Robots Among Us
Hans Moravec
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
June 1999
Bedazzled by the explosion of computers into everyday life, pundits
predict a world saturated by communicating chips, in our gadgets,
dwellings, clothes, even bodies. But if pervasive computing handles
most of our information needs, it will still not clean the floors,
take out the garbage, assemble kit furniture or do any of a thousand
other other essential physical tasks. The old dream of mechanical
servants will remain unmet.
Robot inventors in home, university and industrial laboratories have
tinkered with the problem for most of the century. While mechanical
bodies adequate for manual work can be built, artificial minds for
autonomous servants have been frustratingly out of reach. The
problem's deceptive difficulty fooled generations of workers who
attempted to solve it using computers.
The first electronic computers in the 1950s did the work of thousands
of clerks, seeming to transcend humans, let alone other machines. Yet
the first reasoning and game-playing programs on those computers were
a match merely for single human beginners, and each only in a single
narrow task. And, in the 1960s, computer-linked cameras and
mechanical arms took hours to unreliably find and move a few white
blocks on a black tabletop, much worse than a toddler. The situation
did not improve substantially for decades, and disheartened waves of
robotics devotees.
But things are changing. Robot tasks wildly impossible in the 1970s
and 1980s are nearing commercial viability in the 1990s. Experimental
mobile robots map and navigate unfamiliar office suites, and robot
vehicles drive themselves, mostly unaided, across entire countries.
Computer vision systems locate textured objects and track and analyze
faces in real time. Personal computers recognize text and speech.
Why suddenly now?
Mental Illusions
The short answer is that, after decades at about 1 MIPS
(Million Instructions Per Second, each
instruction representing work like adding two ten-digit numbers),
computer power available to research robots shot through 10, 100 and
now 1,000 MIPS in the 1990s. This is odd because the
cost-effectiveness of computing rose steadily all those decades. In
1960 computers were a new and mysterious factor in the cold war, and
even outlandish possibilities like artificial intelligence (AI)
warranted significant investment. In the early 1960s AI programs ran
on the era's supercomputers, similar to those used for physical
simulations by weapons physicists and meteorologists. By the 1970s
the promise of AI had faded, and the effort limped for a decade on old
hardware. In contrast, weapons labs upgraded repeatedly to new
supercomputers. In the 1980s, departmental computers gave way to
smaller project computers then to individual workstations and personal
computers. Machine costs fell and their numbers rose, but power
stayed at 1 MIPS. By 1990 the research environment was saturated with
computers, and only then did further gains manifest in increased power
rather than numbers.
Mobile robot research might have blossomed sooner had the work been
done on supercomputers, but pointlessly. At best, a mobile
robot's computer could substitute for a human driver, a function
worth perhaps $10 an hour. Supercomputer time cost at least $500 per
hour. Besides, dominant opinion in the AI labs, dating from when
computers did the work of thousands, was that, with the right program,
1 MIPS could encompass any human skill, . The opinion remained
defensible in the 1970s, as reasoning and game-playing programs
performed at modest human levels.
For the few researchers in the newborn fields of computer vision and
robotics, however, 1 MIPS was obviously far from sufficient. With the
best programs, single images crammed memory, simply scanning them
consumed seconds, and serious image analysis took hours. Human vision
performed much more elaborate functions many times a second.
Hindsight enlightens. Computers calculate using as few gates and
switching operations as possible. Human calculation, by contrast, is
a laboriously learned, ponderous, awkward, unnatural behavior. Tens
of billions of neurons in our vision and motor systems strain to
analogize and process a digit a second. If our brain were rewired
into 10 billion arithmetic circuits, each doing 100 calculations a
second, by a mad computer designer with a future surgical tool,
we'd outcompute 1 MIPS computers a millionfold, and the illusion
of computer power would be exposed. Robotics, in fact, gave us an
even better exposé.
