Discipline is Hard

“Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconsistent creatures. we can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”(1)

These are not my words, of course. I was reading The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and I ran across this quote. The words are from Dr. Atul Gawande, and they started me thinking: thinking about robots and computers, security patrols, and the industrial revolutions. Perhaps I should explain.

The Industrial Revolutions

We tend to think of the Industrial Revolution as a single thing, but in reality in human history we have experienced three or four. There was the one we all learned about in school, when steam and petroleum based power were harnessed to dramatically change the process of manufacturing. This resulted in increased standards of living, greater availability of manufactured goods, the acceleration of populations moving from agricultural to urban dwellings, and all that stuff.  But, there have been other such revolutions. And the quote about discipline sparked a thought.

Perhaps the first revolution was not really industrial, although it set the stage for the rest. In this first revolution, we, as weak, clawless, thin-skinned people harnessed animal power.  We  stopped using people to cut furrows for wheat, and used oxen.  We stopped grinding corn in a human powered metate, and began to rely on animal powered grinding wheels.  The result was a significant increase in food production, the creation of food surpluses, and the beginning of leisure.  But the driver might have been discipline – or the lack of it.  Because it takes discipline to keep working in the hot sun, dragging a blade to cut a furrow, or to keep turning a wheel to grind grain into flour.  And we’re not good at discipline, so we improved our lives by shifting discipline onto an animal.

Several tens of thousands of years later, we did it again, shifting the discipline onto water power – the water wheel never said “I’m too tired to turn,” or “I’ll do it in the morning.”  Then we pushed it onto steam – and we had huge factories turning out products made from ore dug by steam, crushed by steam, smelted and then formed by steam. And no one had to have motivational meeting with the steam to encourage it to work an extra hour.  The assembly workers were a different matter, however. They still required discipline to put in the long, hard hours to produce the goods and services that society demanded.  And we are not good at discipline.

Robots and Computers

So we shifted the needed discipline onto (you knew I was going to get here eventually) robots and computers.  These tireless, disciplined machines began producing goods at an astounding rate – perhaps too quickly and too easily, but that is another blog. We were awash in stuff produced by machines – and we did it by shifting discipline onto the robots.

The robots could work all day and all night, but they were limited to physical actions.  The welding robot on the factory floor did not do the whole job of running a modern business. So, soon we had rooms full of people doing nothing but adding numbers, pushing paper, and compiling statistics.  And this, too, was grueling work that required long hours and, you got it, discipline. So in the most recent industrial revolution we harnessed computers to do this information processing task. Gone were the big rooms full of desks and adding machines, because we had shifted the discipline once again, this time onto the computers.

Security

So, what does this have to do with security officers? Well, a security officer has a job that requires almost everything that Dr. Gawande identified: ’Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even selflessness.‘ A good security officer must be trustworthy, she must be skilled, and she must be selfless to a degree. After all, part of the job it to put one’s self on the line to protect others.  But above all it requires discipline, and discipline is hard for us. Much of the infrastructure of a guard team is to support discipline.  The training builds habits, and as we all know habits can make being disciplined easier. Guard tours – the devices we use to track the progress of a patrol – are designed to instill the drive that gets us down to the end of that long empty warehouse on every patrol. Post orders establish day-in and day-out routines, especially those that require discipline.  When we know that every other officer on the team is completing these tasks, that helps us to muster the discipline to do the job right. But, discipline is hard, and that is why we like robots.

The security robot is one way to start the next revolution – once again improving lives by shifting discipline. This time onto the robot.  It doesn’t care how dusty the hallway is, it goes down to the end, and reports back, every time. It doesn’t care if ‘nothing ever happens in the basement’, it always does its patrol. It doesn’t care if it is rolling into a dangerous situation, if you tell it to go there, it goes.  And, in the process it keeps us safer, and that makes lives better, because the robot doesn’t need to muster discipline – for a robot discipline is easy.

Where is your robot?(tm) Ours are being built at Gamma Two Robotics, in Colorado, USA

‘Creating a world in which people live better lives assisted by affordable, reliable, helpful robots.’

(1) Gawande, A., The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right  (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 183.

