Robotics (I)

choi

The issue of Economist, Mar 29, 2014 contains a special report “Robots.”  Only the introduction is fascinating, which is introduced in this posting. As for the first article in the Special Report (see next posting), there is no need to read the rest, other than quotations.

Immigrants From the Future. Robots offer a unique insight into what people want from technology. That makes their progress peculiarly fascinating, says Oliver Morton
www.economist.com/news/special-r ... hnology-makes-their
(“DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) [held] a first-of-its-kind event [ ] at a speedway track near Miami in December 2013 [where SCHAFT was the only robot that succeeded in scaling ‘a nine-step aluminium ladder.’] * * * DARPA, the Pentagon research agency which runs the DRC, is rewarding the best teams at the event with up to $1m so that they can improve their robots and compete again in a year’s time at a more demanding second event. All told the project is costing it some $80m”)

Note:
(1)
(a) Homestead-Miami Speedway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead-Miami_Speedway
(motor racing track located in Homestead [35 miles (56 km) southwest of Miami], Florida)
(b) speedway (n; First Known Use 1894): "a racecourse for automobiles or motorcycles"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedway

(2) SCHAFT, DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), undated
www.theroboticschallenge.org/node/58
(a) For Takashi KATO, see
加藤崇とは？  株式会社加藤崇事務所, undated
www.takashikato-office.com/profile.html
(“1978年東京都武蔵野市生まれ。早稲田大学理工学部 応用物理学科卒業。オーストラリア国立大学 経営学修士（MBA）* * * 2011年株式会社加藤崇事務所を設立。世界最高の安定歩行・制御技術で世界を変えるヒト型ロボットベンチャー株式会社SCHAFT共同創業者兼取締役CFO就任

translation: “Who is Takashi KATO?  Born in Tokyo in 1978 [age 46]; Bachelor’s in applied physics from Waseda University; MBA from Australian National University [ANU; public; established 1946; in Canberra] * * * In 2011, formed Takashi KATO office, [in May 2012, according to Bloomberg] co-founded world-changing robot venture SCHAFT and assumed the post of CFO.”
(b)  Mariko Yasu and Shigeru Sato, Founder of Robot Startup Bought by Google Eyes Hidden Japan Gems. Bloomberg, Jan , 2014
www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-0 ... den-japan-gems.html
(Google Inc bought Schaft Inc in November 2013)

Quote:

“Kato, 35, struggled to get funding for Schaft even though it had some of the best humanoid robot technology in the world, which persuaded him there are other similar opportunities in Japan. He was turned down by ten Japanese investment firms and ultimately got funding from the US government.

“Schaft was founded in May 2012 with two engineers at Tokyo University, who sought Kato’s help to produce disaster response robots after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to Kato.

(c) Why named Schaft?  I search the Web high and low but find nothing.
(d) The German surname Schaft means "a maker of wooden shafts for tools or weapons, from Middle High German, Middle Low German schaft."


(3) “This fascination has produced robots of many shapes and sizes. Academics have tried their hand at mimicking nature, basing robots on everything from termites to pterodactyls. For robots designed to make money, form has followed function, leading to the multi-jointed, mostly cast-iron arms of the world’s 1.2m-1.5m manufacturing robots; the spindlier limbs of robots designed for surgery; the deep-pan pizza-dish form of service robots that vacuum the floors of the house-proud and gadget-friendly. But at the DRC, as in the public imagination, the robots are mostly humanoid.”
(a) pterodactylus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterodactylus
(from the Greek pterodaktulos, meaning "winged finger” and composed of pteron "wing" + daktylos "finger": refers to the way in which the wing is supported by one large finger)
(b) spindly
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spindly
(c) “the deep-pan pizza-dish form of service robots that vacuum the floors”
(i) The clause alludes to Roomba, trademark of a robot.
(ii) Chicago-style pizza
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_pizza
(deep-dish pizza [that] has a crust up to three inches tall at the edge)

(4) “RoboSimian, competing on behalf of JPL, the laboratory that runs most of NASA’s planetary missions[,] * * * moves more like a body-popping spider. * * * Hubo, a South Korean robot being used by two of the teams, and Atlas, the machine chosen by seven American teams, go the whole arms-legs-head-and-shoulders humanoid hog.”
(a) Most robots mentioned in this article can be found in the companion graphic.
(b) Jet Propulsion Laboratory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Propulsion_Laboratory
(located in La Cañada Flintridge [a city on the northwestern border of City of Pasadena, both of Los Angeles County], California, United States; managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the NASA; primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft)
(c)
(i) body-popping (n): "A kind of street dancing characterized by jerky robotic movements of the joints"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/body-popping
(ii) popping
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popping
(based on the technique of quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to cause a jerk in the dancer's body)
(d) “Hubo, a South Korean robot being used by two of the teams”

In the companion graphic, the legend for Hubo reads: “(KAIST) 130cm   Developed by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology as a platform for various projects”
(i) “the name Hubo is short form for nothing, it is just Hubo” Wikipedia
(ii) KAIST
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAIST
(formerly also known as Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology;  a public research university located in Daejeon 大田 廣域市; Established 1971)
(iii) “a platform” here means it is a hardware where two software developers tries their codes in this platform. See the next posting.
(e) “go the whole hog” is a phrase.


