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The Guardian 
Do humans have a role in the robot wars 
of the future? 
Barbara Ehrenreich 
11 July 2011 -- For a book about the all-too-human "passions of 
war", my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: 
I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon —
honour, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful 
to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain 
species of ants wage war and computers can simulate "wars" that play 
themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. 
More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating 
pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation. 
In the human case, we know it is capable of spreading geographically 
and evolving rapidly over time — qualities that, as I suggested 
somewhat fancifully, make war a metaphorical successor to the 
predatory animals that shaped humans into fighters in the first place. 
A decade and a half later, these musings do not seem quite so airy 
and abstract anymore. The trend, at the close of the twentieth century, 
still seemed to be one of ever more massive human involvement in 
war — from armies containing tens of thousands in the sixteenth 
century, to hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth, and eventually 
millions in the twentieth-century world wars. 
It was the ascending scale of war that originally called forth the 
existence of the nation-state as an administrative unit capable of 
maintaining mass armies and the infrastructure — for taxation, 
weapons manufacture, transport, etc — that they require. War has 
been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project 
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human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very 
different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller 
role to play. 
One factor driving this change has been the emergence of a new kind 
of enemy, so-called "non-state actors," meaning popular insurgencies 
and loose transnational networks of fighters, none of which are likely 
to field large numbers of troops or maintain expensive arsenals of 
their own. In the face of these new enemies, typified by al-Qaida, the 
mass armies of nation-states are highly ineffective, cumbersome to 
deploy, difficult to manoeuvre, and from a domestic point of view, 
overly dependent on a citizenry that is both willing and able to fight, 
or at least to have their children fight for them. 
Yet just as US military cadets continue, in defiance of military 
reality, to sport swords on their dress uniforms, our leaders, both 
military and political, tend to cling to an idea of war as a vast, labour-
intensive effort on the order of World War II. Only slowly, and with 
a reluctance bordering on the phobic, have the leaders of major states 
begun to grasp the fact that this approach to warfare may soon be 
obsolete. 
Consider the most recent US war with Iraq. According to then-
president George W Bush, the casus belli was the 9/11 terror attacks. 
The causal link between that event and our chosen enemy, Iraq, was, 
however, imperceptible to all but the most dedicated inside-the-
Beltway intellectuals. Nineteen men had hijacked aeroplanes and 
flown them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre — 15 of 
them Saudi Arabians, none of them Iraqis — and we went to war 
against ... Iraq? 
Military history offers no ready precedents for such wildly mis-aimed 
retaliation. The closest analogies come from anthropology, which 
provides plenty of cases of small-scale societies in which the death of 
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any member, for any reason, needs to be "avenged" by an attack on a 
more or less randomly chosen other tribe or hamlet. 
Why Iraq? Neoconservative imperial ambitions have been invoked in 
explanation, as well as the American thirst for oil, or even an Oedipal 
contest between George W Bush and his father. There is no doubt 
some truth to all of these explanations, but the targeting of Iraq also 
represented a desperate and irrational response to what was, for 
Washington, an utterly confounding military situation. 
We faced a state-less enemy — geographically diffuse, lacking 
uniforms and flags, invulnerable to invading infantries and saturation 
bombing, and apparently capable of regenerating itself at minimal 
expense. From the perspective of Secretary of Defense Donald 
Rumsfeld and his White House cronies, this would not do. 
Since the US was accustomed to fighting other nation-states —
geopolitical entities containing such identifiable targets as capital 
cities, airports, military bases, and munitions plants — we would have 
to find a nation-state to fight, or as Rumsfeld put it, a "target-rich 
environment". Iraq, pumped up by alleged stockpiles of "weapons of 
mass destruction" became the designated surrogate for an enemy that 
refused to play our game. 
The effects of this atavistic war are still being tallied: in Iraq, we 
would have to include civilian deaths estimated at possibly hundreds 
of thousands, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and 
devastating outbreaks of sectarian violence of a kind that, as we 
should have learned from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, can readily 
follow the death or removal of a nationalist dictator. 
