Transcript Towards a Robotic Ecology

Towards a Robotic Ecology
Briefing
August 27, 1999
Rodney Brooks
(MIT)
Greg Pottie
(UCLA)
Robot Ecologies
Where we are:
Single robot that has as its intellectual
metaphor a lone animal that perhaps
can interact with people.
Where we are going now:
Swarms of identical robots based on
social insect metaphors, perhaps with
augmented communication.
Where we want to go:
1
ISAT
Self deploying, and self sustaining
ecologies of plant-like robots and
animal-like robots that symbiotically
interact across many species, in order
to carry out complex missions without
logistical support.
DARPA
The Robot Ecologists
GUEST PRESENTERS
COMMITTEE ITINERANTS
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• Rod Brooks, ISAT
• Greg Pottie, UCLA
• Dick Urban, DARPA
• Elana Ethridge, SPC
• Polly Pook, IS Robotics
• Sarita Thakoor, JPL
• David Gerrold, writer
• Russ Frew, ISAT
• Al McLaughlin, ISAT
• Chuck Taylor, UCLA
• Maja Mataric, USC
2
ISAT
DARPA
Brian Wilcox, JPL
Paul MacCready, AeroVironment
Doug Stetson, JPL,
Helen Greiner, IS Robotics,
Ian Waitz, MIT
Dave Shaver, Lincoln Lab
Steve LaFontaine, MIT
Steve Leeb, MIT
Erik Syvrud, OST
John Blitch, DARPA
Mark Swinson, DARPA
Bob Nowak, DARPA
Keith Holcomb, Marines (ret)
Warfare in an Asymmetrical Situation
The game is changing--we must change our response.
ENGAGEMENT
SURVEILLANCE
• Stay outside of detection circle
 depends on cross section (self)
• Within circle want to:
 sense what is happening
 maintain long term presence
 tag things and infiltrate surgically
and outfiltrate(!)
 maintain covertness
detection/lethality
circle
3
ISAT
robots
DARPA
• Stay outside of lethality circle
 depends on weapons (of opponent)
• Want numerical advantage
• Within circle want to:
 sense what is happening
 provide targeting information
 disrupt the opponent’s cohesion
and will
Logistics
chain
people
Why Using Robots Is Hard, Yet Good
ENGAGEMENT
SURVEILLANCE
• Need covert deployment
• Need occasional mobility
• Need long term operation
 energy supply logistics
 possibly resupply (bio sensors)
• Need covert information return
• Robots can move
• Robots can be very small
• Robots can carry variety of
sensors
• Robots wait patiently
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Need rapid deployment
Need rapid mobility
Need logistics chain
Need reliable, rapid information
processing and transmission
• Need active responses
• Robots can move
• Robots are expendable
• Robots can carry a variety of
sensors
• Robots can provide many
viewpoints
We know where you are and what you are doing.
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ISAT
DARPA
Solution: The Robot Ecology
• Build an ecology of ‘animal’- and ‘plant’-like robots
 Go beyond the idea of single mobile robots
 Develop the collective as a super-organism where no single part
understands the whole
• The Robot Ecology
 is a self-constructing infrastructure
 supports diverse individual tasks and enables more complex
missions
 handles system degradation gracefully
 is self-sustaining throughout mission life
5
ISAT
DARPA
How The Components Combine
“seed” sensors
stationary sensor
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ISAT
mother plant
DARPA
caterpillar
(mobile sensor)
What new capabilities?
• Precondition the battlefield for timely and precise
targeting of enemy assets
 Know the environment
• scout, search, collect, penetrate, filter, report
 Tag enemy assets
• reduce fog; trace and target
 Weaken enemy infrastructure
• disrupt, confuse, attack cohesion and will
 Deploy friendly infrastructure
• communication, navigation, supplies, weapons
• High-quality low-cost real-time intelligence available to
small tactical units
7
ISAT
DARPA
Symbiosis Between People and Robots
• The robot ecology needs to intermesh with the human
organization in a symbiotic relationship
 People are better at some things
 Robots are better at some things
• Robots will be the remote extension of people
 Robots must support people rather than force people to support
robots
 People are freed to make the higher level judgements
• in command without having to control
• The currencies of the self-sustaining robot ecology are
 energy and information
• they trade against each other and between themselves
• they need to be supplied at the right places and times
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ISAT
DARPA
Application Scenarios
• Remote exploration
• Tagging of people/trucks/ships/submarines
• Self-deploying communications/power network
• Search and rescue
• Battlefield surveillance, mine countermeasures
• Response to bio/chem attack
• Monitoring (infesting) a building
• Monitoring remote site for underground facilities (UGF)
• Support for military operations in urban terrain (MOUT)
9
ISAT
DARPA
UGF
• Threats: missile sites, weapons factories (e.g. biochem),
command facilities, storage, weapons research
• What needs to be done: covertly characterize the facility
(activity and structure) and possibly disrupt it
• Task List: monitor input/output of facility (roads, vents,
effluent), sense nearby, sense inside, guide weapons,
disrupt facility
• Steps: locate, infiltrate/disrupt, infestation, gather
information; establish logistical chain for
communication, sample retrieval and/or facility
disruption
10
ISAT
DARPA
Underground Facility Characterization
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UAV follows;
releases microflyers, “seeds”
(maybe
satellite detect)
pods, creepers,
burrs, mobile
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