The Mythical Robot

We just finished up an outreach event.  The Colorado Robotics Association sponsored Automate! Denver, and we brought our Gamma Two Vigilus(tm) robot to show off.  The event showcases the growing robotics industry in Colorado, with educational exhibits, new products, robot competitions, all that cool stuff.  One of the local high school FIRST teams provided food as a fund raiser, and a great time was had by all!

We got to talk about two of my favorite subjects, robots and the business of robotics, to a wide range of people from different backgrounds and with differing perspectives. And we got to hear stories. Stories of robot competitions won and lost, stories of situations where they could have really used a robot, and stories of the Mythical Robot.

The Mythical Robot shows up frequently. It is the robot that no-one has ever seen, but a friend of a friend told them, or there was this video, or web-site once that showed… And it is cool!  It does everything, it does everything really well, it does many things far better than a person could do.  In some ways it is the antithesis of the Killer Robot Overlord, but, in the end, just as mythical.

I think seeing our robots at work inspires people to tell us the stories. You see, unlike the more common tele-operated robots, our robots are autonomous.  They take instructions, move on their own, make choices about what actions to do next, and ask for help when they need it. They also talk, and listen to our commands.  This makes them seem a lot smarter than they really are, and that inspires people to remember stories they have heard about robots, they recall videos showing robots doing really cool stuff.  And, sometimes those stories and images get conflated into one single super-robot: The Mythical Robot.

There has been an amazing amount of progress made in robotics over the last decade or so.  There are robots that, under the right circumstances, can fold laundry, there are robots that  make sushi, there are robot cars driving on the streets in some cities. But the general purpose robot, the one robot that does it all, is still the Mythical Robot. And unfortunately, the ‘right circumstances’ are very, very rare. In many example videos it may take hours to set-up the right circumstances, and even then it may take several ‘takes’ to get the video. But, we see the final videos, and to most people it looks like the Mythical Robot is everywhere.

Of course, the media help the Mythical Robot, the demo videos make great visual equivalents of sound bites, and there is infinite fodder for movies.  If you haven’t seen this movie trailer for Prometheus, take a look at it now: David 8.  It truly sets the stage for the Mythical Robot.

The Mythical robot has many powerful impacts, some good, some less so.  On the positive side the Mythical Robot is what inspires us to build better robots. We look at these visions of the future and it both informs and drives our research and development. Almost every robotics researcher I have ever met in the last 20 years can point to one moment when their drive to be a roboticist started. One blinding flash, when they confronted a Mythical Robot and said “I want to build that!” The Mythical Robot also informs the development. It is far easier to imagine in words or images what the role of the robot would be, than it is to build it. So the Mythical Robot becomes the testing ground for how humans and robots will interact and work together, or against each other as in many robotic dystopias.

However, the Mythical Robot can have a chilling effect on the many people who are interested in supporting the development of robots. There are people at funding agencies that write grants to improve our knowledge and understanding, but they don’t fund it if they think it has already been done. There are people who invest in robotics companies to bring cutting edge technology to commercial products, but not if they think the technology is ‘old hat’ compared to the Mythical Robot.  And there are millions of consumers waiting to buy these commercial robots to improve their lives. But it is easy to get confused about the line that separates reality from myth, the huge chasm between a Roomba(tm) and a Rosie the Robot(tm). We all have in the back of our heads a gestalt impression of robots, whether we are scientists or kids in school, and we all have an image of the ‘state-of-the-art’, drawn from our everyday experiences.  For many people, the perceived state-of-the-art is driven more by the Mythical Robot than by the reality.

It becomes difficult to track exactly where we are on the development path.  It becomes hard to separate the myth from the reality. As new developments are made, we creep closer to the Mythical Robot, so it is a fuzzy line to trace, even for people working in the field.  Over a decade ago we heard about it at a technical conference on using robots to help fight terrorism, one participant described the robot charging across the subway platform to subdue a terrorist picked out from the rush hour crowd.  Just a month ago at an exhibition put on by the NDIA, on cutting edge ground robotics, we heard about this robot that somebody has in Europe that can do everything. Now, they have some really cool robots in Europe, but this one was the Mythical Robot.

