Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Last week, Tesla held an event called we Robot, in which attendees got to see a new vehicle that was dubbed the robo Van, although Elon Musk pronounced it as reboven. There was a cyber cab that must claims is going to cost less than thirty thousand dollars when it goes into production sometime before twenty twenty seven, which would potentially allow the average person to run a small uber or lift business out of their own garage with the cybercab giving people rides. Though that raises a lot of questions I have, like liability issues. Let's say that your cybercab got into an act extent. Are you held liable for that? Or is Tesla or I don't know. That's a discussion for another time. But they also gave a closer look at the humanoid Optimus robots, and they had robots that were dancing and serving drinks and some that even held conversations with attendees. Now, those robots had some help. Tesla also did not hide this fact. This is not like a gotcha because the company was very forthright about this. Remote operators were augmenting the robot's abilities while those robots were on the floor. So, for example, those conversations were actually human beings who were using the robots kind of like an advanced bipedal intercom system. But it made me think about the long history of humans trying to make humanoid robots. Now, in some ways this pursuit is a bit strange because a legged, bipedal humanoid robot brings with it a ton of challenges that you could sidestep if you just made some compromises to your design approach, like why does the robot need to be bipedal and humanoid? If you decided the robot should move around on wheels or tank treads, or maybe move around on all fours, or maybe you make like a centaur like robot where it has like a base with four legs and then a torso with two arms and it stands upright. You know, we make the rules like it doesn't have to take any specific form factor, and you could do that and get around a lot of the challenges you would face if you were to instead focus on this humanoid bipedal approach. Creating a robot that can move the way humans do is hard. It has taken decades of research and development to accomplish that to a reliable degree, and even then it's typically under very controlled circumstances. When you start getting into stuff like uneven terrain, it gets a lot trickier. Okay, In other ways, the desire to build a human like robot is totally understandable. You know, my first reaction to anyone talking about developing a humanoid robot is why why are you doing that? What's your reasoning? Because if you can accomplish the same goal using a different method of locomotion, that might be the better choice. However, if you want this robot to be able to do tasks in our human world, like tasks that human beings would typically carry out on their own, well, making the robot human shaped makes more sense. You don't have to adapt your environment to the abilities of the robot, right because a set of stairs or a ladder would defeat most wheeled robots. They would come to it and say, well, I can't navigate up this obstacle, and if my goal is on the other end of that obstacle, that's a problem. So to really maneuver within the human world, it helps to have your typical human shape and typical human capabilities. Now, the flip side of this is that we humans, we have an obligation to make spaces accessible for those who have an atypical shape or atypical capabilities. We need to make sure that people who don't have the use of say, their legs, can still access really important stuff. That's a responsibility we have, but that's a topic for another episode. Plus, I think there is something inherent within us, or at least inherent within some of us, some human beings, and it drives us to want to create companions that look and to an extent behave the way we do. So much of science fiction is based around variations of this idea. Arguably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is kind of along this track of thinking. You know, you have you your crazy scientists who desires to play god, and then you have General Capex's influential work, Rossum's Universal Robots. That's the work where we get the term robot in the first place, or the replicants in Blade Runner, which actually pretty closely resemble the robots in capex work, to the works of Isaac Asimov and beyond. So in many of these pieces there's a warning that is given that the pursuit to build and exploit robots often comes tinged with arrogance and hubris, and it rarely works out well for anybody by the end of the story. Now, not all of those robots were mechanical or electro mechanical or digital creatures. In fact, like Frankenstein's Monster, the robots in Capex's work and the replicants in Blade Runner are all synthetic life forms. They're not masses of wires and circuit boards. Asimov's work introduced more mechanical and electro mechanical creatures with artificial brains. But ultimately, all the stories involve creatures and creations that gain an awareness of themselves and their place in the world, and how they reject the hand that has been dealt to them, often to dramatic and catastrophic degrees. Now, what the future holds as far as humanoid robots go has yet to be written, though we can certainly look back and talk about some of the history in the field of humanoid robots that have happened so far. Before robots, we have examples of automata that mimiced human movement and capabilities. Some of these were actual clockwork creations, such as the Karakuri. These are puppets from Japan, dating as far back as the seventeenth century, so the sixteen hundreds. These used mechanisms to power certain movements, usually repeatable movements like serving tea or playing musical instrument. Some of the early automata weren't automata at all. They were hoaxes. The famed mechanical Turk creation of Wolfgang von Kemplan is such an example. Kempland actually stowed a human operator inside a cabinet that was attached to this supposed automaton that had been designed to play chess. In reality, it was the human operator hidden inside the cabinet that was controlling everything. It was really just a puppet, not an automaton. But these creations, whether actual automata or not, were limited in function, and typically they weren't bipedal either, not truly like they weren't moving around on two legs. They might be stationary in the case of the mechanical turk, or they might have wheels and they have like robes that cover up the wheels, so it looks like they're kind of gliding across, but they're not actually walking. And I also have to include one story I came across because it's just too absurd to leave out. So in eighteen forty eight. In May of eighteen forty eight, a couple of different journals, one of them being Scientific American, published an account of a supposed encounter with a remarkable automaton that was capable of standing up, sitting down, and even of speaking. The automaton itself was apparently almost indistinguishable from a human being. The account was said to have originally published in quote an Augsburg Gazette end quote. So Augsburg is a city in Bavaria in Germany, and so the original article was supposedly written in German and then translated into English to be published in various periodicals in the United States and elsewhere. The automaton's name was mister Eisenbrass, which is great, but the name of the inventor was doctor Lube, which, y'all, that's like a gift from the gods of comedy right there. Mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube. I maintain that someone should make a stage production that has the title mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube, and it might well be me unless someone beats me to it. And someone probably will beat me to it, because I'm infamous for coming up with ideas for shows or novels or whatever and then just sitting on them. But my goodness, mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube. That's that's a title, y'all. Anyway, according to this article, the author and some other visitors went to the lab of doctor Lube, which I imagine was down a slippery slope. Anyway, The doctor was quote seated at a sort of cabinet having a keyboard somewhat similar to that of a piano forte arranged on one side of it, and nearly in the center of a room sat a fashionably dressed gentleman who rose and bowed as we entered endo quote. And then, according to the article, the visitors engaged in some small talk with this fashionably dressed gentleman, and the gentleman actually took a seat after the visitors had sat down, and eventually the doctor stops playing at his keyboard, and mister Eisenbrass goes quiet, and Lube explains that the whole thing is a mechanical contraption. Only then do the visitors notice the cables going from the keyboard console to the chair of mister Eisenbrass. Now, according to the piece, Lube procured bones from a human being, presumably a dead one, which is a big ol' ick already, but then use rubber tubes to kind of serve as musculature, and that he also created quote a perfect system of nerves made of fine platinum wire and covered with silk end Quote to what end, you might say, what what are the nerves for? I guess the idea is that electric motors would pull upon the rubber tubes. It does explain that there were electro magnets that were in use in this system, and that the tubes just served as muscles that when you pulled on them, would cause the contraction you would associate with a human body. I actually at first assumed, since they were talking about rubber tubes, that this was going to be a pneumatic system where you would use air to achieve similar results. Right, you pump air into something to extend a limb, and you would allow air to escape to contract the limb. But that apparently is not how this was supposed to work. Supposedly, the keyboard allowed the doctor to produce incredible results just by pressing a few keys, like I guess there was a key that was just labeled small talk or something, and that the figure was apparently capable of quote walking, talking, singing, playing the piano, and doing many other things with as much ease and precision as an accomplished man. End quote. The author then proactively chides the reader for undoubtedly asking so what good is on this? And then the author goes on to talk about how mechanical servants will replace all those undependable lauts and scally wags who currently act as servants, and thus give the women of the household the freedom to carry out their feminine