burrowing device from mother plant
down to buried targets
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ISAT
communication relay to hill
DARPA
creeper down air vent;
burr placed inside;
set up sensor net
(vibrations, gases, etc.)
[not to scale]
MOUT
• Threats: snipers, suicide bombers, biohazards,
traps/mines; complication of neutrals as shields, chaos
and confusion
• What needs to be done: avoid entering circle of lethality
while establishing order and control
• Task List: navigation, communication, clearing, securing
cleared areas, security in crowded/cluttered areas
• Steps: long-range deployment (e.g. to rooftops), local selfdeployment, sense assess and reposition cycle, weapons
use; diversity and numbers to overcome countermeasures
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ISAT
DARPA
Military Operations in Urban Terrain
Sensors defend
secured areas
Microflyers “harvest”
bio-samples
Camouflaged devices for tracking,
scanning, extracting bio-samples
Creeper/climbers
gather indoor
/outdoor info;
form comm relay
Robo-insects gain access inside
doors/windows, around corners,
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ISAT
DARPA
not to scale
Why Can’t We Just Do This Today?
 Scaling
• 10’s (now) to 100’s and 1000’s
 Heterogeneity
• Symbiotic relationships of plantbots, mobots, and people
 Adaptivity
• Context-aware self-organizing systems
• Some holes in base technology research areas
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Mobility
Self-configuring networks
Sensors
Energy sources
Cooperative behavior
ISAT
DARPA
System issues supported by technologies
• There are some key systems challenges
Energy sources
Cooperative
behavior
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ISAT
Adaptability
Self-configuring
networks
Sensors
Heterogeneous
Mobility
Scaling
Systems Issues Relate to Technologies
NA
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1
0
2
1
2
NA
1
0
1
0
1
DARPA
Each of these systems issues
can only be pushed forward
with adequate support from
the underlying technologies.
The technologies have
certain levels of development
as they relate to the systems
issues.
Evaluation Scale:
0
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=
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=
=
no idea
fragile lab demo
solid lab demo
real stuff
Mobility: rolling, boring, swimming, creeping, hatching, flying,
walking, climbing, reaching, standing, peering...
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ISAT
DARPA
Plantbots
• Current Examples:
 factory robots, sensor networks
• Future Examples:
 solar net, sensor net, sensor seed, creeper vine, balloon
launcher, burr, lure, tumbleweed, bio-station, any sci-fi alien
plant form...
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ISAT
DARPA
Plantbots
• Capabilities
 Accumulate/convert energy, information, provide shelter (e.g.,
for short-lived bio-sensors), resupply; no self-locomotion for
whole plant
• Benefits
 Limited mobility (seeds, creepers) can lead to advantage in
information or energy collection
 Will provide the infrastructure for the mobile ecology
components
• Challenge: requires extensive new research to devise
appropriate forms and interoperation
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ISAT
DARPA
Communications Self-Deployment

