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Article 6.
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
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troops — and the class of people that supplies them — is to risk having
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,
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however, as well as for older combat veterans, the US military is the
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
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functions that have been outsourced to private companies — including
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
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swarms of lethal "cyborg insects" that could potentially replace
human infantry.
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
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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
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
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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,
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
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"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 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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Article 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 I.B.M.'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
intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing
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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
becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they
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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.
"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
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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
was the laundry-folding team from Berkeley, which has named its
robot Brett, for Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks.
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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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