duties as caretaker of the home just by tickling some ivories. Yeah, this article is well and truly both sexist and classist. Anyway, to say that I am skeptical about this account is putting it lightly. I feel fairly certain that no such demonstration ever actually took place, or if there were some kind of demonstration, it did not unfold as described in this article. I did try to find the original article written in German. I assumed that the German gazette that was referenced in the English piece must have been the Algemina Zeitung that was published in Augsburg, Germany for most of the nineteenth century, and was like the main paper not just of Augsburg, but like of that region of Germany. However, I found no record of Eisenbrass or doctor Lube anyway. As diverting as mister Eisenbrass and doctor Lube are, I feel confident in saying that the capability of building a robot that could maintain its balance standing still, let alone walking around all without other means of support, was likely well outside the reach of even the most clever of innovators in the mid eighteen hundreds. That seems like that's just a no brainer. When it comes to creating a two legged robot, one where most of the mass is actually above the legs of the robot, not contained within the legs, things get really tricky because a lot of physics have to be considered before engineers could get serious about bipedal robots. If we relied solely on trial and error and just figured we're going to get this right, we'd likely not be anywhere as far along as we are right now. So when we come back, we're going to consider how challenging it is to create something that walks around on two legs. But before we get to that, and I get a little unbalanced, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So what's the big deal with walking around on two legs? Lots of people do it all the time. You know, toddlers can get the hang of it without too much trouble, and we celebrate it when it happens like that's a big deal, But then shortly after that it's It really becomes just a source of stress as the toddlers toddle along toward one danger or another. But you're entirely dependent upon just two points of contact with your surrounding environment. If you're talking about a true bipedal form that is capable of moving around round the area, and those two points of contact with the environment are essentially the bottoms of the foot seats. That's, of course, if everything is actually going as you wanted it to. If things have gone poorly, you might actually have lots of different points of contact with the ground. But that's because you went horizontal after something went wrong. So you've got your robot. It's got two legs, the two points of contact with the ground or the bottom of the feet likely the legs and the feet, and your robot in general has a number of degrees of freedom. So degrees of freedom are joints that allow movement along at least one axis. The point of contact with the ground could actually be considered a passive degree of freedom in itself. And you're also relying on friction to allow your robot to stand up, to maintain balance, and to get anywhere. If the robot's feet were frictionless, then it wouldn't be able to stay up right at all, let alone walk. And you've got all this weight above the legs that you have to worry about. So have you ever balanced something like, say, a baseball bat, on the palm of your hand. If you do that with a baseball bat and you're using the narrow part the handle in of the words of the bat and you're balancing that on your palm and the thick part of the bat is up in the air, you know that little motions can create big results. Right A small movement at the base can cause the top to really sway, and that requires you to make larger corrections down at the base in order to keep everything in balance. Well, that's kind of what it's like to try and figure out how to make a bipedal robot walk while maintaining its balance. You've got a inertia to deal with, and that really affects balance. How do you make sure the mass above the legs doesn't throw everything off kilter whenever it starts moving or when it stops moving. How do you correct for that so that your robot doesn't just tumble over? How do you keep your bot upright? One early discussion that became a core component in the pursuit of bipedal robots revolved around a concept that came to be known as the zero moment point or ZMP. So a pair of smarty pants is from Russia named Beyomir Vukabratovich and Davor Jurichic first described this back in the nineteen sixties. Now, the actual term zero moment point would be coined a little bit later, but it was used to describe what they were talking about, and the whole concept revolves around a moment in which the net reaction forces between a bipedal mechanism's feet and the ground are essentially zero and there's no movement along the horizontal plane. So that means, like forward momentum and gravity they've kind of canceled each other out. You've hit this zero moment where you don't have to worry about the robot tipping forward and falling over. It is you could think of as a moment of stability, and the robot, assuming no external forces are acting upon it, will remain upright, assuming that ZMP is maintained. Now, this discussion really drives home how stability can be a huge challenge. As robots move, they must deal with inertia and you have to know the math to achieve dynamic stability if your robot is to remain upright, whether it's walking, running, jumping, or whatever. And in fact, it gets increasingly more difficult as you go down those tasks. Walking is hard, running is really hard, and jumping is really really hard. Like the jump part might be easy, the landing and staying upright that's the hard part. Otherwise your robot's gonna topple over. And while watching a robot take a tumble might be a great YouTube video. In practice, in the real world, you obviously don't want your robots to be falling over. You want your robots to be stable and capable of moving around environments without causing damage or potentially injury to people, to be able to maneuver. It's tough and robots are expensive. You don't want them falling over. Then you're thinking, well, that's twenty thousand dollars to get this thing back on its feet. Again, that's not a great way to reach progress either. So to plan the motion for a robot, you need to be able to calculate the zero moment point or ZMP. You need to figure out which joints the robot is going to have to engage in order to achieve stability under its various operating conditions, and those conditions could include things outside of your strict control. It's one thing to calculate how the robot can achieve stability when it's walking across a level floor that has a firm surface, But what about a floor that surface isn't as firm. Maybe it's a little squishy, you know, maybe it's a nineteen seventies shag carpet or something, or what if the floor isn't level, what if the terrain is actually uneven, you know, kind of like a typical sidewalk in the city of Atlanta. How does a robot compensate for all this, remain stable and keep itself from pitching over? This is a non trivial challenge, and it takes a lot of work to get to a point where robots are sophisticated enough to achieve stability. Engineers have had to take a lot into consideration. Would more degrees of freedom help or does that actually overcomplicate matters? I mean, there's no reason why we should be constrained to the same degrees of freedom that a person has. Right Like, we could think, oh, let's mimic the way humans work and make sure that the ankles and the knees and the hips all have the same points of articulation. Or we could say, well, there's no reason why we couldn't have more or fewer joints if it makes the operations work better. So that's something to think about, you know. And then walking would require shifting stability so that the robots can maintain itself with just one foot in contact with the ground, right like, suddenly points of contact have halved. If you're running, it's even harder because with running, at least the definition of running that roboticists use, there's a moment that may only last just for a split second, but there's a moment in which both of the robots feet are not touching the ground. So how do you achieve stability when your point of contact is continually interrupted? Jumping is even harder, right, because you're really leaving the ground then, and how do you ensure that landing you do so in a way that you maintain stability. So that ZMP was a huge deal. It still is a huge deal. Not all robot locomotion is centered around ZMP calculations, by the way, but a lot of it still is. So a lot of the work in bipedal robots, particularly in the seventies and eighties, involved calculating ZMP and keeping the robot within that zone while engineering movements. So calculating ZMP is one thing. Building a robot that can balance is another. Even building robot that's capable of static stability is no simple task. Static stability just means the robot is able to stand still and not fall over, and believe it or not, that's easier said than done. In nineteen seventy four, labs at the School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University in Japan started a project with the goal of building a stable bipedal robot. This project became known as Weibot wabot that stands for Waseda Robot. The labs created a new focus group within the laboratory system at the university. It's called the Bioengineering Group, and their first effort, the Waybot one, wasn't exactly something that you would mistake as a human being. It was not like a smooth humanoid robot. You would never look at it and think it was anything other than a robot. In fact, it looked kind of like a giant erector set. It was very much a big, blocky, metallic humanoid robot. So it had a limb control system, obviously very important if you're going to have a walking robot. It also had a primitive vision system. It even was able to converse in Japanese to a certain degree. They said that it had the in electrical capacity of like a one and a half year old Keep in mind this is the early nineteen seventies. It was tethered to computer systems and power systems. There was not yet a point where we had reached a miniaturization where you could have all that computing power, not to mention electrical power on board the robot itself. If you had done that, the robot would either need to be huge or would be carrying the biggest backpack you've ever seen in order to have all the