The question is what can you do to enhance the inspirational aspect of the mythical robot, and warm up the chilling aspects? We need that drive and exploration that will lead to the Mythical Robot becoming reality, but to get there we have to accept that there is a lot of hard work that needs to be supported. I can tell you that our approach is simple: we celebrate the accomplishments by taking our robots to events like Automate! Denver and the upcoming Colorado TEDx FrontRange event – to give people an example of what is actually possible today.

And, when we are exhibiting our robots, robots that routinely do an important task, one that people don’t really want to do;  real robots doing that dull security patrol hour after hour, day after day, we know that there is another robot lurking in the collective unconscious. The Mythical Robot that does it all,  and we ask people:

Where is your robot? Ours are being built right here in Colorado, at Gamma Two Robotics.

[Note: All trademarks are the property of the respective trademark owners.]

Automate! Denver on Saturday April 14th

We’re getting our robots ready to participate in Automate! Denver
What is Automate! Denver?  Information

 

 

Where will my Roboticist come from?

A recent report by the International Federation of Robotics looks at jobs. The report titled “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment” suggests that more than one million robotics jobs will be created  world wide by 2016. Needless to say, these jobs will require the technical skills and training to be a roboticist.  Where will these million new workers come from?  And what will inspire the next generation of robot makers?

Tomorrow, Saturday April 7th, 2012 marks the beginning of the 3rd annual National Robotics Week. A week-long (well actually 9 days, but who is counting) national focus on Robotics, Robots, and education.  This year the participation has grown to over 135 events across the country. At Gamma Two, we will be kicking off the week with a pre-party open lab. Tonight we will open our doors and let all interested people come in and meet the robots. The robots will be serving snacks and doing demonstrations, while people get to experience first hand our vision of the future – a world where people live better lives assisted by affordable, reliable, helpful robots.

What does this have to do with future roboticists? We encourage education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) because the robotics engineers of tomorrow are the students of today.  We regularly have school groups, scout groups, and individual students stop by the lab for learning, demonstrations, and interviews.  We encourage them to become infected with the robotics bug, because we will need to hire them when they finish school. And let’s face it, robotics is a complex discipline.

Sure you need the math and science, the mechanical and electrical engineering, industrial design and project management; as well as (my favorite) the computer science. But a true roboticist requires more. Our robots are designed to work with people everyday. We need an understanding of sociology, psychology, and cognitive science.  Our robot brains are designed on living systems, so we need biology, and neuro-anatomy. And as our robots move into people’s homes, we need an understanding of architecture, design, and user experience modeling to make sure that the robot will work effectively for years to come. One of our first outreach actions was to the local arts community to bring in a “robo-esthetician” to design our robot’s skin and appearance. As the Cybernetic Brains become more complex we’ll need philosophers, ethicists, and will we need robo-psychologists as predicted by Isaac Asimov in his robot stories?

Where are your future roboticists going to come from?  You need to start ‘growing’ them today.  So check out the interactive map of events for National Robotics week, and take the family to a nearby event.

Where is your robot? Ours are being built right here in Colorado, at Gamma Two Robotics.

National Robotics Week

Check out local events for National Robotics Week – April 7th through the 15th

http://www.nationalroboticsweek.org/

A long strange trip

We just returned from a robotics exhibition in San Diego. That was not the long strange trip I had in mind however.  Okay, the robot (Vigilus-MCS) that we brought along had a long strange trip – including a short stop by the security team at the Hoover Dam, but I was thinking more about the trip that we began about 4 years ago, when we started on the current robot platform. The philosophy at Gamma Two has never been tightly aligned with the current trends in research. We are not big on large, all encompassing theoretical research. We focus on solving real-world problems. Sometimes that means we need to do cutting edge theoretic research to come up with the solutions.

The Vigilus Robot on the demonstration site during site set-up

We were driven by a question when we started this project: “Why don’t we have robots working along side us every day?”  Or, to put it more simply “Where’s my robot?” That led to several years of theoretic research, which culminated in two things. The second was our technical book “Robots, Reasoning, and Reification,” which summarizes the open problem that stood between us and functional robot co-workers. The book outlines a theoretic solution to the problem. I suppose that we could have stopped there.

