Machines of Loving Grace (34 page)

Andy Rubin went on a buying spree for Google when the company decided to develop next-generation robotics technologies.
Despite planning a decade-long effort, he walked away after just a year.
(
Photo courtesy of Jim Wilson/
New York Times/
Redux
)

In 1999, Rubin started Palo Alto–based Danger, Inc., a smartphone handset maker, with two close friends who had also been Apple engineers.
The company name reflected Rubin’s early obsession with robots.
(In the 1960s science-fiction television series
Lost in Space,
a robot guardian for a young boy would say “Danger, Will Robinson!”
whenever trouble loomed.) Danger created an early smartphone called the Sidekick, which was released in 2002.
It attracted a diverse cult following with its switchblade-style slide-out keyboard, downloadable software, email, and backups of personal information in “the cloud.”
While most businesspeople were still chained to their BlackBerrys, the Sidekick found popularity
among young people and hipsters, many of whom switched from PalmPilots.

Rubin was a member of a unique “Band of Brothers” who passed through Apple Computer in the 1980s, a generation of young computer engineers who came of age in Silicon Valley as disciples of Steve Jobs.
Captivated by Jobs’s charisma and his dedication to using good design and computing technology as levers to “change the world,” they set out independently on their own technology quests.
The Band of Brothers reflected the tremendous influence Jobs’s Macintosh project had on an entire Silicon Valley generation, and many stayed friends for years afterward.
Silicon Valley’s best and brightest believed deeply in bringing the Next Big Thing to millions of people.

Rubin’s robot obsession, however, was extraordinary, even by the standards of his technology-obsessed engineering friends.
While working on phones at Google, he bought an $80,000 robot arm and brought it to work, determined to program it to make espresso—a project that stalled for more than a year because one step in the process required more strength than the arm could exert.

Early on, Rubin had acquired the Internet domain name android.com, and friends would teasingly even refer to him as “the android.”
In his home in the hills near Palo Alto, evidence of the coming world of robots was everywhere, because, once again, Andy Rubin had seen something that hadn’t yet dawned on most others in Silicon Valley.
Rubin would soon get the opportunity to make the case for the coming age of mobile robots on a much larger stage.

I
n the spring of 2013, Google CEO Larry Page received a curious email.
Seated in his office at the company’s Mountain View headquarters, he read a message that warned him an alien attack was under way.
Immediately after he read the message, two large men burst into his office and instructed
him that it was essential he immediately accompany them to an undisclosed location in Woodside, the elite community populated by Silicon Valley’s technology executives and venture capitalists.

This was Page’s surprise fortieth birthday party, orchestrated by his wife, Lucy Southworth, a Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D.
A crowd of 150 people in appropriate alien-themed costumes had gathered, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who wore a dress.
In the basement of the sprawling mansion where the party was held, a robot arm grabbed small boxes one at a time and gaily tossed the souvenirs to an appreciative crowd.
The robot itself consisted of a standard Japanese-made industrial robot arm outfitted with a suction gripper hand driven by a noisy air compressor.
It helped that the robot could “see” the party favors it was picking up.
For eyes—actually a single “eye”—the robot used the same sensor Microsoft originally added to the Xbox to capture the gestures of video game players in the living room.

The box-throwing robot was a prototype designed by Industrial Perception, Inc., a small team then located in a garage just across the freeway from the Googleplex in Palo Alto.
When the robot, which had already briefly become an Internet sensation after a video showing its box-tossing antics had appeared on YouTube,
¹⁰
wasn’t slinging boxes, it was being prototyped as a new class of intelligent industrial labor that might take over tasks as diverse as loading and unloading trucks, packing in warehouses, working on assembly lines, and restocking grocery shelves.

Equipping the robots to understand what they are seeing was only part of the challenge.
Recognizing six-sided boxes had proven not to be an insurmountable problem, although AI researchers only recently solved it.
Identifying wanted items on grocery shelves, for example, is an immensely more complicated challenge, and today it still exceeds the capability of the best robot programmers.
However, at the Page party, the
Yaskawa robot had no apparent difficulty finding the party favor boxes, each of which contained a commemorative T-shirt.
Ironically, humans had packed each of those boxes, because the robot was not yet able to handle loose shirts.

The Industrial Perception arm wasn’t the only intelligent machine at the party.
A telepresence robot was out on the dance floor, swaying to the music.
It was midnight in Woodside, but Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was controlling the robot from New Hampshire—where it was now three
A
.
M
.

This robot, dubbed a “Beam,” was from Suitable Technologies, another small start-up just a couple of blocks away from Industrial Perception.
Both companies were spin-offs from Willow Garage, a robotics laboratory funded by Scott Hassan, a Stanford graduate school classmate and friend of Page’s.
Hassan had been the original programmer of the Google search engine while it was still a Stanford research project.
Willow Garage was his effort to build a humanoid robot as a research platform.
The company had developed a freely available operating system for robotics as well as a humanoid telepresence robot, PR2, that was being used in a number of universities.

That evening, both AI and IA technologies were thus in attendance at Page’s party—one of the robots attempted to replace humans while another attempted to augment them.
Later that year Google acquired Industrial Perception, the box-handling company, for Rubin’s new robot empire.