computational and electrical power necessary to operate this thing. So, yeah, it was tethered. The Waybot was the first humanoid robot to achieve static stability, and later it would be the first digitally controlled anthropomorphic robot at all that was able to achieve dynamic stability, and statically stable means that the robot can remain balanced while standing still. Dynamically balanced refers to robots that are maintaining that stability while they are still in motion. Going from one to the other and back again is actually really hard. Like achieving one is hard, achieving the other one is also hard. Going back and forth between still and moving and maintaining balance is even harder. You know, remaining dynamically stable is often easier than going from dynamic to static, assuming that you know motions are smooth, and fast enough to counter the forces acting on the robot, because when you think about it, walking is really a series of falls. It's like you're falling and you're catching yourself over and over again. You move forward when you walk, not just by moving your legs. You know, you kind of lean forward into the walk as well, and for a moment it's as if you're falling forward and that you would face plant into the ground ahead of you. But of course you've moved your leg to catch yourself, and this process repeats, so you're propelling yourself forward by constantly almost falling but catching yourself over and over and over again. Now we do this without really thinking about it, like once we learn how to walk, we don't have to focus on this. This is this is just how we do it. Robots, however, have to calculate this stuff in order to do it properly, in order to catch themselves with just the right amount of force to keep things moving and not to use too much or too little force and then risk taking a fall. Tons of work in robotics continued around the world towards this goal of creating bipedal humanoid robots, but nearly all the articles I read for this episode. Make a big jump from the nineteen seventies to the mid nineteen nineties. That's when Honda unveiled a robot that they called the humanoid P two. So Honda had actually been developing humanoid robots for about a decade before showing off the P two. A series that was kind of the in secret R and D works that was called the E series of robots, and this was in the nineteen eighties. These E robots were primitive, but they demonstrate the capability to walk on level ground under very controlled circumstances. The first E robot, for example, was able to walk at an extremely deliberate pace because it was said that each step took about five seconds to complete. I challenge you to try walking that way, even if it's just a couple of feet, count to five slowly per step. That is slow, but it illustrates how challenging it was to design a robot capable of walking in a biped away. Now, the first E series robot was built in nineteen eighty six. It essentially looked like a pair of legs attached to robotic hips and that's it like. It didn't have any top half. There was no torso or arms or anything like that. The B two wouldn't debut until nineteen ninety six. Honda had a decade of work developing humanoid robotics before they revealed to the public what they had been up to. And like I said, E zero, not very humanoid. It is like a free, free walking pelvis, robotic pelvis. The later robots in the E series started to look I don't know, in my opinion, even more strange, Like one of them looks kind of like a microwave oven that has legs. One of them looks sort of like the front end of a fancy car, like a Rolls Royce, but with legs. You would never call any of them human in shape, but they were gradually evolving toward that. The P two in nineteen ninety six looked much more human in that it had legs, and it had arms and a torso and a head. Now this head was rectangular, and it was it was wider than it was tall. It was not human looking at all, but it demonstrated that Honda had been hard at work tackling this BikeE Hetle challenge, and it would serve as a foundation for a much more famous Honda robot just a few years later, a robot that would debut in two thousand. It was called Asmo. Now I have a fun connection with Asimo, and I will talk about that, but first let's take another quick break. All right, So the year was two thousand and seven. Asimo had been a thing for the better part of the two thousands, like it debuted in early two thousand and now it's two thousand and seven. I had just been hired by a company called HowStuffWorks dot com, and one of my first assignments was to rewrite and to update the article on how Asimo works. So I researched the project, including the lofty goal that the engineers had set to have a robot that couldn't just walk but could also run. So it would be a robot that, at little points would have both feet leave the ground just for a moment, but still be able to maintain its balance. Now that was a huge accomplishment. Even if you were to watch videos and it kind of looks like Asmo's doing a little hopping dance you might do if you were in need of getting to a restroom, Like I think of it as oh, it's doing the peepee dance. But you know, watch Asmo running. It's cute, it's weird, it has this odd sort of tone to it, I would say, But it was phenomenal because yes, for a split second, both feet are off the ground, and yet when the opposite foot makes contact with the floor, the robot would maintain its balance and be able to continue running. Asimo looks a lot more human than P two did. In fact, it looks like sort of a diminutive astronaut in a spacesuit. I actually got to meet Asimo once when I was at Disneyland in California, because there was demonstration of Asimo that was a real blast. I watched this presentation that they gave, and then I mentioned to a cast member that I had written an article about how Asima worked, and they brought me aside and I got to meet the robot, which was a really fun moment for me. That was kind of cool. Anyway, Asimo would go on to establish a lot of firsts in the bipedal humanoid robot space. Not only was it the first one to run, it could also climb and descend stairs, at least eventually it could. One early demonstration didn't go so well, and Asimo tripped, but it later demonstrated those capabilities, and these were things that would be built upon in future robotic projects, both at Honda and elsewhere. I should also mention that Asimo was largely a programmed robot, in that it would maneuver around and interact with an environment that had been carefully mapped out for the robot. So it's not like it was spontaneous. It wasn't coming into a brand new environment finding its way or around picking things up that kind of stuff. It was following a very specific set of instructions and it knew where everything was supposed to be and where it was supposed to go. So it was not like an autonomous robot. But that really wasn't what the project was about. It wasn't about autonomy. It was about robotic locomotion and interacting in human spaces. So you have to keep in mind that this whole approach to robotics is multidisciplinary in nature. It requires lots of different work in varying fields, some of which aren't even in technology. I'll talk more about that later. In twenty fifteen, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency here in the United States aka DARPA held a robotics challenge. So DARPA is known for contracting with various companies and research facilities to develop bleeding edge technologies potentially useful for the purposes of national defense. They're not always couched in those specific terms, but that's the directive of DARPA. DARPA has played a part in everything from the development of the Internet to the early days of driverlest car technology. Well in twenty fifteen, they had a lofty goal set for robotics teams and it was all inspired by a terrible disaster. So in twenty eleven, an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The power plants backup systems were damaged, and this led to a situation in which the plant's reactors began to overheat because there was no power that could be used to operate the cooling system in order to keep everything under control, and ultimately this overheating led to a containment failure and radioactive material was released into the environment. It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Cleaning up after the disaster was a really dangerous job. Response workers would be subjected to potentially dangerous levels of radiation or extended periods of time. DARPA's challenge was to give robotics teams a set of tasks that a robot would have to complete with minimal direction and intervention from the teams. The idea being let's work toward a technological solution where we could develop robots that could step in into situations that were like Fukushima and take the place of humans so that human beings don't put their lives at risk to do this kind of stuff. The robots, since they have no lives, they could go and do it and we wouldn't be putting any human life in jeopardy. That was the concept. But to do this, these robots would have to do very human like things, and they have to maneuver in a very human like world because it was designed by humans, right, so no big surprise there. So the robots would have to do stuff like get in, to get out of and operate a vehicle, to be able to open doors and step through doorways, to pick up a tool and to use it properly. And teams were given some but not all, the information that they would actually need in order to complete the various tasks that DARPA had laid out, and the reason why they weren't given everything is because the whole concept requires teams to build a robot that could accomplish goals in a world that is unpredictable and uncontrolled for the most part. In a real emergency, there may be no way to account for all the variables, and depending on the nature of the emergency, a team might not be able to maintain a direct connection with their robot, so the robot would need to be able to handle some of this autonomously. Now, most of the challenges were pretty darn straightforward, and they would have been trivial for most people to be able to complete if they were given the assignment. You know, if you ask your typical human to get into a vehicle kind of like a golf cart and to drive to a specific location, to then get out of that vehicle, to open a door, go through the door, pick up a power drill, drill a hole in a wall, climb some stairs, and navigate some rubble, and you'd likely see a lot of people succeed