By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos
While finishing graduate school in the 1980s, I knew a few people involved in robotic vision, or how to build robots that recognize objects to pick up or avoid. Instead of a humanoid robot, think of a single eyeball mounted near a disembodied arm to find and manipulate simple objects. If your robot could pick up a torus (i.e. a donut), and dunk it in a container (i.e., a coffee cup), you’d have a prize-winning doctoral thesis. It is not far from the truth to say that one could see a graduate student dunking a donut in a coffee cup while programming a robot to do the same. Kind of stupid, now that I think about it.
Nevertheless, one of the 1990s spinoffs from the MIT AI Lab, where the torus-dunking was being researched, was the company iRobot, funded on the promising idea of adding more body parts to robots. The company iRobot attracted substantial funding from the Department of Defense to develop robotic mules to carry gear for soldiers. However, they soon realized there were many more lazy civilians at home than in the Marines. This was the genesis of robotic vacuum cleaners and the iRobot Roomba product line.
As much as I resist picking up a broom, I also resisted buying a gimmicky pseudo-robot, until, feeling that I was falling further and further behind in 21st-century societal norms, I succumbed to buying my own, meaning my own robotic vacuum, not my own broom. I assured Terry that we could blissfully watch a movie while the robotic puck next door picked up all our crumbs, and, with the solemn promise that if the robot idea failed, I would follow up with her “Just pick up and push the darn broom.” directive, I ordered the Roomba 670 directly from iRobot.
A few days later, I was unpacking our labor-saving orb, which my AI suggested I christen Dustin Bieber. I admit that connecting Dustin to WiFi, installing the iRobot App, and programming its cleaning schedule took much longer than picking up all those crumbs around the dining table with a hand vacuum. Nevertheless, imagine my satisfaction when I pressed that green button on my smartphone and yelled, arms skyward, “It’s Alive, It’s Alive!”
My suction serf began its life of toil and subservience, and we walked to the den to enjoy a relaxing evening.
The reassuring soft hum next door gave me a sense of confidence, and I visualized getting a robotic snowblower next. After a little while, I paused the movie when the humming stopped, replaced by a repeated bumping sound. Of course, I should have moved the chairs out of the way to help Dustin Bieber work more efficiently. I stacked them in a corner and returned to the movie.
Wait, what is that new grinding sound? Oops, Dustin Bieber was trying to swallow throw rug. Bad Bieber!!! I rolled the throw rugs onto the dining table and watched with satisfaction as a chastened Dustin made a beeline to the underside of the china cabinet, sucking up some ten-year-old dust bunnies. Back to the movie!
“David, the THING is stuck,” Terry announced and pointed to the Roomba bouncing between two dining table legs. Deciding that emptying the room of all furniture seemed a little too much effort, I commanded Dustin to a timeout in the corner and finished the job with that forsaken broom.
I have a son who works at JPL, and his job title, believe it or not, is Robotics Technologist. He has worked on the Mars helicopter and is working on other missions that may explore one of Jupiter’s moons twenty years from now. I don’t remember whether he has his own Dustin Bieber, but a helicopter robotic vacuum might solve a few of my problems. I will discuss it with him the next time I see him, but in the meantime, I’ll look up some old robotics papers from the 1980s. Maybe some MIT AI Lab PhD student taught a robotic arm to “Just pick up and push the darn broom.”