Though spectacular underachievers at the wacky new stunt of longhand
calculation, we are veteran overachievers at perception and
navigation. Our ancestors, across hundreds of millions of years,
prevailed by being frontrunners in the competition to find food,
escape danger and protect offspring. Existing robot-controlling
computers are far too feeble to match this ultra-optimized perceptual
inheritance. But by how much?
The vertebrate retina is understood well enough to be a kind of
Rosetta stone roughly relating nervous tissue to computation. Besides
light detectors, the retina contains edge- and motion-detecting
circuitry, packed into a little tenth-millimeter-thick,
two-centimeter-across patch that reports on a million image regions in
parallel about ten times a second via the optic nerve. In robot
vision, similar detections, well coded, each require the execution of
a few hundred computer instructions, making the retina's 10
million detections per second worth over 1,000 MIPS. In a risky
extrapolation that must serve until something better emerges, this
implies it would take about 50,000 MIPS to functionally imitate a gram
of neural tissue, and almost 100 million MIPS (or 100 trillion
instructions per second) to emulate the 1,500 gram human brain. PCs
in 1999 beat insects, but lose to the human retina and to the 0.1 gram
brain of a goldfish. They are a daunting million times too weak to
perform like a human brain.
While dispiriting to artificial intelligence pioneers, the deficit
does not warrant abandoning their goals. Computer power for a given
price roughly doubled each year in the 1990s, after doubling every 18
months in the 1980s, and every two years prior. Twenty or thirty more
years at the present pace would close the millionfold gap. Better
yet, sufficiently useful robots don't need full human-scale
brainpower.
Commercial and research experiences convince me that mental power
like a small guppy, about 1,000 MIPS, will suffice to guide mobile
utility robots reliably through unfamiliar surroundings, suiting them
for jobs in hundreds of thousands of industrial locations and
eventually hundreds of millions of homes. Such machines are less than
a decade away, but have been elusive so long that only a few dozen
small research groups pursue them.
One Track Minds
Commercial mobile robots, the smartest to date barely insectlike at
10 MIPS, have found few jobs. A paltry ten thousand work worldwide,
and companies that made them are struggling or defunct (robot
manipulators have a similar story). The largest class, Automatically
Guided Vehicles (AGVs), transport materials in factories and
warehouses. Most follow buried signal-emitting wires and detect
endpoints and collisions with switches, a technique developed in the
1960s. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to install guide
wires under concrete floors, and the routes are then fixed, making the
robots economical only for large, exceptionally stable factories.
Some robots made possible by the advent of microprocessors in the
1980s track softer cues, like patterns in tiled floors, and use
ultrasonics and infrared proximity sensors to detect and negotiate
their way around obstacles.
The most advanced industrial mobile robots to date, developed since
the late 1980s, are guided by occasional navigational markers, for
instance laser-sensed bar codes, and by preexisting features like
walls, corners and doorways. The hard-hat labor of laying guide wires
is replaced by programming carefully tuned for each route segment.
The small companies who developed the robots discovered many
industrial customers eager to automate transport, floor cleaning,
security patrol and other routine jobs. Alas, most buyers lost
interest as they realized that installation and route changing
required time-consuming and expensive work by experienced route
programmers of precarious availability. Technically successful, the
robots fizzled commercially. But in failure they revealed the
essentials for success.
First one needs reasonably-priced physical vehicles to do various
jobs. Fortunately existing AGVs, fork lift trucks, floor scrubbers
and other industrial machines designed for human riders or to follow
wires can be adapted for autonomy. Second, the customer should be
able, unassisted, to rapidly put a robot to work where needed. Floor
cleaning and most other mundane tasks cannot bear the cost, time and
uncertainty of expert installation. Third, the robots must work for
at least six months between missteps. Customers routinely rejected
robots that, after a month of flawless operation, wedged themselves in
corners, wandered away lost, rolled over employees' feet or fell
down stairs. Six months, however, earned the machines a sick
day.
Robots exist that work faultlessly for years, perfected by a repeated
process that fixes the most frequent failures, revealing successively
rarer problems that are corrected in turn. Alas, the reliability has
been achieved only for prearranged routes. Insectlike 10 MIPS is just
enough to track a few hand-picked landmarks on each path segment.