at this. It's again a pretty simple set of tasks for most people, that's not a tough gig, but for robots, it's a totally different story. Now. There are compilations of videos of the various teams participating in this competition that show just how challenging it really was. There are videos of robots that, upon trying to just walk through a doorway, fall over. One robot completed the list of tasks, turned wave to the crowd, then fell over because that balance thing is really hard, y'all. Creating humanoid robots that can interact with the technology that was made for human beings requires a ton of consideration and cross disciplinary work. For one thing, sometimes it requires roboticists to ask, hey, why did we make this thing work in this specific way. It's almost like you have to go through reverse engineering the world around you in order to understand why things are the way they are. That doesn't always end with an answer that makes much sense. By the way, sometimes we're like, wow, we should really change this because this is not the best way to do it, but at that point it's the established way to do it. Ultimately, a team from the Republic of Korea won this competition. The winning robot was named DRC dash Qubo Hubo. It completed the series of tasks in just under forty five minutes, and the team took home a two million dollar cash prize. Now, no, lie, two million dollars, that's a lot of money, But I would be willing to bet that the two million dollars doesn't remotely cover the costs of all the research, development, and production of the robot itself. I bet if you were to add up all the expenses of making this robot, it would be more than two million dollars. But the money wasn't really the full goal of this thing. Like that was an award, but you weren't doing it to win the money. It's this challenge trying to figure out a way to achieve this really tough goal set out by the nature of the challenge itself. That's the real call the engineers out there, know what I'm talking about. Like that thrill of tackling a problem and figuring out a solution. That's really what drives a lot of engineers. Now, if anything, the challenge illustrated just how hard it is to build a humanoid robot that can function properly. Now, the benefits are pretty clear. You know, this kind of robot could potentially step in during situations like the Fukushima disaster scenarios in which a human would be put into danger and the robot, due to its design, could interface with systems that had been built for humans. That's understandably a worthy goal. It's just a very challenging one. And it gets harder when we start to bring artificial intelligence into this because we've been mostly focused on things like locomotion. But let's talk about AI. Now. I've told this story before, but I went to a panel and about robotics. It was at south By Southwest. This was several years ago, and at that panel, the presenters were talking about how challenging it is to teach robots how to do things, like not program the robots to do it, but to teach them how to learn in an environment and then replicate things that they have learned. Like even when you build models in which the robots are able to observe and then attempt to replicate actions, stuff can go wrong. Robots have the same limitations as other examples of machine learning. So, for example, I have often used an example saying, like teaching a computer to do something like recognize that an image represents a specific object like a coffee mug is hard. Not all coffee mugs are alike, right, Some come in different sizes or shapes or colors. Some might have handles. Those handles could be shaped one way versus another, some might be you know, the pictures of them might be in under different lighting conditions, or they might be paired with other stuff that's of a similar size or shape to the coffee mug. All of these elements represent challenging variables to machines that are being trained to recognize images. You know, the machines do not inherently understand what makes a coffee mug a coffee mug. That's what you are teaching them. And you know, you can teach a human being what a coffee mug is and they pretty much get it pretty darn quickly, even to the point where they can recognize other coffee mugs that don't look exactly like the initial one. But for computers it requires a lot more training. You train your model, then you tweak all the settings so that you can improve your results, you know, cut down on the false positives and fix all the mistakes, and you train it again, and you're potentially using millions of images in order to do this. Now, consider the humble door, now a door is a pretty darn simple thing to operate for most people, but there are lots of different ways that a door could potentially operate right Like, the door might have a knob that you have to twist. It might have a bar that you have to press, or a handle that you have to pull. So when you encounter a door, chances are you have a decent idea of how it works, but you might not know which way it opens it for that can give you a little bit of a pause. One of my favorite of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons a classic cartoon strip from the eighties. It shows a young boy pushing as hard as he possibly can on a door, and just above his hand on the door is a label that reads pull, and next to the doorway is a sign that reads Midvale School for the Gifted. I feel this cartoon in my soul some days. Well. Robots are kind of like that student. Even a robot that's been trained to open doors might need to pause and have a digital think about things before giving it an attempt. So the south By Southwest panelist was telling the story of such a robot, and this robot sat outside a door in a hallway. I think It was an electrical engineering department at the university that this panelist worked at, and it was sat there for several days just contemplating the door, and it was really irritating folks who worked there because they had to walk around this thing in order to get through the hallway, and if they passed in front of it, it irritated the row bodicists because it could actually disrupt the process and set things back even further. But the robot was just trying to figure out how it should proceed in order to try and open the door. And when you think about how a robot could potentially be powerful enough to cause damage to the environment it's in if it attempts to do something incorrectly, then you start to understand why taking time might actually be a necessity. It might be an important thing to build into robots. It seems ridiculous to just stare at a door for days on end before even attempting to open it, but if you could potentially rip the handle off the door or damage the door in some way, well, taking time might be a needed precaution. And that's not even getting into the challenge of having robots that operate within an environment in which they're also human beings. Obviously, you have to take a lot into consideration in those kinds of situations where robots and human beings are going to be working within the same environment. Like in most industrial uses for robots, the robots are very much separated from all the people, like there are multiple safety considerations put in place to keep the robots and people away from each other because the potential for catastrophe is way too high. If you're working too close to a robot, like it's a robot that welds stuff or whatever. Well, you know you don't want to get in the way of a welding, right, That would be awful, It would potentially be deadly. So creating robots that are capable of interacting among human beings it comes with its own series of challenges you have to overcome. So not only must the robot be able to move around without falling over onto somebody, it needs to be able to do this in a way that doesn't cause anxiety or fear or other negative reactions among the human beings. Really weird thing is that sometimes a robot can behave a little too human and that can end up being almost as bad as if it's not acting human enough. You've got to find a balance, Like there are expectations that humans have when it comes to interacting with the robots. Of the robots behave too far outside that set of expectations, it can cause issues. So robotics has become a truly multidisciplinary endeavor. Making a bipedal humanoid robot capable of integrating with humans the way the Tesla Optimist robot is supposed to do that requires lots of work in disciplines that go well outside of technology. We're talking about stuff like psychology, and I think every time we see a remarkable achievement in the robotics space, we're also reminded how far we still have to go and how hard this really is. So will Tesla's Optimist robots deliver upon all the promises that Elon Musk often quotes at these events. Maybe I'm skeptical, largely because Elon Musk has proven to make some rather ambitious claims the past that have failed to manifest as described. He's kind of the boy who called fully autonomous driving. And largely I also have doubts because I have an inkling as to how hard it's going to be to make a bipedal general purpose robot that's at least as good as, and hopefully better than a human being at doing your typical tasks. If the robot is worse at doing those tasks, then it's a waste of time and money to use the robot. Just hire somebody else to do it, it makes more sense. So like these are these are really high barriers that you have to you have to get over, and I don't think we're going to get over them very quickly. I think it's going to take years and years more work. But it is a heck of a goal to aim for. I don't want to shame anyone for taking aim at achieving this really difficult task because it drives innovation. I think that's important. So I don't want to dismiss anyone who's working toward building bipedal humanoid general purpose robots that have a level of AI that allow them to operate autonomously within a human environment. I think that that is a phenomen I just think it's also one that's going to require many more years of work for it to be a viable project. Right, Like, I guess I could see a disappointing version becoming a reality within a couple of years. But that's really falling fall short of the promise, and I would much rather see more work being done to improve the technology than for a premature release of some humanoid robot that just doesn't do anything well enough to justify its existence. That would really take a lot of wind out of the sales. I think, all