Scott Hassan’s Willow Garage spin-offs once again pose the “end of work” question.
Are Page and Hassan architects of a generation of technology that will deeply disrupt the economy by displacing both white-collar and blue-collar workers?
Viewed as a one-to-one replacement for humans, the Industrial Perception box handler, which will load or unload a truck, is a significant step into what has been one of the last bastions of unskilled human labor.
Warehouse workers, longshoremen, and lumpers all have rough jobs that are low paying and unrewarding.
Human workers moving boxes—which can weigh
fifty pounds or more—roughly every six seconds get tired and often hurt their backs and wind up disabled.

The Industrial Perception engineers determined that to win contracts in warehouse and logistics operations, they needed to demonstrate that their robots could reliably move boxes at four-second intervals.
Even before their acquisition by Google, they were very close to that goal.
However, from the point of view of American workers, a very different picture emerges.
In fact, the FedExes, UPSes, Walmarts, and U.S.
Post Offices that now employ many of the nation’s unskilled laborers are no longer primarily worried about labor costs and are not anxious to displace workers with lower-cost machines.
Many of the workers, it turns out, have already been displaced.
The companies are instead faced with an aging workforce and the reality of a labor scarcity.
In the very narrow case of loading and unloading trucks, at least, it’s possible the robots have arrived just in time.
The deeper and as yet unanswered question remains whether our society will commit to helping its human workers across the new automation divide.

A
t the end of 2013 in a nondescript warehouse set behind a furniture store in North Miami, a group of young Japanese engineers began running practice sessions fully a month before the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
They had studied under Masayuki Inaba, the well-known roboticist who himself was the prize student of the dean of Japanese robotics, Hirochika Inoue.
Inoue had started his work in robotics during graduate school in 1965 when his graduate thesis advisor proposed that he design a mechanical hand to turn a crank.

Robots have resonated culturally in Japan more positively than they have in the United States.
America has long been torn between the robot as a heroic “man of steel” and the image of a Terminator.
(Of course, one might reasonably wonder what Americans really felt about the Terminator after Californians
twice elected the Hollywood actor who portrayed it as governor!) In Japan, however, during the 1950s and 1960s the cartoon robot character Mighty Atom, called Astro Boy in other countries, had framed the more universally positive view of robotics.
To some extent, this makes sense: Japan is an aging society, and the Japanese believe they will need autonomous machines to care for their elderly.

The Japanese team, which named themselves Schaft, came out of JSK, the laboratory Dr.
Inoue had established at Tokyo University, early in 2013 with the aim of entering the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
They had been forced to spin off from Tokyo University because the school, influenced by the antimilitarist period after the end of World War II, prevented the university laboratory from participating in any event that was sponsored by the U.S.
military.
¹¹
The team took its name from a 1990s Japanese musical group of the electro-industrial rock genre.
Rubin had found the researchers through Marc Raibert.

When news broke that Google had acquired Schaft, it touched off a good deal of hand-wringing in Japan.
There was great pride in the country’s robotics technology.
Not only had the Japanese excelled at building walking machines, but for years they had commercialized some of the most sophisticated robots, even as consumer products.
Sony had introduced Aibo, a robotic pet dog, in 1999, and continued to offer improved versions until 2005.
Following Aibo, a two-foot-tall robot, Qrio, was developed and marketed but never sold commercially.
Now it appeared that Google was waltzing in and skimming the cream from decades of Japanese research.

The reality, however, is that while the Japanese dominated the first-generation robot arms, other nations are now rapidly catching up.
Most of the software-centric next-generation robot development work and related artificial intelligence research was happening in the United States.
Both Silicon Valley and Route 128 around Boston had once again become hotbeds of robotics start-up activity in 2012 and 2013.

When they agreed to join Rubin’s expanding robot empire, the Schaft researchers felt conflicted.
They expected that now that they were marching to Google’s drumbeat, they would have to give up their dream of competing in the Pentagon contest.
“No way!”
Rubin told them.
“Of course you’re going to stay in the competition.”
The ink was barely dry on the Google contract when the Japanese engineers threw themselves into the contest.
They started building three prototype machines immediately and they built mockups of each of the eight contest tasks—rough terrain, a door to open, a valve to close, a ladder, and so on—so they could start testing their robots immediately.
In June, when DARPA officials checked on the progress of each group, Team Schaft’s thorough preparation stunned Gill Pratt—at the time, none of the other teams had even started!

In September, when two members of the Schaft team traveled to a DARPA evaluation meeting held in Atlanta alongside the Humanoids 2013 technical conference, they brought a video to demonstrate their progress.
Though they spoke almost no English, the video hit like a thunderbolt.
The video showed that the young Japanese had solved all the programming problems while the other competitors were still learning how to program their robots.
The other teams at the conference were visibly in shock when the two young engineers left the stage.
Two months later in their Miami warehouse, the team had settled in and recreated a test course made from plywood.
Even though it was almost December, muggy and miserable Miami weather and mosquitoes plagued the researchers.
A local security guard who watched over the team was so bitten that he ended up in the hospital after a severe allergic reaction.

Schaft established a control station on a long table in the cavernous building.
Controlling the robot was dead simple—users operated the machine with a Sony Playstation PS3 controller, just like a video game.
The robot pilot borrowed sound bites from Nintendo games and added his own special audio feedback to the robot.
The researchers practiced each of the
tasks over and over until the robot could maneuver the course perfectly.