air drop
 spreads
over tree

climbs up,
establishes new
nettwork

climbs
down
not
19 to scale
ISAT

sends out network
on ground
DARPA
'bots crawl
 mobile
on jungle floor
Sensor State of the Art
• Current:
 Lots of low-power compact sensors exist
• acoustic, magnetic, seismic, pressure, IR, and visible
 Other sensors require considerable development to meet
reliability/size requirements, e.g. bio/chem
 In general, cost dominated by communications and signal
processing, rather than the sensor itself
• Imaging (IR or visible) costly in signal processing and (especially)
communications
• Active sensors (e.g. radar) costly in power; require energy support
network, cueing by other sensors for sustainability
• Future - Systems Approach:
 Exploit large numbers of sensors via self-organizing mobile
networks
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ISAT
DARPA
Self Configuring Networks
• General-Purpose Networks won’t work:
 set-up is labor-intensive, even for military field command posts
 can’t be deployed in denied areas
 pushing the limits result in high energy/complexity costs
• Future Mobile Sensor Networks by contrast
 are relaxed in all aspects if processing is done locally
 exploitation of application and mobility allows energy-efficient
and scalable design
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ISAT
DARPA
Benefits of Mobile Sensor Networks
• Current: static distributed sensor net
 provides dense data gathering
 but, taxes information management through large numbers
• Small motion can dramatically improve detection and
communication
 e.g., maximize field of view, line-of-sight, form synthetic
apertures
 with better signal need many fewer elements
• Larger motion enables dynamic network deployment
 repair network failures,
 track and investigate threats beyond initial region of sensors
 extend or change detection region
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ISAT
DARPA
Energy Generation/Extraction/Distribution
• Many methods
1. battery exchange
2. wires (incl. telephone and power grid)
3. solar
4. wind/water/waves
5. beaming (incl. concentrator mirrors)
6. hydrocarbon/fuel cells
7. convoys/depot system
8. animals (burrs and lures)
9. vehicles (burrs; exploit vibrations)
10. hybrid, e.g., both capacitors and batteries for high
currents
• Research required into how to best combine methods for
particular systems and missions
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ISAT
DARPA
Energy Conversion / Sustainment

micro-flyer moves battery

plugs in

creeper comes out
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ISAT
DARPA
Future Energy Management
• Sustainment through ecology
 Design of energy system has large impact on
sustainability; e.g. plantbot energy network for energy
accumulation and distribution
• Efficient use through distributed information
 Network provides global information to minimize
energy waste
• navigation assistance, actuation/mobility avoidance, resource
discovery and management, exploitation of heterogeneity of
ability/location
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ISAT
DARPA
Cooperation: The Lessons of Ants
• Specialization and castes enable range of tasks to be
performed
• Cooperative behaviors enlarge the set of tasks
• Main benefits of colonies however are:
 parallelism of tasks
 collective reliability with individual unreliability
• Ants apply distributed algorithms for collective control
• Much more research is needed to enable robot colonies to get
these kinds of benefits
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ISAT
DARPA
networking, competing, cooperating, distributing, sweeping...
Current cooperative robots are mostly
homogeneous, and never more than
20 robots
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ISAT
DARPA
Robot Cooperation Challenges
• Centralized systems are brittle and require excessive
communications resources.
 Must identify effective heuristics for distributed coordination
• Communications and energy network self-organization cannot
be general purpose
 Cooperation must be pursued in applications context
• Lack of operational data
 Field tests to discover the needed behaviors for particular
missions, and integrate human operators and larger
military/industrial infrastructure
• Lack of general theory of cooperation
 With a better understanding, can reduce number of experiments
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ISAT
DARPA
Robot Ecology Today
• Factory automation:
 adjust environment for convenience of robots
• Global economy:
 large infrastructure in place for symbiotic human/machine
interaction on regional and global scales
• Battlefield:
 unpredictable environment and no infrastructure, and thus many
people to sustain each robot
• Need sustained autonomous operation in diverse environments
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ISAT
DARPA
Robot Ecology Tomorrow
• Scaling
 More than 20 robots
• Heterogeneous robots
 Diverse sets of robots working together in sustained
missions
• Adaptivity
 Context-aware adaptation among members of the
ecology for operation in unplanned environments
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ISAT
DARPA
Getting There
• Experiments
 short-term, incremental progress
• integration of existing components, medium scaling
 long-term, revolutionary steps
• incorporation of new algorithms, components, large scale
 standard test conditions, and real-world
• Standard parts
 modular robot software and hardware for plug and play
• enables creation of diverse, distributed research community
• Fundamental theoretical research
 cooperation, scaling, adaptation
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ISAT
DARPA