right, that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Last week, Tesla held an event called we Robot, in which attendees got to see a new vehicle that was dubbed the robo Van, although Elon Musk pronounced it as reboven. There was a cyber cab that must claims is going to cost less than thirty thousand dollars when it goes into production sometime before twenty twenty seven, which would potentially allow the average person to run a small uber or lift business out of their own garage with the cybercab giving people rides. Though that raises a lot of questions I have, like liability issues. Let's say that your cybercab got into an act extent. Are you held liable for that? Or is Tesla or I don't know. That's a discussion for another time. But they also gave a closer look at the humanoid Optimus robots, and they had robots that were dancing and serving drinks and some that even held conversations with attendees. Now, those robots had some help. Tesla also did not hide this fact. This is not like a gotcha because the company was very forthright about this. Remote operators were augmenting the robot's abilities while those robots were on the floor. So, for example, those conversations were actually human beings who were using the robots kind of like an advanced bipedal intercom system. But it made me think about the long history of humans trying to make humanoid robots. Now, in some ways this pursuit is a bit strange because a legged, bipedal humanoid robot brings with it a ton of challenges that you could sidestep if you just made some compromises to your design approach, like why does the robot need to be bipedal and humanoid? If you decided the robot should move around on wheels or tank treads, or maybe move around on all fours, or maybe you make like a centaur like robot where it has like a base with four legs and then a torso with two arms and it stands upright. You know, we make the rules like it doesn't have to take any specific form factor, and you could do that and get around a lot of the challenges you would face if you were to instead focus on this humanoid bipedal approach. Creating a robot that can move the way humans do is hard. It has taken decades of research and development to accomplish that to a reliable degree, and even then it's typically under very controlled circumstances. When you start getting into stuff like uneven terrain, it gets a lot trickier. Okay, In other ways, the desire to build a human like robot is totally understandable. You know, my first reaction to anyone talking about developing a humanoid robot is why why are you doing that? What's your reasoning? Because if you can accomplish the same goal using a different method of locomotion, that might be the better choice. However, if you want this robot to be able to do tasks in our human world, like tasks that human beings would typically carry out on their own, well, making the robot human shaped makes more sense. You don't have to adapt your environment to the abilities of the robot, right because a set of stairs or a ladder would defeat most wheeled robots. They would come to it and say, well, I can't navigate up this obstacle, and if my goal is on the other end of that obstacle, that's a problem. So to really maneuver within the human world, it helps to have your typical human shape and typical human capabilities. Now, the flip side of this is that we humans, we have an obligation to make spaces accessible for those who have an atypical shape or atypical capabilities. We need to make sure that people who don't have the use of say, their legs, can still access really important stuff. That's a responsibility we have, but that's a topic for another episode. Plus, I think there is something inherent within us, or at least inherent within some of us, some human beings, and it drives us to want to create companions that look and to an extent behave the way we do. So much of science fiction is based around variations of this idea. Arguably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is kind of along this track of thinking. You know, you have you your crazy scientists who desires to play god, and then you have General Capex's influential work, Rossum's Universal Robots. That's the work where we get the term robot in the first place, or the replicants in Blade Runner, which actually pretty closely resemble the robots in capex work, to the works of Isaac Asimov and beyond. So in many of these pieces there's a warning that is given that the pursuit to build and exploit robots often comes tinged with arrogance and hubris, and it rarely works out well for anybody by the end of the story. Now, not all of those robots were mechanical or electro mechanical or digital creatures. In fact, like Frankenstein's Monster, the robots in Capex's work and the replicants in Blade Runner are all synthetic life forms. They're not masses of wires and circuit boards. Asimov's work introduced more mechanical and electro mechanical creatures with artificial brains. But ultimately, all the stories involve creatures and creations that gain an awareness of themselves and their place in the world, and how they reject the hand that has been dealt to them, often to dramatic and catastrophic degrees. Now, what the future holds as far as humanoid robots go has yet to be written, though we can certainly look back and talk about some of the history in the field of humanoid robots that have happened so far. Before robots, we have examples of automata that mimiced human movement and capabilities. Some of these were actual clockwork creations, such as the Karakuri. These are puppets from Japan, dating as far back as the seventeenth century, so the sixteen hundreds. These used mechanisms to power certain movements, usually repeatable movements like serving tea or playing musical instrument. Some of the early automata weren't automata at all. They were hoaxes. The famed mechanical Turk creation of Wolfgang von Kemplan is such an example. Kempland actually stowed a human operator inside a cabinet that was attached to this supposed automaton that had been designed to play chess. In reality, it was the human operator hidden inside the cabinet that was controlling everything. It was really just a puppet, not an automaton. But these creations, whether actual automata or not, were limited in function, and typically they weren't bipedal either, not truly like they weren't moving around on two legs. They might be stationary in the case of the mechanical turk, or they might have wheels and they have like robes that cover up the wheels, so it looks like they're kind of gliding across, but they're not actually walking. And I also have to include one story I came across because it's just too absurd to leave out. So in eighteen forty eight. In May of eighteen forty eight, a couple of different journals, one of them being Scientific American, published an account of a supposed encounter with a remarkable automaton that was capable of standing up, sitting down, and even of speaking. The automaton itself was apparently almost indistinguishable from a human being. The account was said to have originally published in quote an Augsburg Gazette end quote. So Augsburg is a city in Bavaria in Germany, and so the original article was supposedly written in German and then translated into English to be published in various periodicals in the United States and elsewhere. The automaton's name was mister Eisenbrass, which is great, but the name of the inventor was doctor Lube, which, y'all, that's like a gift from the gods of comedy right there. Mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube. I maintain that someone should make a stage production that has the title mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube, and it might well be me unless someone beats me to it. And someone probably will beat me to it, because I'm infamous for coming up with ideas for shows or novels or whatever and then just sitting on them. But my goodness, mister Eisenbrass and Doctor Lube. That's that's a title, y'all. Anyway, according to this article, the author and some other visitors went to the lab of doctor Lube, which I imagine was down a slippery slope. Anyway, The doctor was quote seated at a sort of cabinet having a keyboard somewhat similar to that of a piano forte arranged on one side of it, and nearly in the center of a room sat a fashionably dressed gentleman who rose and bowed as we entered endo quote. And then, according to the article, the visitors engaged in some small talk with this fashionably dressed gentleman, and the gentleman actually took a seat after the visitors had sat down, and eventually the doctor stops playing at his keyboard, and mister Eisenbrass goes quiet, and Lube explains that the whole thing is a mechanical contraption. Only then do the visitors notice the cables going from the keyboard console to the chair of mister Eisenbrass. Now, according to the piece, Lube procured bones from a human being, presumably a dead one, which is a big ol' ick already, but then use rubber tubes to kind of serve as musculature, and that he also created quote a perfect system of nerves made of fine platinum wire and covered with silk end Quote to what end, you might say, what what are the nerves for? I guess the idea is that electric motors would pull upon the rubber tubes. It does explain that there were electro magnets that were in use in this system, and that the tubes just served as muscles that when you pulled on them, would cause the contraction you would associate with a human body. I actually at first assumed, since they were talking about rubber tubes, that this was going to be a pneumatic system where you would use air to achieve similar results. Right, you pump air into something to extend a limb, and you would allow air to escape to contract the limb. But that apparently is not how this was supposed to work. Supposedly, the keyboard allowed the doctor to produce incredible results just by pressing a few keys, like I guess there was a key that was just labeled small talk or something, and that the figure was apparently capable of quote walking, talking, singing, playing the piano, and doing many other things with as much ease and precision as an accomplished man. End quote. The author then proactively chides the reader for undoubtedly asking so what good is on this? And then the author goes on to talk about how mechanical servants will replace all those undependable lauts and scally wags who currently act as servants, and thus give the women of the household the freedom to carry out their feminine duties as caretaker of the home just