But the effects of war on the US and its allies may end up being 
almost as tragic. Instead of punishing the terrorists who had attacked 
the US, the war seems to have succeeded in recruiting more such 
irregular fighters, young men (and sometimes women) willing to die 
and ready to commit further acts of terror or revenge. By insisting on 
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fighting a more or less randomly selected nation-state, the US may 
only have multiplied the non-state threats it faces. 
Unwieldy armies 
Whatever they may think of what the US and its allies did in Iraq, 
many national leaders are beginning to acknowledge that 
conventional militaries are becoming, in a strictly military sense, 
almost ludicrously anachronistic. Not only are they unsuited to 
crushing counterinsurgencies and small bands of terrorists or 
irregular fighters, but mass armies are simply too cumbersome to 
deploy on short notice. 
In military lingo, they are weighed down by their "tooth to tail" ratio 
— a measure of the number of actual fighters in comparison to the 
support personnel and equipment the fighters require. Both hawks 
and liberal interventionists may hanker to airlift tens of thousands of 
soldiers to distant places virtually overnight, but those soldiers will 
need to be preceded or accompanied by tents, canteens, trucks, 
medical equipment, and so forth. "Flyover" rights will have to be 
granted by neighbouring countries; air strips and eventually bases 
will have to be constructed; supply lines will have be created and 
defended — all of which can take months to accomplish. 
The sluggishness of the mass, labour-intensive military has become a 
constant source of frustration to civilian leaders. Irritated by the 
Pentagon's hesitation to put "boots on the ground" in Bosnia, then-
Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously demanded of 
Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, "What good is this marvellous 
military force if we can never use it?" In 2009, the Obama 
administration unthinkingly proposed a troop surge in Afghanistan, 
followed by a withdrawal within a year and a half that would have 
required some of the troops to start packing up almost as soon as they 
arrived. It took the US military a full month to organize the transport 
of 20,000 soldiers to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake — and 
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they were only travelling 700 miles to engage in a humanitarian relief 
mission, not a war. 
Another thing hobbling mass militaries is the increasing 
unwillingness of nations, especially the more democratic ones, to risk 
large numbers of casualties. It is no longer acceptable to drive men 
into battle at gunpoint or to demand that they fend for themselves on 
foreign soil. Once thousands of soldiers have been plunked down in a 
"theatre" they must be defended from potentially hostile locals, a 
project that can easily come to supersede the original mission. 
We may not be able clearly to articulate what American troops were 
supposed to accomplish in Iraq or Afghanistan, but without question 
one part of their job has been "force protection". In what could be 
considered the inverse of "mission creep", instead of expanding, the 
mission now has a tendency to contract to the task of self-defence. 
Ultimately, the mass militaries of the modern era, augmented by 
ever-more expensive weapons systems, place an unacceptable 
economic burden on the nation-states that support them — a burden 
that eventually may undermine the militaries themselves. Consider 
what has been happening to the world's sole military superpower, the 
United States. The latest estimate for the cost of the wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan is, at this moment, at least $3.2 trillion, while total US 
military spending equals that of the next 15 countries combined, and 
adds up to approximately 47% of all global military spending. 
To this must be added the cost of caring for wounded and otherwise 
damaged veterans, which has been mounting precipitously as medical 
advances allow more of the injured to survive. The US military has 
been sheltered from the consequences of its own profligacy by a level 
of bipartisan political support that has kept it almost magically 
immune to budget cuts, even as the national debt balloons to levels 
widely judged to be unsustainable. 
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The hard right, in particular, has campaigned relentlessly against "big 
government", apparently not noticing that the military is a sizable 
chunk of this behemoth. In December 2010, for example, a 
Republican senator from Oklahoma railed against the national debt 
with this statement: "We're really at war. We're on three fronts now: 
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the financial tsunami [arising from the debt] 
that is facing us." Only in recent months have some Tea Party-
affiliated legislators broken with tradition by declaring their 
willingness to cut military spending. 
