^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^ PA Project Progress Report #6 Sept. 30, '94 ^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^ Recent emergence of serious projects in the ProtoAndroid concept envelope, primarily from Japan, is great news. An August report to the Robot Group, recapping AAAI-94, decribes these spooky machines. The ProtoAndroid (Pa) will have kin. The siren chorus of new tools and hot research continues to offset Pa's pathetic funding and excessively cool specs. Grunt work and cleverness might suffice but we're short on both. ---o--- Fabrication...crawling towards a finish line in cybersand- James Perez finished metal work shortening the leg span (pelvis width) in August. The design change was triggered by confirmation that the cylinders in that area would not collide if the configuration were based yet closer to a gorilla skeleton. Sean French scrounged aluminum magnesium alloy sheeting for fabricating Pa's gangly arms. Due to CG placement and shortness, the legs are less weight critical and could be built in the chrome-moly steel of the core assemblies. Sean specializes in replicating midieval armour and is adapting those skills to modern materials and design practices. The result will a blend of styles- monocoque aerospace and shining armor. Sean and David Santos have been extending the ProtoAndroid mock-up ahead of final metal work. The Russian roboticists (Rover Ltd.) made an informal estimate of $500 each for 1/2 scale aluminum alloy 3 DOF machined joints for the ProtoAndroid's neck and wrists. This is about what our costs would be but their true areospace quality would be far beyond our backyard shop. The practical fear of distance contracting persist but slow progress may prevail. Quick fab summary (see reports #1 & #2 for full details): At 39 Degrees Of Freedom (DOFs-"joints") the machine is fully twice as kinematically complex as the next closest mobile robot we know of. Nevermind the apocalyptic programming crisis, mere fabrication is an ultrathon of mechanical poetry. The 15 largest DOFs are fully machined and assembled, the most powerful of which support cylinders rated at a ton of kick in a fraction of a second. With the big work out of the way we are about three quarters done with the complete structure. ---o--- New Resources...keep hope alive- During the last two years begging proved to be the primary means of outfitting the proposed creature. A request to maintain and extend a ProtoAndroid donor list has been made to the newly formed Robot Group Fundraising Committee. Pending donations include cylinders, valves, software, a notebook computer, cookies, portable periferals, etc. Consider signing over your life savings to advance the project. Various payment plans are available and we still have some of those donor coffee mugs. ---o--- CAD Work...the virtual android- Zoltan Mesaros, self styled "3D master of the universe", has mostly completed an animated 3D model of the basic 3DOF unit and reports it was a royal pain. Soon there will be a full 3D model of the entire robot, all 39 DOF, for simulation, PR, and entertainment purposes. Norm Annals had previously drafted the 2D dimensioned fabrication plans from which Zoltan is working. If anyone actually needs shop drawings for an android, holler up. The CAD model is rendered in 3D Studio and key frames are grabbed for simulation-animation reusing many FaceSpace components. ---o--- ProtoAndroid Software.....oxymoron or scandal?- Window shopping for brains- The Soar agent architecture is still being flirted with. The literatature is voluminous, the community is large, freeware development tools exist, and there are compelling proofs of concept in diverse domains, but then, who really knows? General machine intelligence is Philosophers Stone 2000. Of particular interest is work on multi agent and case-based reasoning versions of Soar, and the many robotic projects. Tim O'Leary and David have been extending the robot's multi-media personae shell. Compared with recent work at Sigraph and AAAI-94 our stuff has several unique features and is on a par with the handful of interesting projects in this field. The current version of the program was a hit at Berzerkwerks. Windows programmer Bill Bergman is to rewrite the prototype for performance. We don't need the speed yet, but will beg for it as we load the program down. We are extending the features to include networked multi-agents for "desktop theatre" as part of our cultural contract with the City of Austin. This is the subject of a forthcoming report. This summer Johnathan Abbey, David Santos, and Wan-Yik Lee held met at UT CS to discussed intelligent agent architectures for robot and simulated environments from a computer science standpoint. A cautious stategy of new technology adoption was defined. One avenue that emerged was to study the Soar architecture for intelligence, which has a large dedicated community of researchers. The idea is to use Soar as a meta-level control frill over a seething mass of proven technology. We have aquired the Soar code. Last week Wan-Yik and David checked out a thick stack of volumes from UT comprising almost all that can be known about Soar. Cyc would be a wonderul alternative, but there is uncertainty about its availibility and workability. At least Soar is available.... The project is continuing to pursue the adoption of something like National Instruments' LabView software for the general integration of sensors, computers and electromechanical components. It would be timely were to define an up to date microcontroller module integrated with Labview as a "Virtual Instrument". Our contact at NI, Liz Stice has had her baby and is back at work. ---o--- Distributed Development- PA's net server is intermittently up and