by tickling some ivories. Yeah, this article is well and truly both sexist and classist. Anyway, to say that I am skeptical about this account is putting it lightly. I feel fairly certain that no such demonstration ever actually took place, or if there were some kind of demonstration, it did not unfold as described in this article. I did try to find the original article written in German. I assumed that the German gazette that was referenced in the English piece must have been the Algemina Zeitung that was published in Augsburg, Germany for most of the nineteenth century, and was like the main paper not just of Augsburg, but like of that region of Germany. However, I found no record of Eisenbrass or doctor Lube anyway. As diverting as mister Eisenbrass and doctor Lube are, I feel confident in saying that the capability of building a robot that could maintain its balance standing still, let alone walking around all without other means of support, was likely well outside the reach of even the most clever of innovators in the mid eighteen hundreds. That seems like that's just a no brainer. When it comes to creating a two legged robot, one where most of the mass is actually above the legs of the robot, not contained within the legs, things get really tricky because a lot of physics have to be considered before engineers could get serious about bipedal robots. If we relied solely on trial and error and just figured we're going to get this right, we'd likely not be anywhere as far along as we are right now. So when we come back, we're going to consider how challenging it is to create something that walks around on two legs. But before we get to that, and I get a little unbalanced, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So what's the big deal with walking around on two legs? Lots of people do it all the time. You know, toddlers can get the hang of it without too much trouble, and we celebrate it when it happens like that's a big deal, But then shortly after that it's It really becomes just a source of stress as the toddlers toddle along toward one danger or another. But you're entirely dependent upon just two points of contact with your surrounding environment. If you're talking about a true bipedal form that is capable of moving around round the area, and those two points of contact with the environment are essentially the bottoms of the foot seats. That's, of course, if everything is actually going as you wanted it to. If things have gone poorly, you might actually have lots of different points of contact with the ground. But that's because you went horizontal after something went wrong. So you've got your robot. It's got two legs, the two points of contact with the ground or the bottom of the feet likely the legs and the feet, and your robot in general has a number of degrees of freedom. So degrees of freedom are joints that allow movement along at least one axis. The point of contact with the ground could actually be considered a passive degree of freedom in itself. And you're also relying on friction to allow your robot to stand up, to maintain balance, and to get anywhere. If the robot's feet were frictionless, then it wouldn't be able to stay up right at all, let alone walk. And you've got all this weight above the legs that you have to worry about. So have you ever balanced something like, say, a baseball bat, on the palm of your hand. If you do that with a baseball bat and you're using the narrow part the handle in of the words of the bat and you're balancing that on your palm and the thick part of the bat is up in the air, you know that little motions can create big results. Right A small movement at the base can cause the top to really sway, and that requires you to make larger corrections down at the base in order to keep everything in balance. Well, that's kind of what it's like to try and figure out how to make a bipedal robot walk while maintaining its balance. You've got a inertia to deal with, and that really affects balance. How do you make sure the mass above the legs doesn't throw everything off kilter whenever it starts moving or when it stops moving. How do you correct for that so that your robot doesn't just tumble over? How do you keep your bot upright? One early discussion that became a core component in the pursuit of bipedal robots revolved around a concept that came to be known as the zero moment point or ZMP. So a pair of smarty pants is from Russia named Beyomir Vukabratovich and Davor Jurichic first described this back in the nineteen sixties. Now, the actual term zero moment point would be coined a little bit later, but it was used to describe what they were talking about, and the whole concept revolves around a moment in which the net reaction forces between a bipedal mechanism's feet and the ground are essentially zero and there's no movement along the horizontal plane. So that means, like forward momentum and gravity they've kind of canceled each other out. You've hit this zero moment where you don't have to worry about the robot tipping forward and falling over. It is you could think of as a moment of stability, and the robot, assuming no external forces are acting upon it, will remain upright, assuming that ZMP is maintained. Now, this discussion really drives home how stability can be a huge challenge. As robots move, they must deal with inertia and you have to know the math to achieve dynamic stability if your robot is to remain upright, whether it's walking, running, jumping, or whatever. And in fact, it gets increasingly more difficult as you go down those tasks. Walking is hard, running is really hard, and jumping is really really hard. Like the jump part might be easy, the landing and staying upright that's the hard part. Otherwise your robot's gonna topple over. And while watching a robot take a tumble might be a great YouTube video. In practice, in the real world, you obviously don't want your robots to be falling over. You want your robots to be stable and capable of moving around environments without causing damage or potentially injury to people, to be able to maneuver. It's tough and robots are expensive. You don't want them falling over. Then you're thinking, well, that's twenty thousand dollars to get this thing back on its feet. Again, that's not a great way to reach progress either. So to plan the motion for a robot, you need to be able to calculate the zero moment point or ZMP. You need to figure out which joints the robot is going to have to engage in order to achieve stability under its various operating conditions, and those conditions could include things outside of your strict control. It's one thing to calculate how the robot can achieve stability when it's walking across a level floor that has a firm surface, But what about a floor that surface isn't as firm. Maybe it's a little squishy, you know, maybe it's a nineteen seventies shag carpet or something, or what if the floor isn't level, what if the terrain is actually uneven, you know, kind of like a typical sidewalk in the city of Atlanta. How does a robot compensate for all this, remain stable and keep itself from pitching over? This is a non trivial challenge, and it takes a lot of work to get to a point where robots are sophisticated enough to achieve stability. Engineers have had to take a lot into consideration. Would more degrees of freedom help or does that actually overcomplicate matters? I mean, there's no reason why we should be constrained to the same degrees of freedom that a person has. Right Like, we could think, oh, let's mimic the way humans work and make sure that the ankles and the knees and the hips all have the same points of articulation. Or we could say, well, there's no reason why we couldn't have more or fewer joints if it makes the operations work better. So that's something to think about, you know. And then walking would require shifting stability so that the robots can maintain itself with just one foot in contact with the ground, right like, suddenly points of contact have halved. If you're running, it's even harder because with running, at least the definition of running that roboticists use, there's a moment that may only last just for a split second, but there's a moment in which both of the robots feet are not touching the ground. So how do you achieve stability when your point of contact is continually interrupted? Jumping is even harder, right, because you're really leaving the ground then, and how do you ensure that landing you do so in a way that you maintain stability. So that ZMP was a huge deal. It still is a huge deal. Not all robot locomotion is centered around ZMP calculations, by the way, but a lot of it still is. So a lot of the work in bipedal robots, particularly in the seventies and eighties, involved calculating ZMP and keeping the robot within that zone while engineering movements. So calculating ZMP is one thing. Building a robot that can balance is another. Even building robot that's capable of static stability is no simple task. Static stability just means the robot is able to stand still and not fall over, and believe it or not, that's easier said than done. In nineteen seventy four, labs at the School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University in Japan started a project with the goal of building a stable bipedal robot. This project became known as Weibot wabot that stands for Waseda Robot. The labs created a new focus group within the laboratory system at the university. It's called the Bioengineering Group, and their first effort, the Waybot one, wasn't exactly something that you would mistake as a human being. It was not like a smooth humanoid robot. You would never look at it and think it was anything other than a robot. In fact, it looked kind of like a giant erector set. It was very much a big, blocky, metallic humanoid robot. So it had a limb control system, obviously very important if you're going to have a walking robot. It also had a primitive vision system. It even was able to converse in Japanese to a certain degree. They said that it had the in electrical capacity of like a one and a half year old Keep in mind this is the early nineteen seventies. It was tethered to computer systems and power systems. There was not yet a point where we had reached a miniaturization where you could have all that computing power, not to mention electrical power on board the robot itself. If you had done that, the robot would either need to be huge or would be carrying the biggest backpack you've ever seen in order to have all the computational and electrical power