How the warfare state became the welfare state 
If military spending is still for the most part sacrosanct, ever more 
spending cuts are required to shrink "big government". Then what 
remains is the cutting of domestic spending, especially social 
programmes for the poor, who lack the means to finance politicians, 
and all too often the incentive to vote as well. From the Reagan years 
on, the US government has chipped away at dozens of programmes 
that had helped sustain people who are underpaid or unemployed, 
including housing subsidies, state-supplied health insurance, public 
transportation, welfare for single parents, college tuition aid, and 
inner-city economic development projects. 
Even the physical infrastructure — bridges, airports, roads, and tunnels 
— used by people of all classes has been left at dangerous levels of 
disrepair. Antiwar protestors wistfully point out, year after year, what 
the cost of our high-tech weapon systems, our global network of 
more than 1,000 military bases, and our various "interventions" could 
buy if applied to meeting domestic human needs. But to no effect. 
This ongoing sacrifice of domestic welfare for military "readiness" 
represents the reversal of a historic trend. Ever since the introduction 
of mass armies in Europe in the seventeenth century, governments 
have generally understood that to underpay and underfeed one's 
troops — and the class of people that supplies them — is to risk having 
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the guns pointed in the opposite direction from that which the officers 
recommend. 
In fact, modern welfare states, inadequate as they may be, are in no 
small part the product of war — that is, of governments' attempts to 
appease soldiers and their families. In the US, for example, the Civil 
War led to the institution of widows' benefits, which were the 
predecessor of welfare in its Aid to Families with Dependent 
Children form. It was the bellicose German leader Otto von Bismarck 
who first instituted national health insurance. 
World War II spawned educational benefits and income support for 
American veterans and led, in the United Kingdom, to a 
comparatively generous welfare state, including free health care for 
all. Notions of social justice and fairness, or at least the fear of 
working class insurrections, certainly played a part in the 
development of twentieth century welfare states, but there was a 
pragmatic military motivation as well: if young people are to grow up 
to be effective troops, they need to be healthy, well-nourished, and 
reasonably well-educated. 
In the US, the steady withering of social programmes that might 
nurture future troops even serves, ironically, to justify increased 
military spending. In the absence of a federal jobs programme, 
Congressional representatives become fierce advocates for weapons 
systems that the Pentagon itself has no use for, as long as the 
manufacture of those weapons can provide employment for some of 
their constituents. 
With diminishing funds for higher education, military service 
becomes a less dismal alternative for young working-class people 
than the low-paid jobs that otherwise await them. The US still has a 
civilian welfare state consisting largely of programmes for the elderly 
(Medicare and Social Security). For many younger Americans, 
however, as well as for older combat veterans, the US military is the 
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welfare state — and a source, however temporarily, of jobs, housing, 
health care and education. 
Eventually, however, the failure to invest in America's human 
resources — through spending on health, education, and so forth —
undercuts the military itself. In World War I, public health experts 
were shocked to find that one-third of conscripts were rejected as 
physically unfit for service; they were too weak and flabby or too 
damaged by work-related accidents. 
Several generations later, in 2010, the US Secretary of Education 
reported that "75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 
to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have 
failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are 
physically unfit." When a nation can no longer generate enough 
young people who are fit for military service, that nation has two 
choices: it can, as a number of prominent retired generals are 
currently advocating, reinvest in its "human capital", especially the 
health and education of the poor, or it can seriously reevaluate its 
approach to war. 
The fog of (robot) war 
Since the rightward, anti-"big government" tilt of American politics 
more or less precludes the former, the US has been scrambling to 
develop less labour-intensive forms of waging war. In fact, this may 
prove to be the ultimate military utility of the wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan: if they have gained the US no geopolitical advantage, 
they have certainly served as laboratories and testing grounds for 
forms of future warfare that involve less human, or at least less 
governmental, commitment. 