Such robots are easily confused by minor surprises like shifted bar
codes or blocked corridors, not unlike ants on scent trails or moths
guided by the moon, who can be trapped by circularized trails or
streetlights. (Unlike plodding robots, though, insects routinely take
lethal risks, and thus have more interesting, if short,
lives.)
A Sense of Space
Robots that chart their own routes emerged from laboratories
worldwide in the mid 1990s, as microprocessors reached 100 MIPS. Most
build two-dimensional maps from sonar or laser rangefinder scans to
locate and route themselves, and the best seem able to navigate office
hallways for days between confusions. To date they fall far short of
the six-month commercial criterion. Too often different locations in
coarse 2D maps resemble one another, or the same location, scanned at
different heights, looks different, or small obstacles or awkward
protrusions are overlooked. But sensors, computers and techniques are
improving, and success is in sight.
My small laboratory is in the race. In the 1980s we devised a way to
distill large amounts of noisy sensor data into reliable maps by
accumulating statistical evidence of emptiness or occupancy in each
cell of a grid representing the surroundings. The approach worked
well in 2D, and guides many of the robots mentioned above.
Three-dimensional maps, a thousand times richer, promised to be even
better, but for years seemed computationally out of reach. In 1992 we
found economies of scale and other tricks that reduced 3D grid costs a
hundredfold, and now have a test program that accumulates thousands of
measurements from stereoscopic camera glimpses to map a room's
volume down to centimeter-scale. With 1,000 MIPS the program digests
over a glimpse per second, adequate for slow indoor travel. A
thousand MIPS is just appearing in high-end personal computers. In a
few years it will be found in smaller, cheaper computers fit for
robots, and we've begun an intensive three-year project to
develop a prototype commercial product. Highlights in the development
will be automatic learning processes to optimize hundreds of
evidence-weighing parameters, programs to find clear paths, locations,
floors, walls, doors and other objects in the 3D maps, and sample
application programs orchestrating the basic skills into tasks like
delivery, floor cleaning and patrol. The initial testbed is a small
camera-studded mobile robot. Tiny mass-produced digital camera chips
promise to be the cheapest way to get the millions of measurements
needed for dense maps.
As a first commercial product, we plan a basketball-sized
"navigation head" for retrofit onto existing industrial vehicles. It
would have multiple stereoscopic cameras, 1,000 MIPS, generic mapping,
recognition and control software, an application-specific program, and
a hardware connection to vehicle power, controls and sensors.
Head-equipped vehicles with transport or patrol programs could be
taught new routes simply by leading them through once. Floor-cleaning
programs would be shown the boundaries of their work area. Introduced
to a job location, the vehicles would understand their changing
surroundings competently enough to work at least six months without
debilitating mistakes. Ten thousand AGVs, a hundred thousand cleaning
machines and, possibly, a million fork-lift trucks are candidates for
retrofit, and robotization may greatly expand those markets.
Income and experience from spatially-aware industrial robots would
set the stage for smarter yet cheaper ($1,000 rather than $10,000)
consumer products, starting probably with small, patient robot vacuum
cleaners that automatically learn their way around a home, explore
unoccupied rooms and clean whenever needed. I imagine a machine low
enough to fit under some furniture, with an even lower extendible
brush, that returns to a docking station to recharge and disgorge its
dust load. Such machines could open a true mass market for robots,
with a hundred million potential customers.
Fast Replay
Commercial success will provoke competition and accelerate investment
in manufacturing, engineering and research. Vacuuming robots should
beget smarter cleaning robots with dusting, scrubbing and picking-up
arms, followed by larger multifunction utility robots with stronger,
more dexterous arms and better sensors. Programs will be written to
make such machines pick up clutter, store, retrieve and deliver
things, take inventory, guard homes, open doors, mow lawns, play games
and on. New applications will expand the market and spur further
advancements, when robots fall short in acuity, precision, strength,
reach, dexterity, skill or processing power. Capability, numbers
sold, engineering and manufacturing quality, and cost effectiveness
will increase in a mutually reinforcing spiral. Perhaps as by 2010
the process will have produced the first broadly competent "universal
robots," as big as people but with lizardlike 5,000 MIPS minds that
can be programmed for almost any simple chore.
