GetRobo Blog

Stanford’s Robot Car to Drive from SF to LA Next Spring

Prof. Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University is world famous for leading a team of students and engineers to develop an autonomous car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. The history making car “Stanley” now resides at the Smithsonian.

Since then, his next mission was set to develop a vehicle that can achieve urban driving. The team went on to develop “Junior” and during that process in 2007, won second place in the Urban Challenge. But the goal had always been grander – to create a car that can drive itself from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles without human intervention.

GetRobo got to chat with Prof. Thrun on the phone to get an update on this project and learned that he now plans to accomplish this goal by next spring. The following is an edited version of the interview. (Photograph from Oct. 2007)

 

Q. The last time we talked, you were working on developing a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive on its own from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Can you give us an update on this project?

 

A. The project is underway and we are making good progress. For example, we are now able to handle traffic lights and to localize reliably on highways, which is important for lane keeping. We can now speed up the vehicle in traffic. Also we are much better able to track the other cars around us and we can find and identify pedestrians.

 There are a few open problems that we haven’t solved including merging and lane changing that need some work. Then we have to start doing large-scale experiments on the road to see what other problems exist.

 

Q. Has your car already been driving autonomously on regular roads?

 

A. Yes, we have done many experiments on public roads. We always have a safety driver in the car who can take over just by grabbing the steering wheel. And he can disengage any point in time. And we have a safety computer engineer on board, who monitors the systems. There has never been a close call or anything like that. It is totally safe to do this.

 

Q. Has the car already attempted a trip from SF to LA?

 

A. No. We are gearing up for this. We are making good progress but we are not there yet. Certain behaviors on highways, such as mergers, lane shifts and exiting, entering ramps are still not ready. And I’m sure as we start tackling long distances, we will find more and more problems that we have to solve.

 

Q. If you were to measure your progress on a scale of one to ten, and your goal being ten, where are you at now? And when do you plan to do the full-blown experiment from SF to LA?

 

A. We are at seven. And we plan on doing it by spring of next year.

ASIMO turns 9 years old on Halloween - and Haunted House animatronics

 Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO is turning 9 this weekend on Oct. 31. I found out from Moriyama-san's blog that Honda is having a birthday party for him in Tokyo that day.

 To honor this event, ASIMO big fan Dian is becoming ASIMO for Halloween. His dad Roy made the costume. The treats go into the battery pack and Dian has even mastered the ASIMO walk from watching all the YouTube videos. He doesn't like to see this one though, because it makes him feel "sad." DASIMO and ASIMO are alike in a way that they both have "some mobility issues" according to Dian's mom. 

 

   Talking about Halloween, Roy, who is an engineer at a large semiconductor equipment firm, LOVES to build robots and each year he and his colleague Allen get together to build robots for the Haunted House at McKinley Elementary School as part of a fund raising event.

  The robots move using electric motors and/or pneumatics and they were really impressive (ie scary). Here are some photos from this year's robots. I'm going to leave them as thumbnails so that only those who have a stomach for zombies can go ahead and click on them.  

 Below is the control system for the Haunted House robots. The operator monitors the people coming into the rooms and then hits the appropriate button at the right timing to move each of the robots.

 Thanks Roy and Allen!
 
 

Willow Garage - 5 PR2s to be built by end of 2009

 Willow Garage had it's first open house on Oct. 16. It was geared to the researchers that stopped by in Silicon Valley on their way back home to Japan and other parts of Asia after attending IROS, and I had the privilege to join them. There were about 25 participants.

(Photo: WG CEO Steve Cousins shows off one of the PR2 prototypes to the researchers)

 What was new to me is that they now have technicians working there building the PR2s. They are stocking up enough parts to eventually build 25 PR2s, and according to the production manager, the short-term goal is to complete 5 of them by the end of this year. Willow Garage will "issue a Call for Proposals -- allowing researchers worldwide, from academic, non-profit and for-profit organizations to apply to secure a PR2 development platform." Ten PR2s will be available for free under this plan. The company will use 10 of them in-house and 5 will be for stock.

 It takes about 1,300 types of parts and 10,000 parts overall to build one PR2 and they expect it to take anywhere between 100 and 200 man hours to complete one. The learning curve is pretty steep but once "things start rolling" they should be able to build 2 robots per week with 8-10 technicians, said the production manager.  

