ROS Merchandise

Here are some fashionable t-shirts for the stylish roboticist.

ROS Diamondback T-Shirt

ROS Electric Emys T-Shirt

Now available on DVD

If you have been wondering where we have been, January has been product development month at I Heart Engineering. We are pleased to announce that ROS (Robot Operating System) is now available for pre-order on DVD. We are currently planning to start shipping on February 7th.

This DVD has a few great features that make it a convenient way to get started with ROS. It can be used as a LiveDVD so you can boot from it and try out things like rviz and Gazebo without having to format your hard drive. Once you are ready, the DVD installer will take care of the basic configuration to help you get started quickly with Ubuntu 10.04 and ROS Electric Emys.

$10 of every purchase will be set aside to help fund the creation of a ROS Foundation. In the event that things don't work out and a ROS Foundation can not be established in the next three years the funds will be donated to the EFF.

The 64-bit version is recommend but a 32-bit version is also available in the store.

Reinventing higher education

Sebastian Thrun gives a talk about the recent online AI course which he and Peter Norvig delivered at the end of last year.  This was apparently quite successful, and now he plans to continue the same kind of education system with a new venture called Udacity, starting with two new courses on building a search engine and programming a self-driving car.

As Thrun points out, the existing university system hasn't seen much innovation over the past 1000 years, and the internet allows new forms of interaction between teacher and student in which education can be delivered at scale whilst still feeling like one-on-one tuition.  Counter-intuitively the students paying $30,000 at Stanford preferred the online lectures to ones delivered conventionally in person.

There definitely seems to be a need for changes in how higher education is delivered, since the existing way of doing things is becoming prohibitively expensive and obviously suffering from scaling issues (hence the "weeder" effect).

Beyond Behaviorism

Reinforcement learning has been used extensively in robotics for many years, ranging from the simple types of obstacle avoidance seen in the seven dwarfs all the way up to the elaborate brain based Darwin automata capable of more sophisticated associative learning  This is predicated upon a psychological school of thought known as behaviorism, which was extremely popular for most of the 20th century but which has fallen out of favor in recent decades.

In the realm of learning robotics there don't seem to have been many attempts thus far to go beyond the limited bounds of behaviorism.  Clearly in animals classical conditioning does play an important role, but it's by no means the whole story.  For example, young children don't learn language by being explicitly rewarded or punished every time some new concept is acquired.  Much of learning seems to be self-organised, where the creature has a spontaneous ability to classify and is engaging in a kind of synchronization with its environment where the resulting conceptual framework converges towards stable forms, like eddies in the flow of causality.

Is human language Turing complete?

Even reinforcement learning, when combined with self-organization aren't sufficient to fully explain complex behaviors described as "intelligent".  To be capable of a wide range of adaptation the system needs to be Turing complete in a manner which supports the generation of a population of virtual machines capable of implementing arbitrary transformations or behaviors.

Turing machines can of course be implemented in many different kinds of ways, and there are many possible systems which are computationally equivalent to them.  As noted by people like Chomsky, human language seems to exhibit qualities similar to Turing completeness, such as the ability to generate recursive structures.  If human language is a Turing complete system, as I suspect that it is, then this may explain why it is such a powerful tool for regimenting thought processes, and has class 4 type behavior.  Interactions between multiple such systems, both within a single mind and between multiple minds could be the way in which the problems of classical incompleteness are overcome, since at the interfaces between machines undefined behavior can occur and the systems themselves may comprise heterogeneous but symbiotic formalisms which like the bimetallic strip of a mechanical clock work against each other in a complementary way.

The language augmented nature of human thought is probably also the reason why reinforcement learning can have more extensive consequences than you might see in other creatures, up to and including the complete reorganization of a person's world view based upon one or a small number of learning instances.  So instead of just reinforcing some single isolated categorization the reinforcing event becomes the input to a Turing machine which has consequences that are not always easy to foresee (without running the program) and may spawn new virtual machines or erase existing ones.

Dimensions of Affect

Another issue with reinforcement learning as typically practiced in robotics is that learning itself tends to be unidimensional.  The learning rate may vary, but there are not usually more than one learning parameter.  Hence it's difficult to simulate fading affect memory biases, where memories associated with positive or negative consequences are differentially weighted and can have multidimensional results.  A possible research programme would be to apply the biologically based affect theory of Silvian Tomkins to robotics and try to replicate learning scenarios which have similar outcomes to those seen in people.

A Musical Seasons Greetings from Freiburg

Seasons Greetings from Freiburg's Humanoid Robots Lab!

ROS Documentation Contest: ROSOSC

Our plan to trade t-shirts for documentation continues to pay off, with Michael Carroll sending in his documentation for his new ROS to Open Sound Control Bridge stack. We suggest watching the videos below for how this can be used for teleoperation and remote diagnostics from the convenience of your iDevice or Android device using TouchOSC.







Tutorials can be found here and if anyone is looking for electrical or software
engineers with ROS experience Michael is available for employment.

Turning robots into products

Many good points about the commercial prospects for robotics are made in a recent episode of the robots podcast.  I think it is true that we're at a turning point where mobile robotics is becoming much more practical than it was in the past, and where a hunt for new kinds of applications can commence.

It's not that sensor technologies comparable to the Kinect sensor didn't exist before, since time-of-flight sensors have been around for at least five years and scanning laser rangefinders have been around for longer, but that the current generation of depth sensing technology has a far more favourable price/performance such that applications other than traditional high cost industrial automation ones can be considered.

One way to address the unfocused research problem would be to have some percentage of research activities biased towards application areas.  However, the issue remains that what constitutes good application areas for mobile robotics at this point remains largely undefined.  What's going to happen with robotics will I think be similar to what happened with computers.  In the early days of home computers people didn't really know what they would be used for.  At first they didn't do much more than run simple kinds of games, then they were used for spreadsheets, accountancy and wordprocessing.  In the early 1990s there was a vague idea that computers would be used for "multi media" education, interactive TV or "virtual reality", then in the late 1990s with the rise of the internet the computer became a machine for communicating and doing shopping.

Even in the late 1990s there were still people who asked the question "why would I want a computer in my home?" or "why would I ever want or need to look at the internet?".  People say similar things today about robotics.

So whenever new technology arrives within a consumer price range there is always a long, messy and meandering process of discovery which unfolds and which is not easy to foresee in the research lab.  This means that it's not necessarily a simple task to pick applications towards which research may be biased without being able to foresee the future, and what looks like the hot application of today (elder care or hospital work perhaps) may not be quite so hot by the time something actually gets to the stage of being built and sold.