Keeping robots happy

Taranaki Daily News

Marvin is in a bad mood.

All day he's been facing obstacles and now he's stuck in a small corridor with no perceivable way to go on.

There are large objects everywhere and he can't get past them.

Finally, his frustration turns to annoyance, even anger, and he begins to shove against the objects, which are actually big boxes.

They move, so he can squeeze through gaps and continue his security guard route through the Laby Building at Victoria University.

His "tantrum" has been a success.

Computer systems engineering professor Dale Carnegie and PhD student Christopher Lee-Johnson are responsible for Marvin's emotions.

"We've given Marvin the emotion of anger or frustration. If he finds that he's trapped and can't get out, he'll become more agitated and more frustrated in his movements," Professor Carnegie says.

You see, Marvin is a robot, one that took thousands of hours to build and cost between $10,000 and $20,000 in materials. He's also had an extreme makeover, both physically and emotionally. While he's named after the droll robot in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this Marvin doesn't become quite as depressed as Douglas Adams' creation. But the Kiwi robot can develop bad moods after facing a day full of obstacles, like the one described above. He can also be happy, helpful, intimidating and fearful.

His name is actually an acronym for Mobile Autonomous Robotic Vehicle for Indoor Navigation. In real terms, he acts as a security guard in the engineering faculty building, a place he knows well thanks to a built-in map.

He also has voice-recognition software and can ask questions and answer simple queries. Professor Carnegie says that Marvin also looks different. "Before, he looked like a Dalek." Now, he's more like a person and about the size of an average man.

Robotechnology, the company that built the robotic sheep for the movie Babe, helped with his makeover. Marvin also has human-like mannerisms. When being spoken to, he looks at the person talking and nods, because that's polite. But all manners go out the door when he's interrogating someone he believes shouldn't be in the building. His head projects upwards and outwards and he stands over the person in a menacing manner.

"His eyes will glow red instead of a nice friendly green and his voice becomes far more demanding and strident."

If he's scared, his head will retract and he will appear meek. He's also being educated. Professor Carnegie says Marvin's new emotions are helping him learn and adapt so he can act autonomously.

Marvin is able to work out faster paths through the building by checking out side routes.

"We've given the robot an element of curiosity. If he's making really good progress towards his goal, the robot will actually be happy."

But Marvin doesn't start dancing about in joy, or any such display of pleasure.

"That's the key: the robot is not actually showing emotions, but using emotions to survive."

In other words, Marvin will become happy when he's making good progress towards his goal and will, therefore, continue on his merry way.

"If he's not, he'll become sad, and if he's sad, he's going to try to do something about it. So he'll start exploring new areas, he'll start trying to find ways to get to that goal faster and become happy again."

While this sounds like a simple lesson in human psychology, Marvin isn't actually the brightest artificial intelligence around.

"A lot of this work came out of the initial investigations of Christopher Lee-Johnson and his PhD work.

"The power of our robots is completely dictated by the power of the computers we put in them," Professor Carnegie says.

"Currently we are around about the intelligence level of a lizard. If computers carry on with their current trend, we should be hitting human-like intelligence by about 2050."

While the lizard comparison indicates that robots like Marvin aren't too bright, they can actually perform certain tasks extremely well in environments they are familiar with.

"Outside that environment, they are as helpless as babies."

Professor Carnegie has no plans to commercialise Marvin as a security guard robot. That's not why he was developed. "He's our test bed for developing a whole heap of new research.

"The thing that I would really like to have commercialised is our search-and-rescue robots because they can save people's lives."

These robots would minimise human involvement in high-risk emergency situations, like disaster zones caused by nature, terrorism, or contamination. But the Victoria University researcher says funding is a major hurdle. "We operate on such a scarce budget."

After the World Trade Centre disaster, a group from the University of South Florida tried using search-and-rescue robots at Ground Zero to help find people. But they didn't work. Professor Carnegie says since then, that American team has been given $5.6 million for research.

"I get about $10,000 a year."

That means the New Zealanders have to do everything from scratch, including building the robot "platform", which contains nothing new. This takes about three years.

"I would love to have money to be able to buy a platform and just start research on it."

If that were possible, development of search-and-rescue robots would go up by factor 10 and they could be functional in 12 months. But surviving on the dribs and drabs that we've got, it's probably going to be five years."

Professor Carnegie sounds as frustrated as Marvin in a corridor of obstacles. But he's boxing on.

FREAKY FACTS:

1. The world's first humanoid robot made its appearance in 1939. Elektro, built by Westinghouse, was an exhibit at the World Fair in New York. The 2.1m-tall robot could smoke, blow up balloons and speak more than 700 words. In 1960, it appeared as Thinko in the B-grade movie Sex Kittens Go to College. After that, its head was given to a retiring Westinghouse employee and its body sold for scrap metal.

2. Italian artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci drew up plans for an armoured humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for Nasa to use on Mars. This further backs up this author's long-held theory that Da Vinci was a time traveller!

3. Australian researchers are using nanotechnology to develop robots so small they will be able to travel through the narrowest blood vessels of the brain. The scientists from Monash University are developing these to use in surgery when a patient has had a brain injury or a blood clot. The robots, the width of two human hairs, are introduced by catheter and move through the brain by remote control.

4. Scavenger robots are being developed in Britain. Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal is that these release-and-forget robots can forage for their own fuel.

5. The United States military has a robotic army of 4000, including reconnaissance Talon bots. These small robots operate on tank-type treads and have been used to scout for roadside bombs in Iraq. One of the robots reportedly fell off a bridge and into a river in Iraq. Some time later, the soldiers set up the Talon's control unit and simply drove it out.