wireless robotics

Country/region [select] Terms of use All of dW Home Products Services & industry solutions Support & downloads My IBM developerWorks > Wireless > developerWorks More in this series: Wireless robotics In this article: What is wireless robotics? Thoughts on mobile robotics A bot's-eye view of wireless technology Wireless robotics software applications In conclusion Resources About the author Rate this page Wireless robotics: What, exactly, is "wireless robotics?" How to marry wireless technology with mobile robotics for a blissful outcome Level: Introductory Erik Zoltan (erik@zoltan.org), Advanced Systems Engineer, EDS E-mail this page Document options Print this page 08 Feb 2006 Using XML, but need to do more? Download DB2 Express-C 9 Related links Wireless technical library This article, the first of a two-part series, takes a high-level look at wireless robotics. The article discusses what, exactly, wireless robotics is, looking at its two central components: mobile robotics and wireless technology. I will also cover software applications of wireless robotics. Part 2 will examine some interesting applications of wireless robotics that you likely will hear more about in the future. Rate this page Help us improve this content What is wireless robotics? Wireless robotics is not a separate field of its own. Instead, it may be regarded as the timely confluence of two technologies: wireless technology and mobile robotics. Wireless technology is used to send information out using radio waves; this includes wireless computer networks. The proliferation of open wireless networks throughout offices and urban areas has big implications for robotics. Mobile robotics generally involves untethered robots that run on batteries and have an on-board computer. When you add wireless technology to mobile robotics, it opens the door to collaborative behavior between multiple mobile robots, and to the delegation of responsibility to an external source such as a central computer or a human user. I address what's meant by wireless robotics because some may still need clarification on the boundaries of wireless robotics and where it is headed. In 1898, Nikola Tesla filed a patent entitled "Method of an Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles" (see Resources). This patent covered his newly invented approach for using wireless radio signals to remotely control an external vehicle. He called these vehicles "teleautomatons." Tesla had invented a powerful radio transmitter, and by placing a receiver on the vehicle he was able to remotely produce the electrical signals needed to guide the vehicle. He even became concerned with wireless security issues -- the vehicle would only respond if a specific combination of frequencies was used to transmit the control instruction. Thoughts on mobile robotics Mobile robotics is a future technology in the same way that hand-held PDAs were a future technology two decades ago. Today, we have extremely powerful computers that, nevertheless, are very small and consume minimal battery power. Combine them with the latest small, lightweight batteries that can deliver power for quite a long time, and we're now primed to develop new applications for mobile robotics. However, the most critical ingredient, the ability for the robot to truly understand what it's doing, is still a long way off. As a result, there are several different approaches one can take to mobile robotics right now. (For the purposes of this discussion, let's simplify matters and assume that we're not using wireless technology.) 1. Artificial intelligence. The fundamental problem is the lack of intelligence in a mobile robot. So working directly on the intelligence question makes sense. Vision processing is an example. If you can get a computer to process visual information and more accurately recognize and identify objects, then you can definitely improve the performance of a mobile robot. Note: The fact that some people might regard "artificial intelligence" as a term they'd rather not use only serves to underscore the point that it's a very difficult task to make robots more intelligent! 2. Robotic hardware and software. Even though we don't know how to make the robot behave intelligently, there is still a lot of work that can be done on the hardware end. For example, we could try to create a walking robot with arms and hands that has delicate touch sensitivity and always remains in graceful balance. This is quite an engineering challenge, but a lot of progress has been made. By the time someone figures out how to make a robot intelligent, it will probably have an excellent body waiting for it. 3. Creative application development. In addition to building robots that are effective for certain known applications, we can try to find unknown applications that our existing robots would be good at. Probably the development of the robotic vacuum cleaner (the most successful mobile robotics application so far) falls into this category. What other ideas are out there? Think about it and send me an email if you come up with an interesting idea. Maybe I'll print it here. 4. Platform independence. The availability of software development environments that aren't tied to a specific hardware platform or even operating system would seem to be important for mobile