But, like I said, we are out of step with the pure research community.  We knew that this was the case, since we have been active members of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS) community for over a decade. This conference is run by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), they have an interest in measuring the ‘intelligence’ of intelligent systems. For the last several years, Louise and I have been on the program committee for this conference. Every year we would be part of a group of researchers pushing the limits of what we know about making computer and robotic systems smart. We would see dozens of new and untested theories every year. But, we weren’t willing to propose a theoretic solution, unless we knew that it worked.

So, the first thing that came out of the years of research was a functioning robotic brain, one that enabled the robot to see the world in a way that is similar to the way living systems see the world, and reason about the world in a way that is similar to the way living systems reason about the world.  Of course the brain wasn’t complete, but we had a ‘proof of concept’ prototype that people could work with. It didn’t do much, but it did things in the right way. There’s a short video of the robot updating its model of the world, and keeping track of objects. This was done in November of 2008, and shows the first generation proof of concept robot. When I compare that system with the robot we took to San Diego, I realize just how long a trip it has been.

Up to this trip we have been focused on researching the theory of robotics, then the practicality of developing a robot.  Then we spent enormous amounts of time and energy looking for money to fund the R&D. But we turned a corner this month, a big corner for the business.  We were invited to pitch our company to the assembled investors of the Angel Capital Summit, put on by the Rockies Venture Club.  We were also selected as one of six companies to present “cutting edge technology” in ground robotics to the buyers at the NDIA Ground Robotics Conference an Exhibition.  They both occurred on the same days, last week. The same days that the PerMIS 2012 conference was running.

This is where the long strange trip really became apparent. Five years ago, there would have been no question, we would have been trading ideas with some of the best researchers into machine intelligence in the world. Two years ago, we would have been pitching our hearts out to a group of investors, in hopes that one of them might be interested in becoming part of the ‘next big thing’.  This year there was no question, we were going to be presenting our robots to the people who can buy them and put them to work, making lives better.

Like I said, it has been a long, strange trip.

Where’s your robot? Ours are being built by Gamma Two Robotics, here in Colorado.

What is it about Killer Robot Overlords?

We were doing a presentation this week, at an angel investor meetup. The presentation on our security robot business model went well, although their format forced us to use only 5 minutes. So we spent hours paring down the words to fit into 300 seconds. A great exercise, and well worth the effort. Of course, after the lightning speed presentation, came the questions.

I enjoy the questions, I like the back and forth that occurs – it is more like a conversation than a lecture. But there is a moment I dread. It almost always comes up towards the end of the question period, and, perhaps, I am to blame. I do not come across as a formal speaker, I think that we communicate more effectively if we can communicate informally. I think that that mode encourages thought and engagement, and opens pathways for a more free-ranging conversation. Which, when talking about intelligent, autonomous robots, seems to lead, inevitably, to the question.

It takes many forms, depending on the speaker and their cultural refferents, but the thrust is always the same: What about Killer Robot Overlords? This night it was in the Terminator motif; “Jim, what if the robots ask ‘Where is Sarah Connor?’” If the speaker was older it might have been a direct Terminator reference, or perhaps “Klaatu barada nikto”

But, regardless of the exact form of the question, it always comes down to “What about Killer Robot Overlords?” It is kind of weird, I mean, we build robots – design their brains, I know just how smart they are. And they are a looong way from being as smart as a person. But, more importantly, why would they become killer robots? Of course, we, as people, are simply projecting our fears of technology and change onto the hardware. But where did it come from?

Robots have not been with us very long, but the idea of robots is very old.  It goes back beyond the word “robot” which came into use in the 1920′s. The first use of the word is generally ascribed to Karl Capec’s play “R. U. R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots” in which humanoid autonoma were used as workers, and eventually rebelled.  This was generally believed to be an extension of the Jewish Golem mythos – servants crafted out of clay and instilled with pseudo-life. The servant rebellion was a common theme, which, when brought to robots, leads to the robot rebellion, which seems to inevitably lead to killer robot overlords.  But even this model is a relative newcomer.