necessary to operate this thing. So, yeah, it was tethered. The Waybot was the first humanoid robot to achieve static stability, and later it would be the first digitally controlled anthropomorphic robot at all that was able to achieve dynamic stability, and statically stable means that the robot can remain balanced while standing still. Dynamically balanced refers to robots that are maintaining that stability while they are still in motion. Going from one to the other and back again is actually really hard. Like achieving one is hard, achieving the other one is also hard. Going back and forth between still and moving and maintaining balance is even harder. You know, remaining dynamically stable is often easier than going from dynamic to static, assuming that you know motions are smooth, and fast enough to counter the forces acting on the robot, because when you think about it, walking is really a series of falls. It's like you're falling and you're catching yourself over and over again. You move forward when you walk, not just by moving your legs. You know, you kind of lean forward into the walk as well, and for a moment it's as if you're falling forward and that you would face plant into the ground ahead of you. But of course you've moved your leg to catch yourself, and this process repeats, so you're propelling yourself forward by constantly almost falling but catching yourself over and over and over again. Now we do this without really thinking about it, like once we learn how to walk, we don't have to focus on this. This is this is just how we do it. Robots, however, have to calculate this stuff in order to do it properly, in order to catch themselves with just the right amount of force to keep things moving and not to use too much or too little force and then risk taking a fall. Tons of work in robotics continued around the world towards this goal of creating bipedal humanoid robots, but nearly all the articles I read for this episode. Make a big jump from the nineteen seventies to the mid nineteen nineties. That's when Honda unveiled a robot that they called the humanoid P two. So Honda had actually been developing humanoid robots for about a decade before showing off the P two. A series that was kind of the in secret R and D works that was called the E series of robots, and this was in the nineteen eighties. These E robots were primitive, but they demonstrate the capability to walk on level ground under very controlled circumstances. The first E robot, for example, was able to walk at an extremely deliberate pace because it was said that each step took about five seconds to complete. I challenge you to try walking that way, even if it's just a couple of feet, count to five slowly per step. That is slow, but it illustrates how challenging it was to design a robot capable of walking in a biped away. Now, the first E series robot was built in nineteen eighty six. It essentially looked like a pair of legs attached to robotic hips and that's it like. It didn't have any top half. There was no torso or arms or anything like that. The B two wouldn't debut until nineteen ninety six. Honda had a decade of work developing humanoid robotics before they revealed to the public what they had been up to. And like I said, E zero, not very humanoid. It is like a free, free walking pelvis, robotic pelvis. The later robots in the E series started to look I don't know, in my opinion, even more strange, Like one of them looks kind of like a microwave oven that has legs. One of them looks sort of like the front end of a fancy car, like a Rolls Royce, but with legs. You would never call any of them human in shape, but they were gradually evolving toward that. The P two in nineteen ninety six looked much more human in that it had legs, and it had arms and a torso and a head. Now this head was rectangular, and it was it was wider than it was tall. It was not human looking at all, but it demonstrated that Honda had been hard at work tackling this BikeE Hetle challenge, and it would serve as a foundation for a much more famous Honda robot just a few years later, a robot that would debut in two thousand. It was called Asmo. Now I have a fun connection with Asimo, and I will talk about that, but first let's take another quick break. All right, So the year was two thousand and seven. Asimo had been a thing for the better part of the two thousands, like it debuted in early two thousand and now it's two thousand and seven. I had just been hired by a company called HowStuffWorks dot com, and one of my first assignments was to rewrite and to update the article on how Asimo works. So I researched the project, including the lofty goal that the engineers had set to have a robot that couldn't just walk but could also run. So it would be a robot that, at little points would have both feet leave the ground just for a moment, but still be able to maintain its balance. Now that was a huge accomplishment. Even if you were to watch videos and it kind of looks like Asmo's doing a little hopping dance you might do if you were in need of getting to a restroom, Like I think of it as oh, it's doing the peepee dance. But you know, watch Asmo running. It's cute, it's weird, it has this odd sort of tone to it, I would say, But it was phenomenal because yes, for a split second, both feet are off the ground, and yet when the opposite foot makes contact with the floor, the robot would maintain its balance and be able to continue running. Asimo looks a lot more human than P two did. In fact, it looks like sort of a diminutive astronaut in a spacesuit. I actually got to meet Asimo once when I was at Disneyland in California, because there was demonstration of Asimo that was a real blast. I watched this presentation that they gave, and then I mentioned to a cast member that I had written an article about how Asima worked, and they brought me aside and I got to meet the robot, which was a really fun moment for me. That was kind of cool. Anyway, Asimo would go on to establish a lot of firsts in the bipedal humanoid robot space. Not only was it the first one to run, it could also climb and descend stairs, at least eventually it could. One early demonstration didn't go so well, and Asimo tripped, but it later demonstrated those capabilities, and these were things that would be built upon in future robotic projects, both at Honda and elsewhere. I should also mention that Asimo was largely a programmed robot, in that it would maneuver around and interact with an environment that had been carefully mapped out for the robot. So it's not like it was spontaneous. It wasn't coming into a brand new environment finding its way or around picking things up that kind of stuff. It was following a very specific set of instructions and it knew where everything was supposed to be and where it was supposed to go. So it was not like an autonomous robot. But that really wasn't what the project was about. It wasn't about autonomy. It was about robotic locomotion and interacting in human spaces. So you have to keep in mind that this whole approach to robotics is multidisciplinary in nature. It requires lots of different work in varying fields, some of which aren't even in technology. I'll talk more about that later. In twenty fifteen, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency here in the United States aka DARPA held a robotics challenge. So DARPA is known for contracting with various companies and research facilities to develop bleeding edge technologies potentially useful for the purposes of national defense. They're not always couched in those specific terms, but that's the directive of DARPA. DARPA has played a part in everything from the development of the Internet to the early days of driverlest car technology. Well in twenty fifteen, they had a lofty goal set for robotics teams and it was all inspired by a terrible disaster. So in twenty eleven, an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The power plants backup systems were damaged, and this led to a situation in which the plant's reactors began to overheat because there was no power that could be used to operate the cooling system in order to keep everything under control, and ultimately this overheating led to a containment failure and radioactive material was released into the environment. It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Cleaning up after the disaster was a really dangerous job. Response workers would be subjected to potentially dangerous levels of radiation or extended periods of time. DARPA's challenge was to give robotics teams a set of tasks that a robot would have to complete with minimal direction and intervention from the teams. The idea being let's work toward a technological solution where we could develop robots that could step in into situations that were like Fukushima and take the place of humans so that human beings don't put their lives at risk to do this kind of stuff. The robots, since they have no lives, they could go and do it and we wouldn't be putting any human life in jeopardy. That was the concept. But to do this, these robots would have to do very human like things, and they have to maneuver in a very human like world because it was designed by humans, right, so no big surprise there. So the robots would have to do stuff like get in, to get out of and operate a vehicle, to be able to open doors and step through doorways, to pick up a tool and to use it properly. And teams were given some but not all, the information that they would actually need in order to complete the various tasks that DARPA had laid out, and the reason why they weren't given everything is because the whole concept requires teams to build a robot that could accomplish goals in a world that is unpredictable and uncontrolled for the most part. In a real emergency, there may be no way to account for all the variables, and depending on the nature of the emergency, a team might not be able to maintain a direct connection with their robot, so the robot would need to be able to handle some of this autonomously. Now, most of the challenges were pretty darn straightforward, and they would have been trivial for most people to be able to complete if they were given the assignment. You know, if you ask your typical human to get into a vehicle kind of like a golf cart and to drive to a specific location, to then get out of that vehicle, to open a door, go through the door, pick up a power drill, drill a hole in a wall, climb some stairs, and navigate some rubble, and you'd likely see a lot of people succeed at this. It's again a pretty simple set