robotics. Why? Because the mobile robotics platform of the future hasn't been invented yet. Someone will invent it, though, and there is no telling what processors, development packages, or operating systems will be available on such a platform. We need to be ready for anything. This isn't intended to be an exhaustive list by any means. There are certainly a lot of other things one could work on in mobile robotics, so think of these as a few broad areas that need attention right now. A bot's-eye view of wireless technology The preceding were some ideas that come to mind when you think about mobile robotics in isolation, without considering wireless technology. But what if you do think about wireless technology in isolation, from the perspective of mobile robotics? What if you consider those wireless applications because you are explicitly interested in mobile robotics (as opposed to laptop computers, telephones, PDAs and so on) If you look at wireless technology, there are a number of interesting avenues that come to mind. 1. Off-the-shelf networking. 802.11x, Bluetooth, and other wireless technologies are implemented at a lower level and may have operating system-level support. Thus, they function seamlessly, allowing the system to behave as though the connections were wired. For example, I can write a TCP/IP application that would work the same way with a wireless network or an ethernet cable. My mobile robotics application might not make sense if the robot had to drag a long cable around, but the programming is all the same. This may sound obvious, but it is a major breakthrough in the field of mobile robotics. It also suggests a development approach: I can plug my robot into a wired network and write my code, and most of the time it will work just the same when I later switch to wireless. This suggests that the wireless robotics code you write today might continue to be compatible in the future, as new advances in wireless technology continue to emerge. 2. Custom wireless technology. If I'm not satisfied with the limitations of off-the-shelf wireless technologies, I can always implement my own, as long as I obey relevant laws about broadcast frequencies and so on. Maybe I have a tiny embedded platform (such as a very small mobile robot running on a single microcontroller) and I don't want to bite off the overhead of a more-robust off-the-shelf technology, so I try to keep it simple. Or maybe I think that I can improve security by implementing an especially baroque form of encryption and not telling anyone how it works. 3. Range enhancement. Numerous popular books and Web sites contain a lot of approaches to building a better antenna that will increase your range. These ideas work on the assumption that you are using a car or a laptop. But what if you are using a wireless robot? Doesn't this open up some possibilities that wouldn't be available with a laptop? For example, perhaps a wireless robot could use some kind of a directional antenna. There are various designs for directional antennas, but let's visualize it as a dish antenna similar to a satellite dish, only smaller. The robot could position itself at a location where the signal is strongest if it needs to do a large upload or download. It could align the dish in the position where the signal is strongest. While the robot is moving around, it could continually keep the dish aligned in the proper orientation to maximize signal strength. You might choose to have a second (non-directional) antenna to monitor overall signal strength. If there are two wireless networks available, and the robot moves closer to one of them, then it might want to switch to the other wireless network and re-align the directional antenna to point at the new signal. Wireless robotics software applications I've talked about the two fields in relative isolation from each other. Now we can combine wireless technology with robotics, and there are some interesting possibilities that come up at the point where the two intersect. Let's begin by thinking about software applications for wireless robotics. Remote control This isn't very surprising, because Tesla was already able to do this sort of thing at the turn of the twentieth century! Many children's toys are surprisingly advanced remote control machines. However, there are still some significant issues here that are worth mentioning. In terms of simple control of movement, we can now be more advanced in terms of how we control a robot's movement. I could wear a sensor glove, or a full body suit, and the robot might be able to mimic my movements with great precision. But what about a robot whose body is nothing like mine? If we develop a very useful robot whose movements are very unlike our own, then it will be a challenge to find a way to control it remotely. So the development of intuitive user interfaces for complex remote control may actually still be an interesting area, depending on what you are controlling. Let's suppose that I am trying to control a spinning robot that goes around in circles at hundreds of RPMs. Obviously, I'm not going to mimic its exact movements. Fortunately, in this case, I could use something like a joystick or a mouse to tell it where to go. I could use something like a lever, a dial, or a foot pedal to control its rotational speed. Imagine a lightweight