In the Greek mythos, Hephestus, the blacksmith to the gods, manufactured robotic carts that carried food and drink around the home.

WLMA robot in a home setting serving tea

Here is photo of one of our robots doing a job that has been around for perhaps 3000 years. In addition, Hephestus made robotic ‘golden maidens’ to work the parties as well.  No sense of Robottic Overlords in ancient Greece, these were reliable, helpful assistents, that help people (well the Gods at least) live better lives.

So, that is the concept that leads us to our vision:

Creating a world in which people live better lives assisted by affordable, reliable, helpful robots.

No killer robot overlords will come out of our shop.

Where is your robot? Ours are be made by Gamma Two Robotics

Changing Hats

It is a truism that the founders of a start-up business have to wear many hats. We are all familiar with the image of the owner/operator running by the office supply store on the way to work to pick up copier paper, cleaning the windows before the doors open, meeting with their banker, taking a client to lunch, taking the garbage out before going home to work on the ad copy for the new brochure. It is the essence of the start-up and small business lifestyle.

It is also true that as the business evolves, the tasks shift over time. A few years back, we were in the research phase of R&D. We focused on exploring the possibilities of a new way to design the brains for intelligent robots. Our white-boards were covered with models of human cognition and neuro-anatomy. We were breaking new ground in software development methodologies to build the brains for our yet-to-be robots. This is the academic hat, our mortar board, and gave us our first technical book Robots, Reasoning, and Reification. You can tell it is an academic book, we used an Oxford Comma in the title!

A little over a year ago, our business changed hats – we spent less time on the ‘R’ part, and far more on the ‘D’ of development. Putting together tens of thousands of lines of code that would implement the intelligent behavior; designing and prototyping new robot bodies that would enable us to prove out the research. And, as is always the case, returning to the white-boards to refine the designs, open new areas of research, and loop back to developing functional prototypes. This was less of a hat, and more of a face shield and lab coat phase.

Then we switched hats again: the white-boards were just as often filled with analyses of the potential markets, and we spent much of our time talking with potential customers to refine the benefits that our robots would provide. We focused more on the hunt for funding to keep the operations going, and designing the ‘look and feel’ of our new robots. We started relying more on project plans and Gantt charts – tracking the progress of our development. And always returning to the white-boards to refine solutions, analyze new problems as we learned more about the domains. We focused not on enabling the robots just to do the tasks they are assigned, but to do those tasks well. Check out Projects versus Products. This is our construction hard-hat – we’re out in the rain pounding nails to put up walls and a roof that have to hold up under the snow and rain.

Mobile Camera System on patrol in a gallery

Once again we are switching hats. Now we are moving into the product design and production set-up phase. It is all well and good to have a robust prototype robot that can do a full days work, but we need to design and build a business process that can turn out robots on demand to meet the needs of our customers.  Sure, there is still software development going on as we fine tune the performance of the robots, and learn more about what our customers need. I’m not sure what the best hat description for this phase would be – I kind of picture the 1950′s drafting tables, and guys (it’s the fifties, there were mostly guys) wearing suits and white button down shirts, perhaps donning a fedora to walk down to the local bar for a Manhattan after work.  In any event this will be a focus for a big part of the team for the next six months.

The rest of the team will switch yet again as we move into the marketing and sales phase for our first product off the line – the Mobile Camera System security robot. So that means we focus on building a clear, simple message about how we can make our customer’s lives better, reducing costs, increasing security and safety. That message needs to be consistently presented across a variety of media, to a variety of different customers; each with their own needs.  We need to be on target, and get geared up for our impending product launch in August – less than seven months away.  Every time I look at our internal website I see a countdown timer, reminding me that we have (as of today, less than 170 days to go!)  Did I mention – I’m a software engineer, not an MBA?  Oh well, just one more learning curve to try to catch up with the real experts on the team.

Where is your robot? Ours are being built at Gamma Two Robotics, here in Colorado.