of tasks for most people, that's not a tough gig, but for robots, it's a totally different story. Now. There are compilations of videos of the various teams participating in this competition that show just how challenging it really was. There are videos of robots that, upon trying to just walk through a doorway, fall over. One robot completed the list of tasks, turned wave to the crowd, then fell over because that balance thing is really hard, y'all. Creating humanoid robots that can interact with the technology that was made for human beings requires a ton of consideration and cross disciplinary work. For one thing, sometimes it requires roboticists to ask, hey, why did we make this thing work in this specific way. It's almost like you have to go through reverse engineering the world around you in order to understand why things are the way they are. That doesn't always end with an answer that makes much sense. By the way, sometimes we're like, wow, we should really change this because this is not the best way to do it, but at that point it's the established way to do it. Ultimately, a team from the Republic of Korea won this competition. The winning robot was named DRC dash Qubo Hubo. It completed the series of tasks in just under forty five minutes, and the team took home a two million dollar cash prize. Now, no, lie, two million dollars, that's a lot of money, But I would be willing to bet that the two million dollars doesn't remotely cover the costs of all the research, development, and production of the robot itself. I bet if you were to add up all the expenses of making this robot, it would be more than two million dollars. But the money wasn't really the full goal of this thing. Like that was an award, but you weren't doing it to win the money. It's this challenge trying to figure out a way to achieve this really tough goal set out by the nature of the challenge itself. That's the real call the engineers out there, know what I'm talking about. Like that thrill of tackling a problem and figuring out a solution. That's really what drives a lot of engineers. Now, if anything, the challenge illustrated just how hard it is to build a humanoid robot that can function properly. Now, the benefits are pretty clear. You know, this kind of robot could potentially step in during situations like the Fukushima disaster scenarios in which a human would be put into danger and the robot, due to its design, could interface with systems that had been built for humans. That's understandably a worthy goal. It's just a very challenging one. And it gets harder when we start to bring artificial intelligence into this because we've been mostly focused on things like locomotion. But let's talk about AI. Now. I've told this story before, but I went to a panel and about robotics. It was at south By Southwest. This was several years ago, and at that panel, the presenters were talking about how challenging it is to teach robots how to do things, like not program the robots to do it, but to teach them how to learn in an environment and then replicate things that they have learned. Like even when you build models in which the robots are able to observe and then attempt to replicate actions, stuff can go wrong. Robots have the same limitations as other examples of machine learning. So, for example, I have often used an example saying, like teaching a computer to do something like recognize that an image represents a specific object like a coffee mug is hard. Not all coffee mugs are alike, right, Some come in different sizes or shapes or colors. Some might have handles. Those handles could be shaped one way versus another, some might be you know, the pictures of them might be in under different lighting conditions, or they might be paired with other stuff that's of a similar size or shape to the coffee mug. All of these elements represent challenging variables to machines that are being trained to recognize images. You know, the machines do not inherently understand what makes a coffee mug a coffee mug. That's what you are teaching them. And you know, you can teach a human being what a coffee mug is and they pretty much get it pretty darn quickly, even to the point where they can recognize other coffee mugs that don't look exactly like the initial one. But for computers it requires a lot more training. You train your model, then you tweak all the settings so that you can improve your results, you know, cut down on the false positives and fix all the mistakes, and you train it again, and you're potentially using millions of images in order to do this. Now, consider the humble door, now a door is a pretty darn simple thing to operate for most people, but there are lots of different ways that a door could potentially operate right Like, the door might have a knob that you have to twist. It might have a bar that you have to press, or a handle that you have to pull. So when you encounter a door, chances are you have a decent idea of how it works, but you might not know which way it opens it for that can give you a little bit of a pause. One of my favorite of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons a classic cartoon strip from the eighties. It shows a young boy pushing as hard as he possibly can on a door, and just above his hand on the door is a label that reads pull, and next to the doorway is a sign that reads Midvale School for the Gifted. I feel this cartoon in my soul some days. Well. Robots are kind of like that student. Even a robot that's been trained to open doors might need to pause and have a digital think about things before giving it an attempt. So the south By Southwest panelist was telling the story of such a robot, and this robot sat outside a door in a hallway. I think It was an electrical engineering department at the university that this panelist worked at, and it was sat there for several days just contemplating the door, and it was really irritating folks who worked there because they had to walk around this thing in order to get through the hallway, and if they passed in front of it, it irritated the row bodicists because it could actually disrupt the process and set things back even further. But the robot was just trying to figure out how it should proceed in order to try and open the door. And when you think about how a robot could potentially be powerful enough to cause damage to the environment it's in if it attempts to do something incorrectly, then you start to understand why taking time might actually be a necessity. It might be an important thing to build into robots. It seems ridiculous to just stare at a door for days on end before even attempting to open it, but if you could potentially rip the handle off the door or damage the door in some way, well, taking time might be a needed precaution. And that's not even getting into the challenge of having robots that operate within an environment in which they're also human beings. Obviously, you have to take a lot into consideration in those kinds of situations where robots and human beings are going to be working within the same environment. Like in most industrial uses for robots, the robots are very much separated from all the people, like there are multiple safety considerations put in place to keep the robots and people away from each other because the potential for catastrophe is way too high. If you're working too close to a robot, like it's a robot that welds stuff or whatever. Well, you know you don't want to get in the way of a welding, right, That would be awful, It would potentially be deadly. So creating robots that are capable of interacting among human beings it comes with its own series of challenges you have to overcome. So not only must the robot be able to move around without falling over onto somebody, it needs to be able to do this in a way that doesn't cause anxiety or fear or other negative reactions among the human beings. Really weird thing is that sometimes a robot can behave a little too human and that can end up being almost as bad as if it's not acting human enough. You've got to find a balance, Like there are expectations that humans have when it comes to interacting with the robots. Of the robots behave too far outside that set of expectations, it can cause issues. So robotics has become a truly multidisciplinary endeavor. Making a bipedal humanoid robot capable of integrating with humans the way the Tesla Optimist robot is supposed to do that requires lots of work in disciplines that go well outside of technology. We're talking about stuff like psychology, and I think every time we see a remarkable achievement in the robotics space, we're also reminded how far we still have to go and how hard this really is. So will Tesla's Optimist robots deliver upon all the promises that Elon Musk often quotes at these events. Maybe I'm skeptical, largely because Elon Musk has proven to make some rather ambitious claims the past that have failed to manifest as described. He's kind of the boy who called fully autonomous driving. And largely I also have doubts because I have an inkling as to how hard it's going to be to make a bipedal general purpose robot that's at least as good as, and hopefully better than a human being at doing your typical tasks. If the robot is worse at doing those tasks, then it's a waste of time and money to use the robot. Just hire somebody else to do it, it makes more sense. So like these are these are really high barriers that you have to you have to get over, and I don't think we're going to get over them very quickly. I think it's going to take years and years more work. But it is a heck of a goal to aim for. I don't want to shame anyone for taking aim at achieving this really difficult task because it drives innovation. I think that's important. So I don't want to dismiss anyone who's working toward building bipedal humanoid general purpose robots that have a level of AI that allow them to operate autonomously within a human environment. I think that that is a phenomen I just think it's also one that's going to require many more years of work for it to be a viable project. Right, Like, I guess I could see a disappointing version becoming a reality within a couple of years. But that's really falling fall short of the promise, and I would much rather see more work being done to improve the technology than for a premature release of some humanoid robot that just doesn't do anything well enough to justify its existence. That would really take a lot of wind out of the sales. I think, all right, that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.