window-climbing robot that looks like a ball covered in suction cups. Maybe there is an air hose connected to each of the suction cups and it can inhale to stick to the window or exhale to let go. What kind of remote control application would be appropriate to control this kind of a 'bot? Imagine a scenario in which you want to control a larger number of robots working together. Examples of the same everyday activities where humans typically cooperate include a soccer team, or maybe one robot holding the door open for the rest to go through. It would be nice to be able to select individual robots and control them one at a time if necessary. It would also be good to have some way to control a handful of robots at the same time, coordinating them easily to work on a task together. There is a lot of work still to be done in this area. One promising approach lies in the development of higher-level instructions. There are many very useful tasks -ranging from simple to somewhat complex -- that are surprisingly easy to implement: q q keep going forward until you encounter an obstacle follow the white line until it ends q q keep climbing until you appear to have reached the top of the hill keep the camera focused on anything that moves To the extent that you are able to add useful capabilities to a robot, remote control applications may become progressively easier to use by combining many complex interactions into a single handy command. Robot monitoring Presumably, any good wireless robot is going to have some sort of sensor data that it can report back to an external source. This could include streaming audio and video, positional coordinates, internal temperature, battery state, touch sensor data, the position of any arms, legs, and other movable components, and so on. If a human being is going to monitor this kind of information, then there is the challenge of presenting the information to the user in a useful way. Does a temperature readout simply display a number, or does it look like a thermometer? Does it flash or change color when the temperature is outside a certain range? Is streaming video turned off when no one is looking, to conserve bandwidth? If there are a significant number of touch sensors, then how do you represent this data in a way that is useful to the human user? If the sensor information is being used to make decisions (either on board the robot or on a remote server), then things can get rather complicated in a hurry. Reacting to sensor data is frequently a complicated affair. Even the most simple things, like "back up and turn left when you encounter an obstacle", often turn out to be more difficult than we assumed. (The sensors didn't get triggered by the obstacle; it encountered another obstacle while backing up; it fell down a flight of stairs.) So even when the robot is reacting independently to sensor data, it is helpful to keep a human user posted on its activities and also to leave an audit trail. If something goes wrong, you will want to look back at the details as you try to correct the problem. Robot communication Remote control assumes that the robots are talking to one or more human users; but here they are talking to each other. The communication software itself wouldn't be much more complex than a chat room. The really tricky part is figuring out what kind of useful information two robots can share. Ultimately robot communication would have to arise out of a shared task. To take a simple example, let's suppose that one robot is carrying a bunch of freshly charged batteries, and it needs to pass them around to the other robots. The battery-carrying 'bot could ask the other robots to report their current positions. It would then choose one (presumably the closest one with an old battery) and the two robots would either agree on a place to meet, or they'd head in each other's direction, regularly transmitting their locations until they finally meet. If a group of robots are working together to search for a hidden object, then they could all regularly transmit their locations to a central server, which would keep track of a map of places that have already been searched. Gradually the number of already-searched places would increase and the number of unsearched places would decrease until the object is finally located. In this scenario, the central server could divide the search area into multiple zones and assign one particular robot to look in each zone, or the individual robots could simply report their current positions and the server would report back the nearest place that hasn't been searched yet. Finally, imagine a soccer-playing team of robots similar to RoboCup (see Resources). To be successful, each robot must be able to see the ball, its teammates, the opponents, the goal, and anything else in the field of play. Robots need to be able to think strategically, follow the movements of the ball, and estimate its future location. This is some pretty complex calculating going on. The robots should obviously communicate their identities and their positions to each other regularly, as well as their immediate intentions for movement. There may be an external server that helps to coordinate the robots into a "team plan." Essentially, though, the kinds of communication will vary based on the quality of the information that is