The Snow Shovelling Robot (Part 2)

The snow is still falling, the walk isn’t cleared, and the robot is dripping melting snow onto the garage floor. I have a fresh pot of tea (Nilgiri black, from Mark T. Wendell teas) steaming on the drawing table, along with a home-made English muffin with honey and butter.

Ahhhhhhhh! Paradise.

What was I doing again? Oh yeah, the Snow Shovelling Robot.

So, previously we tried the snow-blower, and the plow. Now it is time to get serious. A snow shovelling robot should shovel snow. How hard can it be?  10 year old kids can do this. Take a shovel, stick it in the snow, toss it away, repeat. Easy. We can take a shovel, and cut down the handle. Attach it to the robot, and add a mechanism to stick it horizontally into the snow. Add another mechanism to lift the shovel blade, and another one to fling the snow off to the side. The robot moves forward, and the process repeats. Where’s my pencil?

I’m sure you can envision the Snow Shovelling Robot: tank treads, front mounted arm, with a shovel blade, electronics, servo-motors, pneumatic cylinders driving the tossing mechanism, possibly even a steam tank to keep the blade from freezing up.  A total steam-punk fantasy. Now we are ready to roll!  Except for the hard part, the brains.

Don’t get me wrong, the mechanical system is complex, and requires serious engineering. I’m sure any number of mechatronics engineers were having a chuckle at the obvious mechanical errors expounded in the previous post. But that is my point – they were obvious errors. If you look at the hundreds of existing robotics systems in the world today, you will see mechanical, electrical, pneumo-hydrolic marvels doing work in bomb disposal, deep sea exploration, flight systems, everything!  But the vast majority of them require a person to drive them around; a person to make sense of the environment by looking through the sensors; a person to decide what to do; and a person to execute the plan using the joysticks, game controllers, and switches on the console. In fact in systems like the Predator drones, it literally can require three or four people to fly the mission.

Right now, it is a person making the hundreds of judgement calls needed to actually do something useful, like shovelling the sidewalk. “What?” you say, “Judgement calls about shovelling?”  Actually, yes.

A judgement call is a decision that is made dependent on the situation, and frequently without complete knowledge. Think about the types of decisions:

• How big a ‘bite’ of snow to take,
• Where to toss it,
• How best to get the snow off the shovel blade,
• What to do when the snow sticks,
• How best to get the shovel blade down to the concrete, without jamming it into a crack, and so on.

And all of these decisions, are being made in real time, you’ve got maybe 3 seconds per ‘shovel operation’. And, these decisions are being made without complete information. You don’t know the ‘stickiness’ of the snow, as you move down the sidewalk, when is the snow you are tossing getting too close to the neighbor’s car? Do you break your rhythm to clean the blade, or risk having the shovel fly out of your grip when the snow doesn’t let go?

And our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to get a computer to do all this, while controlling the robot.

And, perhaps the most daunting aspect of all, is we don’t really understand how ‘we’ as humans make these decisions. If you asked people how they decide how big a ‘bite’ of snow to shovel, you’ll get answers like “the feel is right”, or “I just kind of eyeball it”, or (my favorite) “When you’ve been shovelling snow as long as I have, you just know.”  Program that into your robot.  The odd thing is, according to a number of current cognitive science theories each of these answers is exactly right.

3 pm the snow picks up. Where is the Snow Shoveling Robot?

There are two competing truisms: 1) if you can’t explain how to do something, you can’t program a computer to do it, 2) the act of explaining how you do something frequently changes the process that you are trying to explain.  Sure, there are exceptions to both of these ‘rules’, but they hold most of the time. This is why you don’t have a snow shovelling robot. It’s not the hardware, the mechatronics engineers are giving us great hardware, we are still working on how to ‘tell’ the hardware what to do. For a more detailed analysis you can check out our book “Robots, Reasoning, and Reification”

The short form is that the robot needs to map the current situation into a model of the world (the reification part), and then have behaviors it can execute (the robot part), and it has to select the appropriate behaviors (the reasoning part) as the situation changes.