 They are doing extensive and rigorous testing to make sure things don't break easily. High quality will mean less maintenance after they ship the robots. PR2 is meant to last 3,000 working hours. It is designed to be "robust so that buggy code doesn't destroy the robot," said Keenan Wyrobek, Co-Director of the Personal Robotics Program. And even if something does go wrong, the robot is modular. So for example, you could replace the whole arm in 20 minutes, according to Keenan.

   Also during the open house, software lead Brian Gerkey made a presentation titled "Towards a Robot App Store." The analogy is the cell phone market. If you build the right infrastructure, there will be an explosion of applications. To accomplish that in the robotics world, he and his company believe that the "core components of robots should be OPEN." The core system is not perfect so everyone needs to contribute and researchers need to see and change how things work.

 Willow Garage's message to the research community - Let's share experimental code so that others can replicate, refute or extend results.

 Economic value is at the end = applications. Then there was a question from the audience, "Where do you close the code?" Brian's answer was "I don't know where the line is, but we haven't hit that point yet."

ROBO-ONE Champion Robot - OmniZero.9 - Truly amazing!

 The 16th ROBO-ONE competition was held this weekend in Toyoma, Japan. And the champion belt went to OmniZero.9 .  A great video by respected journalist and popular blogger Kazumichi Moriyama of the robot doing a demonstration. Takeshi Maeda, the creator of the OmniZero series, gets on his newest robot. It is AMAZING what the ROBO-ONE participants continue to accomplish!! And it's not like they can spend millions of dollars in R&D like the Hondas and Toyotas of the world.

France’s humanoid robot Romeo – Big but not dangerous

Project Romeo is an ambitious undertaking by a coalition of companies and national labs in France to develop by the end of 2011 a functional prototype of a humanoid robot that can assist the elderly and visually-challenged people at home. The goal is to develop a 1.2-1.5 meter (47-59 inches) high bipedal robot that humans can communicate with by voice and gesture and which can help a person get up in case of a fall.

 

The organizing company in this project is Aldebaran Robotics, which develops and sells the smaller humanoid robot Nao. GetRobo talked about the goal and challenges of this 10 million Euro (\1.3 billion, $14 million) project with Rodolphe Gelin, Head of Cooperative Projects at Aldebaran, who is the leader of this project. The following is an edited version of the phone interview and first appeared on Robot Watch in Japanese. (Photo: Rodolphe Gelin with Nao)

 

First of all, can you give us a brief overview of Project Romeo?

 

The idea of Project Romeo was born in March 2008 and the project actually started in January 2009. The goal of the project is to develop a functional prototype of a personal assistant humanoid robot by the end of 2011. The robot is meant to be helpful for elderly people that may have cognitive problems. Also we will be working closely with the Vision Institute (Institut de la Vision) and it’s patients so that Romeo will be able to assist visually-challenged people.

Romeo will be able to assist these people when they are alone at home. It will be able to fetch objects in another room and also assist a person to walk or get up from a chair.

The project is led by the French Cap Digital, which is a coalition of companies, labs and institutions in Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France region, set up to cooperate in leading innovation and building a competitive industry. There are 13 partners participating in Project Romeo - 5 companies, 7 national labs and the Vision Institute.

 

The Ile-de-France region, the city of Paris and the DGCIS, which is a department within the Ministry of Economy, will fund about half of the 10 million Euros. The rest will be provided by the partners in the form of investment and human capital .

We plan to come out with our first prototype by the end of 2010. Right now we are in the specification phase. Four engineers are currently working with me at Aldebaran and I would say one at each of our partners.

How did this project come about?

 

Bruno Maisonnier, founder and CEO of Aldebaran, had the idea that France can be a leading country in robotics. He wanted to build a human-sized robot as a demonstration of what France is capable to do. And to accomplish that he thought it was very important to bring together people in robotics from different organizations. So he teamed up with Cap Digital to come up with this huge project and was able to secure funding from the public sector.

 

We think that combining the experience and technology that Aldebaran has accumulated to develop Nao with the expertise of the other partners, we will be able to accomplish our goal.

 

By the way, “Romeo” does not mean anything. It sounds like a person’s name and makes the robot more lovable. Names that end in “-eo” are popular in France these days. It sounds new and high-tech.