its capabilities growing. The PA's e-mail address is protoandroid@faustex.com. The general news and discussion address is android-dev@faustex.com. The old 486 SX that hosted the first facial animat (FaceSpace 1.0) got a new life as a video server by adding a pretty good capture board. It digitizes 30 fps full screen VGA resolution at 16 bit color depth and can grab individual frames in 24 bit color at higher resolutions. Machine vision software is wanted to give the naescent 'droid some primitive sight. The simplest start would be a motion tracking program such as "video mouse" stuff John Witham and Karen Pittman have used. Many people write their own programs of this sort. Another option is processing video on a Unix box running the advanced library of machine vision shareware that Carlos Puchol worked with. The installation of ethernet among Pa's subprocessors was stalled by bargain network adapters with missing drivers. The immediate goal is to transfer video frames from the video server (slacker) to the mother machine (pandora) for use in bitmapped VR. Longer term, machine vison capabilities will be added. The net is up now but the critical applications run funky or not at all ---o--- PA INC. vs. The State of Texas- CyberSpace Lawyer Steve Ryan and Robo-Pscyhiatrist Joanne Pransky continue to express interest toward making the ProtoAndroid a legitimate digital citizen. Sean French's father, Dr. Peter French, is the foremost academic ehticist in the world (28 books and two computer games!). Dr. French has researched and written extensively on the virtual personhood of corporations with computer based decision systems and has expressed interest in Pa's incorporation. ---o--- City of Austin Contract- Promoting tourism and delivering disadvantaged outreach. Austin has the (dis?) honor of having funded an outright android for going on three years. Cumulative city funding from various sources is about 5K. This is not a sane engineering budget for even a dinky application. Nevertheless the ProtoAndroid has coughed up a ragged string of accomplishments. 5000+ hours have been sweated by various particpants. City of Austin monies amount to about a quarter of the ProtoAndroid's ongoing budget. As far as a connection with tourism goes, the first big break was the Discovery Channel/ Invention Show where Austin and the ProtoAndroid were mentioned in the same breath. The clip repeats endlessly around the globe. Brooks Coleman, whom Newsweek ambiguously equivalated to Edison and Wosniak, asserted that the ProtoAndroid was a stategic priority for the Robot Group. David Santos was allowed to babble along more theoretical lines. The most recent media jolt came with a visit by German avant-guarde movie director, Gustave Hamos, working on a project called MadameMachine. This is to be a feature on Euro-TV dealing with the sexualisation of machines. Combing the globe in search of content, Gustave's comment was that we seemed to be the only group actively building the brave new humanoids everyone else only talks about. Actually there are a handful of efforts out there but the compliment is accepted. Outreach to schools is a perennial activity with elements of the ProtoAndroid forming part of everchanging programming. In fact, over the years schoolchildren have made many android scketches and contributed many ideas which have strongly influenced Pa's concept. Ask to see them sometime. ---o--- The next android......the steroid ghost- Many readers will recall the Martial Arts Robot project which has been underway for over a year. Brooks Coleman has made great progress in perfecting air bellows actuators that are featherlight, lightning fast, and canvas tough. The prototype was featured at BerzerkWerks4 and proved harmless and reliable in direct contact with children. Chances are that this approach will be applied to the next generation android, which is envisioned as a regular belle dame sans mercie. Special thanks to Wan-Yik for editing the ProtoAndroid Specification and formatting it in LaTex. New photos and video of PortoAndroid work are available. ---o--- Setting the Record Straight- Upon hearing that the ProtoAndroid is pneumatic folks sometimes express the old fashioned opinion that airpower is somehow unsuited for robotics. Since this sort of persistent myth can have an impact on the perceived adequacy of the design concept, its necessary to repeat the rationale for air presented in an earlier report. First, pneumatics have a ten year successful record in the MIT/Utah hand which is still the most advanced and widely adopted hand manipulator research platform. While the MIT/Utah hand demonstates silky smoothness, Marc Raibert's famous hopping robots (CMU/MIT) demonstrate the acrobatic potential of air. Pneumatics has rapidly gained acceptence as the power technology of choice in medium scale industrial automation. It is usually lighter, cheaper, and more powerful than competing technologies. Air is less mess and fuss than hydraulics. One myth is that air is too "soft" for actuation. High pressure air is no more squishy than hard rubber. In fact, electricity itself is "squishy", but this quality is masked by gear trains which are heavy and fail under shock. In mobile robotics some compliance is helpful in preventing damage in collisions and falls. Austin is lucky new home of Austin Integrated Systems, a subsidiary of Bay Pneumatics of San Jose, top of the new breed of air powered automation technology companies. Their engineers can confirm the wonderful advantages of air power claimed here. Hughes, Moog, Rexroth, etc. are all forging ahead in state of the art pneumatic products. ---o--- If want to critique or work on some aspect of the poor creature please feel welcome to do so.
Thanks for flying PolyCosmos. Join us again.