available, the physical movement capabilities of the robots, and the sophistication of the strategic processing that is available. In conclusion That's an overview of the kinds of software that might be useful in wireless robotics. In Part 2 of this series, I will spend more time on some interesting applications of wireless robotics. Maybe I can discover the "killer app" that will set wireless mobile robotics on fire (not literally, of course). Back to top Resources Learn q See all the articles in this Wireless robotics series. Check out RoboCup if you're interested to learn about how soccer-playing robots work and how they communicate. Learn about IBM's contribution to robotics. Read Nikola Tesla's patent entitled Method of an Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles. Read this previously published article "Introduction to robotics technology" (developerWorks, September 2001). Stay current with developerWorks technical events and Webcasts. q q q q q Get products and technologies q Download a free trial version of WebSphere® Application Server Version 6.0. Build your next development project with IBM trial software, available for download directly from developerWorks. q Discuss q Participate in developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community. Back to top About the author Erik Zoltán got his start in AI in the late 1980s, with the invention of a proprietary neurosemantic network technology that is still under development. His current work focuses most strongly on computer perception. He gradually became involved in robotics when the field kept coming up as an important application of his work. He has taught programming to hundreds of professional developers and has worked on CBT, databases, and communication systems in industries such as banking, education, healthcare and government. Back to top Rate this page Please take a moment to complete this form to help us better serve you. Did the information help you to achieve your goal? Yes No Don't know Please provide us with comments to help improve this page: How useful is the information? (1 = Not at all, 5 = Extremely useful) 1 2 3 4 5 Back to top About IBM Privacy Contact Country/region [select] Terms of use All of dW Home Products Services & industry solutions Support & downloads My IBM developerWorks > Wireless > developerWorks More in this series: Wireless robotics In this article: Applying wireless robotics Telepresence Telepresence robotic services Autonomous robots Wireless Network Applications Convergence Resources About the author Rate this page Wireless robotics: What, exactly, is "wireless robotics"? Level: Introductory Erik Zoltan (erik@zoltan.org), Advanced Systems Engineer, EDS E-mail this page Document options Print this page 29 Mar 2006 Using XML, but need to do more? Download DB2 Express-C 9 Related links Wireless technical library Examine some interesting applications of wireless robotics that you may be hearing more about in the future. This article covers several areas that appear to be major applications of wireless mobile robotics. Applying wireless robotics Rate this page Help us improve this content This second part of a two-part series outlines wireless robotics at a high level. The first part gave a definition of the field and talked about some software-level applications. It described how advances in wireless technology, the availability of very small high-performance computer systems, and the low-cost availability of robotic components are making this a good time to start developing wireless robotic applications. This article takes more of a "big-picture" view of the field and talks about macro applications that suggest themselves. Remote control A remote-controlled robot naturally begs the question: Why would I use a remote-controlled robot instead of just doing the same tasks by hand myself? For example, a remote-controlled robot to comb a child's hair would probably be a lot harder and more expensive than just walking over and combing their hair by hand. Perhaps this is an absurd example, but it illustrates an important point: There is a difference between a can and a should. I can make a large investment of time and capital for certain robotics applications, but which ones should I choose and which ones would be better to ignore? I can think of a number of reasons why I'd want to use a remote-controlled robotic device instead of doing something it by hand. Danger. The robot can go into a hostile or extreme environment (such as an environment where radiation or contaminants are present, extreme temperatures, or an unstable building where an earthquake has occurred) where it would be unsafe to send a human. Robots are already being used in combat environments or search-and-rescue missions. Scale. The robot may need to do things that are much too small and delicate, or too large and heavy, for a person to do by hand. On a large scale, large vehicles such as cranes or fork lifts are already being used to manipulate heavy objects, and perhaps there is room for robots in this domain as well. If a giant crane is currently being used to elevate materials up to the top floor of a building where humans can work with them, then imagine how much more useful a giant humanoperated robot would be for the same activity. (But, perhaps some people would find this to