One step in that direction has been the large-scale use of military 
contract workers supplied by private companies, which can be seen 
as a revival of the age-old use of mercenaries. Although most of the 
functions that have been outsourced to private companies — including 
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food services, laundry, truck driving, and construction — do not 
involve combat, they are dangerous, and some contract workers have 
even been assigned to the guarding of convoys and military bases. 
Contractors are still men and women, capable of bleeding and dying 
— and surprising numbers of them have indeed died. In the initial six 
months of 2010, corporate deaths exceeded military deaths in Iraq 
and Afghanistan for the first time. But the Pentagon has little or no 
responsibility for the training, feeding, or care of private contractors. 
If wounded or psychologically damaged, American contract workers 
must turn, like any other injured civilian employees, to the Workers' 
Compensation system, hence their sense of themselves as a 
"disposable army". By 2009, the trend toward privatisation had gone 
so far that the number of private contractors in Afghanistan exceeded 
the number of American troops there. 
An alternative approach is to eliminate or drastically reduce the 
military's dependence on human beings of any kind. This would have 
been an almost unthinkable proposition a few decades ago, but 
technologies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan have steadily stripped 
away the human role in war. Drones, directed from sites up to 7,500 
miles away in the western United States, are replacing manned 
aircraft. 
Video cameras, borne by drones, substitute for human scouts or 
information gathered by pilots. Robots disarm roadside bombs. When 
American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, no robots accompanied them; 
by 2008, there were 12,000 participating in the war. Only a handful 
of drones were used in the initial invasion; today, the US military has 
an inventory of more than 7,000, ranging from the familiar Predator 
to tiny Ravens and Wasps used to transmit video images of events on 
the ground. Far stranger fighting machines are in the works, like 
swarms of lethal "cyborg insects" that could potentially replace 
human infantry. 
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These developments are by no means limited to the US. The global 
market for military robotics and unmanned military vehicles is 
growing fast, and includes Israel, a major pioneer in the field, Russia, 
the United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, and China. Turkey is 
reportedly readying a robot force for strikes against Kurdish 
insurgents; Israel hopes to eventually patrol the Gaza border with 
"see-shoot" robots that will destroy people perceived as transgressors 
as soon as they are detected. 
It is hard to predict how far the automation of war and the 
substitution of autonomous robots for human fighters will go. On the 
one hand, humans still have the advantage of superior visual 
discrimination. Despite decades of research in artificial intelligence, 
computers cannot make the kind of simple distinctions — as in 
determining whether a cow standing in front of a barn is a separate 
entity or a part of the barn — that humans can make in a fraction of a 
second. 
Thus, as long as there is any premium on avoiding civilian deaths, 
humans have to be involved in processing the visual information that 
leads, for example, to the selection of targets for drone attacks. If 
only as the equivalent of seeing-eye dogs, humans will continue to 
have a role in war, at least until computer vision improves. 
On the other hand, the human brain lacks the bandwidth to process all 
the data flowing into it, especially as new technologies multiply that 
data. In the clash of traditional mass armies, under a hail of arrows or 
artillery shells, human warriors often found themselves confused and 
overwhelmed, a condition attributed to "the fog of war". Well, that 
fog is growing a lot thicker. US military officials, for instance, put 
the blame on "information overload" for the killing of 23 Afghan 
civilians in February 2010, and the New York Times reported that: 
"Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of 
9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones 
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and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the 
ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, 
get directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets 
can be so packed with data that some pilots call them 'drool buckets' 
because, they say, they can get lost staring into them." 
When the sensory data coming at a soldier is augmented by a flood of 
instantaneously transmitted data from distant cameras and computer 
search engines, there may be no choice but to replace the sloppy 
"wet-ware" of the human brain with a robotic system for instant 
response. 
War without humans 
Once set in place, the cyber-automation of war is hard to stop. 