Like competent but instinct-ruled reptiles, first-generation
universal robots will handle only contingencies explicitly covered in
their current application programs. Unable to adapt to changing
circumstances, they will often perform inefficiently or not at all.
Still, so much physical work awaits them in businesses, streets,
fields and homes that robotics could begin to overtake pure
information technology commercially.
A second generation of universal robot with a mouselike 100,000 MIPS
will adapt as the first generation does not, and even be trainable.
Besides application programs, the robots would host a suite of
software "conditioning modules" that generate positive and
negative reinforcement signals in predefined circumstances.
Application programs would have alternatives for every step small and
large (grip under/over hand, work in/out doors). As jobs are
repeated, alternatives that had resulted in positive reinforcement
will be favored, those with negative outcomes shunned. With a
well-designed conditioning suite (eg. positive for doing a job fast,
keeping the batteries charged, negative for breaking or hitting
something) a second-generation robot will slowly learn to work
increasingly well.
A monkeylike 5 million MIPS will permit a third generation of robots
to learn very quickly from mental rehearsals in simulations that model
physical, cultural and psychological factors. Physical properties
include shape, weight, strength, texture and appearance of things and
how to handle them. Cultural aspects include a thing's name,
value, proper location and purpose. Psychological factors, applied to
humans and other robots, include goals, beliefs, feelings and
preferences. Developing the simulators will be a huge undertaking
involving thousands of programmers and experience-gathering robots.
The simulation would track external events, and tune its models to
keep them faithful to reality. It should let a robot learn a skill by
imitation, and afford a kind of consciousness. Asked why there are
candles on the table, a third generation robot might consult its
simulation of house, owner and self to honestly reply that it put them
there because its owner likes candlelit dinners and it likes to please
its owner. Further queries would elicit more details about a simple
inner mental life concerned only with concrete situations and people
in its work area.
Fourth-generation universal robots with a humanlike 100 million MIPS
will be able to abstract and generalize. The first ever AI programs
did narrow abstract reasoning almost as well as people, and many
existing expert systems outperform us. But the symbols they
manipulate are meaningless unless interpreted by humans. For
instance, a medical diagnosis program needs a human practitioner to
enter a patient's symptoms, and to implement a recommended
therapy. Not so a third-generation robot, whose simulator provides a
two-way conduit between symbolic descriptions and physical reality.
Fourth-generation machines result from melding powerful reasoning
programs to third-generation machines. Properly educated, the
resulting robots could become intellectually formidable.
The path I've outlined roughly recapitulates the evolution of
human intelligence - at ten-million speed. It suggests robot
intelligence will surpass our own well before 2050. In that case,
mass-produced, fully-educated robot scientists working diligently,
cheaply, rapidly and increasingly effectively will ensure that most of
what science knows in 2050 will have been discovered by our artificial
progeny!
Raw material for figures for the article
Illustrations that illuminate some of the article's claims.
Click on links to get description and small figure.
For most, clicking on small figure gets double-size version.
Robots in our lab:
The Uranus mobile Robot, left, with trinocular cameras
and sonar ring.
The Neptune robot is seen at the right.
2D grid map of
hallway made by a sonar-sensing robot
1979 sparse map
and 1997 dense 3D grid map of a room from 20 stereoscopic images
MIPS and megabytes
Faster than exponential growth in computing power
The long freeze in AI
computer power
Navigation head (commercial product)
AGV (factory vehicle), possible user of navigation head
Vacuum-cleaning robot concept
Honda P2, an embryonic universal robot
A conceptual universal robot
Robot delivering package
Twin robot assembling furniture
Robot in kitchen