be an alarming prospect.) On a small scale, a tiny little robot can take large scale movements of the human hands and reproduce them on a smaller scale, allowing a person to use natural hand movements to do something very small and delicate. We already have some applications that fall into this category, and I expect a lot more. As miniature hardware components continue to improve, there is definitely going to be more progress in this area. Think of the surgical applications, for instance. Currently, it's possible to swallow a capsule that wirelessly transmits information, such as the core body temperature, to an external receiver. Imagine swallowing a small robotic capsule remotely controlled by a surgeon. As it enters your intestine, the surgeon might cause it to unfold itself and remove a polyp or repair a hernia. Location. Sometimes a person can't be in a specific location for practical reasons. Maybe it's too far away, or they simply can't be there around the clock. A robot could remain in that location as an onsite agent. This can be done already at a purely virtual level with telephones, e-mail, or videoconferencing. However, a robot would add a physical dimension to this notion of "remote presence." This brings me to my next topic. Telepresence Telepresence might just be the first "killer app" for wireless robotics. Telepresence can be thought of as transmitting your physical presence to another remote location. (see Resources for more information). The idea is that even when you are physically in one place, you are experiencing sights and sounds, and controlling movements in a natural way, somewhere else. In terms of wireless robotics, you would have an untethered robot at a remote location, equipped with video and audio sensors, and a speaker. So the user could see what the robot is seeing and hear what the robot is hearing. You could speak into a microphone and your voice would be transmitted by the robot. It's important that the remote controls should be highly responsive and very intuitive to use. (Otherwise, it becomes harder to use the word "telepresence" with a straight face.) A wheeled robot would be okay for telepresence, particularly at first. However, a bipedal robot (if it can be controlled using natural body movements) would be the most ideal. A telepresence robot called Rokviss is currently being used on the international space station. It can be remotely controlled from the ground, but only for a few minutes at a time, while it is over the receiving station in Germany. However, it's a simple research prototype that doesn't meet the full-blown definition of telepresence that I'm presenting here. Telepresence robots have a big advantage over many other applications: the human is fully in control, so there's really no need to solve the problem of intelligent autonomous behavior. Difficult issues like balance, vision, speech recognition and understanding the world around the robot simply aren't a problem in telepresence applications. This is the primary reason why it's one good choice for an early "killer app" of wireless robotics. There are several challenges in telepresence robotics. q q q q q You need a user interface that lets the user see, hear, and communicate in a realistic way and control the remote robot intuitively without having to think about what they are doing. You need a robot that mirrors the user interface exactly, and that responds as intended to the control signals that have been received. So, as you enhance the hardware robot, you may have to update the user interface to keep it in sync, and vice versa. The robot also must give appropriate feedback when problems are encountered. You need software to integrate the user interface with the robot, that is, to transmit and to transmit sensory information from the robot back to the user. Finally, you want to stay connected. So you must have a good wireless link between the robot and the user. When the communications link is inevitably broken (and this is virtually guaranteed to happen), you need some kind of a fallback strategy. Here are some thoughts on applications of telepresence robotics. Stand-in robot. This is a robot that stays somewhere you can't be. For example, it can be remotely controlled and it can be in your office. It can type on your computer for you or answer the phone with your voice. Even though you're not present and there are certain things that must be done physically, you have a remote-controlled agent that is capable of doing them for you. If your office has wifi the agent can walk all over the office, making copies, sending faxes, and so on. Imagine you're a one-person company, but you're away on a business trip or on vacation. You can't be there to open and read the mail, do some unexpected filing or photocopying, read a fax that just arrived, or open that file cabinet and look at a copy of a document that only exists in paper form. As technology advances there are fewer things that you need to do physically on location, but they still exist and they are still important. Did you ever have a server in your office go down in the evening when no one was there to reboot it? Or, you can look at it from the opposite perspective: Imagine you're in the office and your telepresence robot is at home. People are investing money to get their homes and household