderly, who needs our care and supervision,” said Alexandra Barsukova, Business, Development Director of Branto, a robot with which the user can monitor and manage your home remotely. “Many ways robots can help as shopping assistants, aid in carrying items for mothers with small children who have a lot of their children’s stuff to carry, help carrying items for people who live in cities and have to walk far to their apartments,” added Wendy Roberts, CEO Five Elements Robotics, the company behind the friendly robot assistant called “Budgee”. Another aspect in which developers work – and is still in experimental phase – is artificial intelligence for personal robots, as in the case of three students from the University of Maryland and one of NICTA (Australia) who are working in creating a robot that can learn to cook from watching YouTube tutorials. Yi Li, one of the participants of this project, believes that robots with artificial intelligence could be part of the lives of humans at some
point. “In general, robots have to have intelligence, reasoning capabilities, and the ability to reason on top of things—unexpected events. In other words, a robot that is autonomous and capable to reason can be part of the households,” he told Metro. Artificial intelligence is precisely the issue that most worries critics of automatons. Last December, Professor Stephen Hawking warned in an interview with the BBC that the humanity faces an uncertain future as technology learns to think for itself and adapt to its environment. In response to these fears, developers said that they work in artificial intelligence, but they explain that this tech-
nology is not fulfilled yet and it will take more time. Despite the anxieties around the presence of robots in homes, what is certain is that 2015 is quickly shaping up to be the year of the personal robot, since there are already two personal robots for sale (Papper of Softbank and FURO-i, from Korea’s Future Robot) and two more will be ready later this year (Jimmy of Intel and Jibo). Besides, “for 2015, consumers are more than ready for personal robots and have the money to spend,” added Green.
DANIEL CASILLAS
Budgee Budgee is a friendly synthetic assistant created by Five Elements Robotics that carries your stuff and it can communicate with you. Budgee is literally a basket on wheels that uses sensors to follow you wherever you go and prevent itself from running into walls or toppling off edges. Budgee could improve the lives of people who have disabilities, injuries or just too many children to leave enough arms for grocery bags.
Branto Ukrainian startup Branto developed a hub that has a built-in 360-degree camera and speaker for security and telepresence, in addition to being able to operate gadgets over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and infrared. Although this robot does not have a humanoid appearance, it’s very useful in controlling your home remotely with the help of a smartphone.
MWN
Q&A
“We’re working to getting robots to make a meal” YI LI
NICTA, Australia, Co-author of the report “Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by ‘Watching’ Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web”
How can a robot learn from watching YouTube videos? We use “deep learning” techniques. We learn to recognize different grasp types, objects, and tools by learning the image information that is most relevant for the recognition. By finding
the objects and the grasp type, and the times when they change in the video, we can segment and parse the video into a set of primitive actions that the robot can then execute. How could your cyborg help humans at home? Most of us have at some point watched a video in order to learn how to do something. While this goal may be too elusive, we believe our system raises hope towards a fully intelligent robot for manipulation tasks that can automatically enrich its own knowledge resource. What inspired you to create this robot? Several research groups
have looked at the problem of teaching robots actions, and most have concentrated on trying to imitate or copy the actual movement. In contrast, we model them by the goals that are involved in order to accommodate the different ways manipulation actions can be performed. Our research shows that a robot can learn human actions by watching videos of humans performing those actions – in this case, learning to cook by watching cooking shows on YouTube. Could we realistically see a robot of this kind operating inside our homes sometime in the future? We definitely believe this is the case, and we are
working on it. Our robot has some capabilities -- it can pour water, it can stir things. We’re working towards getting robots to make a meal, but we’re not there yet. What other windows of opportunity have robots like this to be part of households in the future? In our experiments we used YouTube videos from cooking shows, and the result is that the robot “learns how to cook”. However, the approach can be generalized, and the same ideas can be used for learning other types of actions and manipulations, such as hammering or screwing, assembling, and so on.