(5) “Like the factory-made labourers to which the word was first applied in Karel Capek’s play, ‘RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots,’  robots became both the products of industrial technology and a way of talking about that technology’s effects * * * Capek’s factory-born robots, embodying anxieties about industrial progress, rose up to wipe out the human race”
(a) For “factory-made labourers.” see (d) for explanation.
(b) Karel Čapek
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Čapek
(1890-1938; a Czech writer; [his] play RUR that introduced the word robot)
(c) RUR
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
(The [1920] play begins in a factory [called RUR] that makes artificial people, called roboti (robots), out of synthetic organic matter
(d) Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word 'Robot.' NPR, Apr 22, 2011
www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135634400 ... n-of-the-word-robot
(interviewing Howard Markel, professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor)

(6) “Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born American * * * Before electronic computers existed, Asimov saw that robots would be programmed, and thus constrained by their programming. * * * Asimov’s robots were * * * those of a child of hard-working and hard-pressed Russian parents in 1930s Brooklyn. Always content to do what they are told; always consigned to work on the ‘dull, dirty, dangerous’ jobs; often uneasily aware that they are superior in some ways to their masters; endlessly at risk of pogrom because of their masters’ resentment and fear of them: his robot stories, and those of his successors, were immigrant stories. Except that the robots are immigrants not from abroad but from the future.”
(a) Isaac Asimov
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
(born  Isaak Yudovich Ozimov; c 1920-1992; born in Russia to a family of Jewish millers; The family name derives from a word for winter crops [Russian: Ozimye] in which his great-grandfather dealt; His family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old; grew up in Brooklyn; His parents owned a succession of candy stores, and everyone in the family was expected to work in them; a professor of biochemistry at Boston University)
(b) The second half of the quotation, from “those of a child” onward, alludes to Mr Asimov himself.

(7) “Robot researchers are keenly aware of the fictional foundations of their work. Gill Pratt, an academic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) currently on secondment to DARPA, where he runs the DRC programme, immediately brings up Asimov when asked why he got interested in robots. Any visit to a Japanese robot laboratory soon leads to a discussion about Astro Boy, the helpful android who in the 1960s starred in Japan’s first popular animated television show, to help explain the country’s rampant robophilia. And robots that offer domestic services are routinely compared to Rosie, the robot maid in “The Jetsons”, an American television show of the same vintage.”
(a) secondment (n): "British  The temporary transfer of an official or worker to another position or employment"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/secondment
(b) Astro Boy  鉄腕アトム
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_Boy
(a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu TEZUKA 手塚 治虫 [born 手塚 治 with the same pronunciation] from 1952 to 1968)

* osamu 治む 【おさむ】 (v): "to govern"
(c) list of The Jetsons characters
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Jetsons_characters
(section 2.2 Rosie)

(8) For PR2 (where PR stands for personal robot), see a photo in Willow Garage
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage
(located in Menlo Park, California)

(9) “Willow Garage, a robotics company founded in 2006 by Scott Hassan, one of the first people to work at Google, spent millions of dollars developing PR2, a two-armed ‘personal robot’ * * * Still, it is, Mr Hassan says, ‘dumber than a doornail.’  In ‘A Christmas Carol,’ the first thing Charles Dickens tells the reader is that Jacob Marley is ‘dead as a doornail’: this fact ‘must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am to relate.’ Something similar applies to the doornail dumbness of robots. To see what may come of them, however wonderful, you have distinctly to understand how very little thought they are currently capable of. They are roughly as intelligent as a small bug, says Mr Pratt. * * * In Masayuki Inaba’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo, where some of the SCHAFT team got their start, a PR2 programmed by gifted students tried to serve your correspondent a can of coffee from a fridge. It opened the fridge door and got the coffee out, but then tried to serve the can to the fridge instead.”
(a) Jacob Marley
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Marley
(b) A doornail is just a nail on the door.
(c) Masayuki INABA  稲葉 雅幸 (a professor in Univ of Tokyo)

(10) “But robots could move farther into the social world than people currently expect, in part because that world may prove oddly welcoming. People will ascribe human feelings to, and invest their own feelings in, things which have only the most passing claim to them—cats, toys, comfort blankets. And, pace Asimov, the relationship need not always be one of fear and distrust.”
(a) For comfort blankets, see comfort object
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_object
(Among toddlers, comfort objects may take the form of a blanket, a stuffed animal, or a favorite toy)
(b) pace (preposition): “contrary to the opinion of —usually used as an expression of deference to someone's contrary opinion —usually ital[iac]”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pace