appliances all connected to a computer. For example, perhaps I want to buy a coffee pot that can be programmed remotely. Maybe I can sit at the office with my laptop and tell the coffee pot to start in 45 minutes so there will be a fresh, hot cup of coffee waiting for me when I get home. The problem with this kind of thing is that each appliance is much more expensive than an equivalent product that I probably already own. How am I going to convince my wife that we need a new coffee pot, a new thermostat that I can control from my laptop as I'm sitting on the couch, and a Web-enabled remote car starter for those frigid New England mornings? What about having a telepresence robot instead? Why not centralize my financial investment in the form of a wireless robot that can perform a variety of household tasks? In addition to having it program the coffee pot to go off at a certain time, I might be able to somehow figure out how to make it grind the beans, change the filter and pour the water. There are other things I could do with this kind of telepresence robot. It could feed the dogs and let them in and out of the house without granting access to strangers. It could adjust the thermostat, turn on the bread machine, empty the litter box, or leave a post-it note on my wife's car keys reminding her that the car is low on gas. Why make a separate investment in a variety of task-specific household devices when you can get a single telepresence robot that does it all? Telepresence robotic services Telepresence robotic services is an extension of telepresence robotics. After you have a telepresence robot in your home or office, why not hire someone else to control it for you? Imagine that there is a robot in your home and it can be controlled remotely over your wifi network by a personal service provider who knows the special security keys required to control it. This robot could take care of your house while you are away on vacation (feed the pets, water the plants, keep the home secure). The same things you'd have a house sitter do for you. Such a service might be a lot less expensive than having a human being actually come to your home, especially if you have an over-protective dog. The services that this kind of robot could provide would depend entirely on the physical capabilities of the robot. Wheeled robots: q q q They move over level terrain and are easily controlled remotely. May not be so good on stairs. Getting stuck on uneven terrain may be an issue. Cameras: q q q Can provide visual feedback, allowing a remote service provider to see exactly what they are doing. Useful for security and monitoring. A robot with a camera can move around through an area and see every corner, so it's not subject to the limitations of a stationary camera. Positioning: You could use GPS or some other positioning technology if it's not clear where the robot is located. This would be especially helpful if the robot is not inside a home or office -- maybe it's in the woods or going down a road. Legged bots: q q May be better at stair climbing, depending on the design, but are generally harder to coordinate than wheeled robots. Tripping or falling over may be an issue. Arms/hands: q q Gives the robot the ability to grasp and manipulate objects. This would be useful for many remote applications. Manual sensitivity and dexterity are critical, as is the development of a good user interface for remotely controlling the environment. Imagine a remote-controlled robot that can change recessed or hard to reach lights. Autonomous robots Here are some ideas for applications of autonomous mobile wireless robots. q "The Scoop," a small autonomous robot that runs around trying to gently scoop up any small objects it comes across and places all the objects in a box. I have emphasized the words gently and small because some objects are more delicate than others and because a sleeping pet might not take kindly to being handled in this way. It could have a large scoop in front, and it could patrol the floor space, backing up when it bumps into an object that doesn't get scooped up. When something lands in its scoop (such as a scrap of paper, a pen that has fallen to the floor, or even an old sock), it can simply place that object in a special box for a human being to organize later. I once developed a simple prototype of this idea in my home, and my two small boys thought it was very funny to sit in the path of the robot or to place other obstructions in its way to see how it would react. I encouraged them to do this, and often found myself tweaking the robot or rewriting the driver code in response to humorous jokes they had managed to play on it. q q A robot that is capable of locating a wall outlet and plugging itself in when it needs to recharge. This is not a major application by itself, but if you can create such a robotic platform then it can serve as a base system for others to use in developing applications. Vacuums and lawnmowers already exist, but we can generalize beyond these specific applications. They are both instances of the general class of activities that I'll call "walk around and do menial chores." A number of other extensions of this approach seem to naturally suggest themselves. 1. Water the plants. You might have special planters or maybe wireless transponders to facilitate doing this autonomously. 