It becomes a dance of a sort.  A three step figure:

• Figure out what aspects of the shovelling process can be reduced to pre-programmed ‘muscle memory’ – behaviors that can be re-played in specific situations.
• Figure out when to ‘re-play’ those behaviors – what are the circumstances in which those behaviors are the appropriate behaviors
• Figure out how to stitch those together into a pattern that ends up with the snow off the sidewalk, and not on the neighbors car.

To do that we need data – Well, the snow is picking up again, so I need to get up, grab the shovel, and start shovelling. Looks like, for this storm anyway, I am the Snow Shovelling Robot.

Where’s your Robot?  Ours are being built by Gamma Two Robotics, here in (snowy) Colorado.

The Snow Shovelling Robot (Part 1)

They are calling it Snowpocalypse. It’s not really that bad for Colorado, a steady 24 hour snowstorm that will pile up 18 to 24 inches of snow.  O.K., it is a little more than normal for Denver in February. Since the storm is a long one, we can look forward to shovelling the sidewalk two or three times today. Did the first one just now, and thought about the snow shovelling robot.

At first glance, how hard can it be to move snow from one place to another? Just need some device to transport snow. So let’s get started.  First we’ll grab a snow blower, that solves the transport snow issue.  We’ll need to make sure it is one of those self-propelled ones. Then all we need to do it provide sensors and steering, and we are done. This is easy, should have done this years ago.

What? You have a question? How does it know where to take the snow from?  Um, okay, we want the sidewalk cleared, so it just has to know where the sidewalk is.  Well, we could use a vision system, but the sidewalk is buried under a foot of snow, so that’s out. Heck, I sometimes find myself missing the walk if the snow is deep enough. Okay, let’s add a marker of some sort – perhaps one of those ‘invisible fence’ wires down each side of the walk, then the robot just has to stay between the lines.  Oh, yeah, and a marker for the property lines, so that we know when to stop. Sure, sure, we’ll go a little over so the neighbors know that we care. Now that we know where we are, we will need to steer. Where is the steering control?  What?  WHAT?  You have to man-handle this thing around by jerking on the handles? That means applying force from an external anchor point, like the person standing securely on the cleared sidewalk. The whole point was that we don’t have a person standing behind the snowblower. Well, maybe we can just use dead reckoning, and blindly go down the middle of the sidewalk. Oooops, that won’t work, we still need a person to line the snowblower up, and turn it around at the other end. Besides, I’m pretty sure my home-owner’s insurance would have something to say about a blind, robotic snowblower charging down the sidewalk chopping up everything in its path. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

Snow covered path to the garage, with 13" of snow, I need a snow shoveling robot.

Let’s go out to the garage and grab that squat little tank-treaded prototype that was designed to weed the garden.  Shoot, that means I need to shovel the 13″ of snow off of the path out to the garage. I really need a snow shovelling robot.

The tank chassis steers itself around, so that is covered. It is pretty heavy so it can transport even heavy wet snow.  It knows (roughly) where it is using GPS. And it has mounting points for manipulators. Let’s start by adding a simple plow blade on the front, and we’ll use the guide wires from version one, so that it can follow the walk. Piece of cake!  Okay,  let’s run it over the sidewalk between the house and the garage. The storm has only put down another 2″ while I was working, so let’s hit the on switch.

Sweet! Works like a charm, it is pushing the snow to either side of the walk, and left a beautiful clear path between the garage and the house.  Now out to the front of the house to clear the walk.

We’ll wrestle the robot through the house, out onto the porch, and place it on the walk. The robot drops through the snow and settles in. Hit the on switch and watch those treads spin. And spin, and spin. The treads can’t get any purchase on the snow. Shoot. Pick the robot up, and put it back on the porch, track snow back through the house to grab the shovel, and clear just a small space on the walk to let the treads hit concrete. Pick the robot off the porch (I need a robot to haul robots) and put it on the walk, and hit the go button. The robot takes off and slams into the (now 14″) wall of snow. It struggles on for about a foot, and then stops. It can’t push the snow out of the way, even when it has good traction. I guess that is why we humans use shovels to lift the snow out of the way, rather than just trying to push it aside. Back inside, pour some more tea, and back to the drawing board.

Next: The Snow Shovelling Robot (Part 2)