Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

In science fiction movies or games, in order to reflect the sense of the future, there is often a common setting, that is, to arrange a robot that can do "chores" in the home or office scene to help humans serve tea, water the flowers and sweep the floor. it seems to depict a world where humans and robots live together in this way.

In fact, in real life, we also live in a world where people and robots coexist, highly automated and intelligent assembly lines in factories, or robots that can play the role of reception and guidance in hotel pavilions. in a broad sense, it can be regarded as all kinds of robots. However, today's robots have not yet gone deep into the scenes of daily life, and are still rooted in a certain professional field to perform their duties, rather than providing extensive help to human beings at home or in the office. Therefore, it always seems to have a big gap with the fantasy world.

The reason for this is not complicated. Mainly because, the more daily life scenes, the more simple and extensive daily assistance, on the contrary, the higher the demand for the universal intelligence of the robot. To put it simply, it is not difficult for a robot to sort goods faster than humans through machine vision, but it may not be so easy to put a robot in a home environment so that it can both water flowers and transmit objects.

We all know that general artificial intelligence is very difficult to develop on a technical level, but on the other hand, if you only need an assisted robot in a home or daily office environment, can you really use a high level of technology like "universal AI"?

Before robots had brains, humans could think for them.

The answer is obviously no.

For the robot, the surrounding environment must be digitized and structured in order to clearly formulate the route and behavior pattern. The most common floor-sweeping robot is like this. The floor-sweeping robot usually walks around the whole room when it is used for the first time, and uses SLAM technology to locate and plan the route of the whole room. In the future use process, it can follow this established route for cleaning.

The daily application scene is too complex and changeable for the robot, and after surpassing the single requirement of "sweeping the floor", the robot has to understand and construct the surrounding environment in a three-dimensional way, which is much more complicated than the sweeping robot planning the cleaning route. For example, the flowers and plants in the home may be placed in the northeast corner today and in the northwest corner tomorrow. If you want the robot to re-understand the environment every time, it may greatly damage its practicality and increase the cost of hardware-- not only lidar and 3D structured light cameras. Power consumption alone is a difficult problem to solve.

But domestic robots don't have to be completely independent of humans, discover the needs of everyday situations and do their own work, as they did in Detroit: changing people. Completing part of the work with the guidance and assistance of human beings should be the first step in the development of household robots.

In other words, can we plan actions and routes for household robots, just as some floor sweeping robots can manually control the cleaning route through App?

Control your sweeping robot just like you control the AR map

At the recent DIS 2019 (interaction Design Systems Conference), a research team from Purdue University presented an experimental solution for household robots.

Purdue University has developed an embedded application called VRa, which uses AR technology to "input" the robot into the mobile phone AR system, and then uses AR to interact with the real scene, allowing users to plan the action path for the robot through the mobile phone App. For example, if users want the robot to walk out of a circular route, they only need to draw a route on the phone using the AR function. At the same time, it also allows the robot to do some simple actions, such as picking and so on.

On the other hand, the user plans the route and the connection mode of the robot is to install the expansion dock in the floor sweeping robot, cheap robot arm and other equipment to set up the mobile phone directly on the expansion dock. At this time, the front camera of the mobile phone can undertake the visual function and become the "eye" of the robot, while the mobile phone chip can undertake the computing function and become the brain of the robot.

At the same time, by adding QR codes on different devices, we can also exchange information between different devices by "scanning code" for cooperation. In the course of the experiment, the researchers affixed different QR codes to the two boxes, and after obtaining the information through the QR code, the mobile phone could control the robot arm to pick up and put down two different tasks.

Through VRa, experimenters have been able to manipulate robots to pick up items, water flowers and other simple housework in home scenes. At present, Purdue University is still experimenting in factory scenes, hoping to bring VRa, a simple way of human-computer interaction, into more scenarios.

The future of human-machine cooperation

Of course, VRa is currently an experimental model, which does not mean that it can be applied in real situations. But VRa solves two important problems in household robots, one is that ordinary users without programming ability can not easily control the robot, and the other is to overcome the problem of hardware cost by mobile phone + cheap robot.

From the VRa model, we can find some inspiration for future collaboration between humans and household robots.

First, can the terminal capabilities of mobile phones be transferred and released?

At present, the software and hardware capabilities of mobile terminals are constantly improving to meet the needs of intelligence, from 3D structured light cameras to AI chips, are in a state of continuous decentralization. In contrast, in terms of their own supply chain capabilities, floor-sweeping robots and robotic arms may have to bear higher costs if they want to apply the same software and hardware, and then transfer these costs to the market side. However, if the household robot can apply the ability of the mobile phone, on the one hand, it can help manufacturers to exert the value of technology, on the other hand, it can also reduce their own costs.

Second, does graphical programming need to be popularized in home robots and home IoT systems?

The complexity and high flexibility of family scenes does not necessarily mean that robots need to rely entirely on their own ability to understand the environment. The physical relationship between the robot and the real environment is established by means of AR, QR code, electronic tag and so on, which is shown to the user through graphical interaction, so that everyone can plan the route and manipulate the action for the robot. In this way to promote human-computer cooperation, through human intelligence to help robots play a role.

Third, will domestic robots become cheap?

One of the important features of VRa is "heavy brain" and "light limbs". The key point is the mobile phone connected to the device through the extension dock, which plays an important role in interaction, positioning and vision. As limbs, floor-sweeping robots, robotic arms and so on take on fewer functions, and the price is also cheap. In the future, will domestic robots prefer to sell software systems and control centers, while the hardware itself, like Lego bricks, can be assembled and replaced at will?

In the final analysis, the emergence of VRa shows a very common AI trend-suspending the pursuit of more powerful and versatile AI technology and turning to polishing the operating system and interface, so that more people can easily use AI as a tool to manipulate and use them.

Since human wisdom is already so powerful, why should we make a detour to imitate human wisdom? When it is impossible to pursue wisdom, it may be a good choice to turn to the universal applicability of wisdom.

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