2. Control the household temperature by opening and closing windows and curtains. One would certainly need to install the right kind of window and curtain hardware to enable this application. Even so, you only need one motor and control system (on the robot) instead of having one for each window and curtain. Instead of having a temperature sensor in each room, the robot could carry a single temperature sensor with it. Plus, you'd need one for outside. On the downside, the robot needs to navigate to each window and curtain, which wouldn't be necessary in a traditional home automation application. You'd want to simplify this process with a radio signal or something else. 3. Monitor environmental conditions. This is an extension of the previous idea. Stationary sensors in the home can monitor temperature, detect smoke or carbon monoxide, radiation, and so on. Alternatively, a robot can have its own sensors or carry portable sensors to any location it can reach. To understand why this might be useful, imagine you have a source of a minor amount of carbon monoxide in your home. Even though the overall levels are within acceptable ranges, a mobile robot might detect high levels in an isolated area that might not be picked up by a stationary sensor. 4. A mobile robot could serve as a remote car starter. Of course, a human user could pilot it remotely, but this would be most desirable if it were an autonomous application. Other applications fall under the same heading such as adjusting the thermostat shortly before you arrive home. 5. Taking care of the pets. Imagine a robot that can make sure the food and water dishes are filled at a certain time each day, or even empty the litter box regularly. 6. Taking out the trash. You might need a special trash can, but some people would consider this a small price to pay to avoid this stinky and menial chore. 7. Preparing food. Hey, don't laugh at this one. Perhaps in a decade or so, there will be a section of your grocery store devoted to specially-packaged foods that can be autonomously prepared by your mobile robot. It's just a new kind of convenience food, and it's a natural extension of recent history. First there was frozen pizza for the oven, then there was toaster oven pizza, and now there is microwave oven pizza. So why not robopizza? This would be pizza (and other types of food) in special packaging that includes a computer chip that can tolerate freezer temperatures. Your mobile robot will simply open and close the freezer, locate and retrieve the pizza from a special compartment in the front, remove it from the custom-designed packaging, and pop it in the oven. It's really not that big a leap from a bread machine. 8. Delivery. Why have a person bring samples to the lab for analysis when a robot can do it more patiently and without getting sidetracked? There are a lot of delivery applications that could be performed by a robot. Of course, there are also a lot of delivery tasks that still have to be done by a human. A robot can't deliver a pizza and obtain payment from a customer yet because there is too much human-level interaction involved and too much navigational uncertainty. But anything where these conditions don't exist might be a good candidate for robotic delivery. If it is easy to navigate from point A to point B, and there is no doubt about how to get through a locked door or exactly where you are going, then most likely a robot can be programmed to get there. If it is easy to make the delivery (for example by leaving the cargo in a specific place that is guaranteed to be available or having a person who is guaranteed to be there and will know how to retrieve the cargo from the robot), then an application might be a candidate for robotic delivery. 9. Development/research platforms. When there is an exciting technology and nobody knows exactly what to do with it, there is room to create a base system that doesn't actually do very much, but already contains some of the ingredients that a useful system would need in the future. Then you can sell this base system (even though it's basically a "useless shell") to somebody else who is also working in the field. This makes a great deal of sense. Each developer or researcher is spared the agony of recreating the wheel and resolving many of the core problems. The prospective developer can focus directly on solving a single more-advanced (and more-interesting) aspect of the domain. Most of the above applications should be autonomous for maximum benefit. Generally, they aren't good candidates for remote control unless you can't to be there to do them personally or if you have physical limitations that makes them a hardship. Wireless Network Applications If you are using a wireless robot over your normal wireless network, then there are a number of applications that are related to the wireless network itself. For example, the robot could exhaustively patrol every inch of territory inside your home or building and create a map of what networks are accessible everywhere, and what the signal strength is. (Actually, you don't even need to have your own wireless network for this to be a useful application.) The robot can even move around outside the building, say in sidewalks and parking lots, or right outside another company's office, to see if