Humans will cling to their place "in the loop" as long as they can, no 
doubt insisting that the highest level of decision-making — whether to 
go to war and with whom — be reserved for human leaders. But it is 
precisely at the highest levels that decision-making may most need 
automating. A head of state faces a blizzard of factors to consider, 
everything from historical analogies and satellite-derived intelligence 
to assessments of the readiness of potential allies. Furthermore, as the 
enemy automates its military, or in the case of a non-state actor, 
simply adapts to our level of automation, the window of time for 
effective responses will grow steadily narrower. Why not turn to a 
high-speed computer? It is certainly hard to imagine a piece of 
intelligent hardware deciding to respond to the 9/11 attacks by 
invading Iraq. 
So, after at least 10,000 years of intra-species fighting — of scorched 
earth, burned villages, razed cities, and piled up corpses, as well, of 
course, as all the great epics of human literature — we have to face the 
possibility that the institution of war might no longer need us for its 
perpetuation. Human desires, especially for the Earth's diminishing 
supply of resources, will still instigate wars for some time to come, 
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but neither human courage nor human bloodlust will carry the day on 
the battlefield. 
Computers will assess threats and calibrate responses; drones will 
pinpoint enemies; robots might roll into the streets of hostile cities. 
Beyond the individual battle or smaller-scale encounter, decisions as 
to whether to match attack with counterattack, or one lethal 
technological innovation with another, may also be eventually ceded 
to alien minds. 
This should not come as a complete surprise. Just as war has shaped 
human social institutions for millennia, so has it discarded them as 
the evolving technology of war rendered them useless. When war 
was fought with blades by men on horseback, it favoured the rule of 
aristocratic warrior elites. When the mode of fighting shifted to 
action-at-a-distance weapons like bows and guns, the old elites had to 
bow to the central authority of kings, who, in turn, were undone by 
the democratizing forces unleashed by new mass armies. 
Even patriarchy cannot depend on war for its long-term survival, 
since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, at least within US 
forces, established women's worth as warriors. Over the centuries, 
human qualities once deemed indispensable to war fighting —
muscular power, manliness, intelligence, judgment — have one by one 
become obsolete or been ceded to machines. 
What will happen then to the "passions of war"? Except for 
individual acts of martyrdom, war is likely to lose its glory and lustre. 
Military analyst PW Singer quotes an Air Force captain musing about 
whether the new technologies will "mean that brave men and women 
will no longer face death in combat," only to reassure himself that 
"there will always be a need for intrepid souls to fling their bodies 
across the sky". 
Perhaps, but in a 2010 address to Air Force Academy cadets, an 
under secretary of defense delivered the "bad news" that most of 
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them would not be flying aeroplanes, which are increasingly 
unmanned. War will continue to be used against insurgencies as well 
as to "take out" the weapons facilities, command centres, and cities of 
designated rogue states. It may even continue to fascinate its 
aficionados, in the manner of computer games. But there will be no 
triumphal parades for killer nano-bugs, no epics about unmanned 
fighter planes, no monuments to fallen bots. 
And in that may lie our last hope. With the decline of mass militaries 
and their possible replacement by machines, we may finally see that 
war is not just an extension of our needs and passions, however base 
or noble. Nor is it likely to be even a useful test of our courage, 
fitness, or national unity. War has its own dynamic or — in case that 
sounds too anthropomorphic — its own grim algorithms to work out. 
As it comes to need us less, maybe we will finally see that we don't 
need it either. We can leave it to the ants. 
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of several books, including Smile 
Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World; 
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: and Blood Rites: 
Origins and History of the Passions of War. 
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AniCIC 7. 
NYT 
In Search of a Robot More Like Us 
John Markoff 
July 11, 2011 -- The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins 
speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose 
change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers. 
The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, 
training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial 
intelligence researchers than 
.'s celebrated victory on 
"Jeopardy!" this year with a robot named Watson. 
Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where 
tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp 
things and move about effortlessly in the physical world. 
Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and 
perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications 
stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas 
manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer 
workers). 
Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial 
intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing. 
"All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology 
does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be 
hard in fundamental ways," said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at 
Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon 
Valley. 
"It's always surprising, because humans can do so much 
effortlessly." 
Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the 
Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial 
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intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing 
efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as 
today's systems, which often cost $100,000 or more. 
Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University 
in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced 
robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the 
United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms 
and hands are only the first step. 
There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a 
machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things 
humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a 
breakthrough in software that mimics perception. 
Today's robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, 
but researchers describe their skills as "brittle." They fail if the tiniest 
change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a 
cumbersome fashion to do something else. 
Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, 
hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a 
library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to 
begin to mimic humans. 
Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an 
artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible 
perception. 
The limits of today's most sophisticated robots can be seen in a 
towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University 
of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, 
anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, 
eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them 
in a pile. 
It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times 
normal speed that the meager extent of the robot's capabilities 
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becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they 
were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding 
shirts and socks.) 
Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not 
yet yielded impressive results. 
In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in 
a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried 
aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International 
Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software 
required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, 
was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a 
rare launching window was available. 
"We're in a funny chicken-and-egg situation," Dr. Brooks said. "No 
one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use 
because we don't have a working hand, and because we don't have a 
grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design." 
Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded 
Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on 
building a generation of low-cost robots. 
And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands 
with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National 
Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism. 
Recently at an SRI laboratory here, two Stanford University graduate 
students, John Ulmen and Dan Aukes, put the finishing touches on a 
significant step toward human capabilities: a four-finger hand that 
will grasp with a human's precise sense of touch. 
Each three jointed finger is made in a single manufacturing step by a 
three-dimensional printer and is then covered with "skin" derived 
from the same material used to make the touch-sensitive displays on 
smartphones. 
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"Part of what we're riding on is there has been a very strong push for 
tactile displays because of smartphones," said Pablo Garcia, an SRI 
robot designer who is leading the design of the project, along with 
Robert Bolles, an artificial intelligence researcher. 
"We've taken advantage of these technologies," Mr. Garcia went on, 
"and we're banking on the fact they will continue to evolve and be 
made even cheaper." 
Still lacking is a generation of software that is powerful and flexible 
enough to do tasks that humans do effortlessly. That will require a 
breakthrough in machines' perception. 
"I would say this is more difficult than what the Watson machine had 
to do," said Gill Pratt, the computer scientist who is the program 
manager in charge of Darpa's Autonomous Robot Manipulation 
project, called ARM. 
"The world is composed of continuous objects that have various 
shapes" that can obscure one another, he said. "A perception system 
needs to figure this out, and it needs the common sense of a child to 
do that." 
At Willow Garage, Dr. Bradski and a group of artificial intelligence 
researchers and roboticists have focused on "hackathons," in which 
the company's PR2 robot has been programmed to do tasks like 
fetching beer from a refrigerator, playing pool and packing groceries. 
In May, with support from the White House Office of Science and 
Technology Policy, Dr. Bradski helped organize the first Solutions in 
Perception Challenge. A prize of $10,000 is offered for the first team 
to design a robot that is able to recognize 100 items commonly found 
on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores. Part of the prize will 
be given to the first team whose robot can recognize 80 percent of the 
items. 
At the contest, held during a robotics conference in Shanghai, none of 
the contestants reached the 80 percent goal. The team that did best 
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was the laundry-folding team from Berkeley, which has named its 
robot Brett, for Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks. 
Brett was able to recognize 68 percent of a smaller group of 50 
objects. And the team has made progress in its quest to build a 
machine to do the laundry; it recently posted a new video showing 
how much it has sped up the robot. 
"Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle," said Pieter 
Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group, "from 
dirty laundry in a basket to everything stacked away after it's been 
washed and dried." 
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