your network is unintentionally available outside the physical boundaries that you thought it had. Maybe you have a client who doesn't mind that you share their data over a wireless network because you have assured them that the network cannot be accessed outside of the building. With this robotics application, you can have a great deal of confidence that it's really true. Or, maybe you have a client that won't permit you to share their data over a wireless network for security reasons. Imagine that you've assured them that there are no wireless networks in your buildings, and that the wireless network card has been disabled on all employee laptops. Are you sure that's really true? A robot that walks around the office routinely searching for wireless network traffic could help you to avoid an embarrassing situation. As soon as it detects a wireless signal, you'll know that someone forgot to turn off their wireless adapter and you can remind them right away before any problems can arise. Another idea is a wireless network extension. What if you are outside and you need to stay connected to a network? A series of mobile robots could follow behind you and remain connected to the base network. They could stay behind at various intervals to create a "daisy chain" router network. Why not just carry a series of wireless routers and leave them behind as you go? An autonomous mobile robot could move around to various areas in an effort to get the best possible signal. In this way you could get a better result than if you tried to manually position a series of antennas. Also, autonomous robots could sense changes in your position and move dynamically to make sure you stay in range. And if you simply forget about them, they could independently return back to the base station when their batteries start to get too low. Convergence Many people are talking about the integration of multiple devices into a single device; for example, your television, your computer, your handheld computer, your cell phone, your ISP, your telephone, and your entertainment system (CD/VCR/DVD/stereo). All of these separate devices are now converging into a single device. But why not add robotics to this equation? Why should your television stay in one place? What if your "surround sound" entertainment system could follow you around the house? What if that elusive remote control could rise up from between the couch cushions to answer your summons? What if pushing the "call button" on your cordless telephone system could cause the handsets to return back to the base station instead of merely beeping at you? What if your appointment book and task list could walk over and tap you on the shoulder to remind you of an important obligation? As the underlying technologies continue to come down in price, many of these applications will start to look more practical. Conclusion I hope that this discussion of wireless robotic applications has gotten you as excited as I am about the future of wireless mobile robotics. The proliferation of laptop computers, the internet, cell phones, and wireless technology has certainly revolutionized everyday life in recent decades. Mobile robotics has a potential to extend this revolution into the physical arena. Even though robotics is still in its early stages, and many problems remain to be solved, there are still some interesting applications just over the horizon that could easily enter your everyday life in the next decade or so. Back to top Resources Learn q Transparent Telepresence Research Group: Telepresence can be thought of as transmitting your physical presence to another remote location. "What, exactly, is "wireless robotics?" (developerWorks, February 2006): Read the first article in this two-part series. Wireless robotics: Read all the articles in this series. Telepresence: Here is a link to a popular article about telepresence. IBM robotics: Learn about the IBM contribution to robotic technology. "Introduction to robotics technology" (developerWorks, September 2001): Read this previously published article to find out more about robotic technology. developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with the latest technologies. q q q q q q Get products and technologies q IBM trial software: Build your next development project with trial software, available for download directly from developerWorks. Discuss q developerWorks blogs: Get involved in the developerWorks community. Back to top About the author Erik Zoltán got his start in AI in the late 1980s, with the invention of a proprietary neurosemantic network technology that is still under development. His current work focuses most strongly on computer perception. He gradually became involved in robotics when the field kept coming up as an important application of his work. He has taught programming to hundreds of professional developers and has worked on CBT, databases, and communication systems in industries such as banking, education, healthcare and government. Back to top Rate this page Please take a moment to complete this form to help us better serve you. Did the information help you to achieve your goal? Yes No Don't know Please provide us with comments to help improve this page: How useful is the information? (1 = Not at all, 5 = Extremely useful) 1 2 3 4 5 Back to top About IBM Privacy Contact