Gadgetory

Pittsburgh Smokey's City Steel City robot city for over a century Pittsburgh thrived on steel the steel mills churned out smog so thick that it blotted out the Sun streetlights remained on even during the day this was seen as a sign of prosperity eventually outdated manufacturing and depleting natural resources led to its destruction forming in its aftermath a new industry robotics Pittsburgh has become a place of monumental ambitions its mechanical arms are reaching for the stars but some are starting with the moon my life is robots robots and robots I've had the privilege and adventures of robotic cleanup of nuclear accidents the creation and mastery of robot carve driving land sea air underground and now to space I conceived for the concept of drilling for the ice at the moon and had those ideas rejected for years on the basis that there was no evidence for the existence of ice and now of course it's a sure bet and the agenda is to robotically reach the surface and to drill that ice robotics in space have not been linked forever except in science fiction and great movies it was a one-time venture by the Soviet Union to put the Luna cog on the moon but except for that there are no other robots on the moon human capabilities in space are intrinsically constrained by the life-support and mass that's required and the issues of long radiation exposure so the missions that are on the books are all robotic that's a transformation of my lifetime I got the idea for robots at work at a time when robots work just fantasy and science fiction and I had a vision for robots to develop secure feed this world and to explore worlds beyond I embraced that there was no looking back my interest in robotics in robots began when I was a small child I was always interested in in motion whether it's away cars drive the animals motion and as a child I was lucky enough to find some small computer and hook it up to motors from RadioShack I was able to make these toy cars move around the way I commanded because that's the ultimate be able to command that motion right now we're in my lab it's called the bio robotics lab it has its name because a lot of the work we do is inspired by biology so my group has done a fair bit of work in snake robots they bear their name because you know you look at them and they look like snakes there's many many extra joints many many extra degrees of freedom these degrees of freedom allow the robot to thread through tightly packed volumes and get to locations that people and machinery otherwise can't access so one application is our urban search-and-rescue here you have a collapsed building rescue workers want to locate up trapped survivors but it's a very dangerous situation that structure is very fragile it's dangerous to the rescue worker also it can be dangerous to the victim because you don't to cause collateral damage these robots have the potential to serve as a tool to extend the sensory reach of rescue workers so they can locate victims more quickly urban search-and-rescue inspection of nuclear power plants archeology in all these cases we're doing minimally invasive surgery on structure so it stands to reason if we shrink the robot down to a small size we can do minimally invasive surgery on a person we're trying to deliver a tool to physicians to perform capabilities that otherwise were relegated to surgeons just over 200 years ago the first steam boat was built on these rivers it squandered natural resources police it's the rivers and required a crew of over 20 men this boat requires zero platypus builds these small low-cost robotic boats for applications such as environmental monitoring fish farms pollution monitoring we were able to build these really low-cost boats by leveraging existing Android phone technology along with custom electronics and package that into a really low cost foam and plastic hull that we could fabricate it's smaller than a lot of people expect we get this all the time where people come in they look at our boats like wow that's way smaller than I expected you know I was expecting a boat so for one example we can go into small streams and small rivulets and things like that without too much problem because we have such a narrow and short base the other thing is that these sensors are just tiny tiny one-ounce things that are strapped on to basically these really huge boats and then dragged around right now and there's a reason for that and so if I actually going to these smaller sizes you get hit kind of a sweet spot where you can use much cheaper hardware to actually push them around we've just got to keep going down that path of making a cheaper more robust more repeatable more usable robot and then the killer apps are there I hope how come I help here may I assist you need anything your wish is my command we're currently at the experimental stage the petri dish trying to figure out what the best robot is what should look like what infrastructures will have should it be running Ross will be running Linux no one really knows what the robot of the future is gonna look like he may look like a Roomba it may look like a hive arms robot who knows right we're here at the personal robotics lab it's a lab that I started this is a robot herb herb stands for home exploring robots Butler everything is completely self-contained he has lasers to map the environment he has cameras to recognize and register objects got his arms to pick up objects and it took us about a year to you know take that first step to get her to actually recognize and register an object it was actually a coffee mug and pick it up and and doing all of this completely autonomously like we didn't tell him where the coffee mug was we didn't tell him how to pick up the coffee mug get models of physics underneath that he was using to evaluate how to grasp objects there's a tremendous amount of autonomy and tremendous amount of artificial intelligence motion planning perception that goes into executing you have very very simple tasks it's very rare that we can actually make true impact in the world and actually help people my grandmother is in India and she's very old and we constantly worry about her and if we can build technology that can help her perform the kinds of tasks that she's used to performing in the home that will be extremely rewarding so what we're doing right now is monitoring my level of attention I have it set up so a threshold of value of 80 will cause the hand a grip right now I'm shooting about 14 so let me concentrate get that guy go and that will stay gripped as long as my concentration value is higher than 80 the thumb movement is done by a plane function and the coordination of the two will allow for a large degree of dexterity I mean CMU CMU is great don't get me wrong it affords a very knowledgeable base of people to talk to and collaborate with certainly their facilities are very very top-notch we've noticed that like universities rarely bring things to market they kind of get caught up in the system we worked there for like six months and became pretty frustrated it's really cool technology it's really helpful but it doesn't help anyone if it actually doesn't come out what we're working on is an assistive technology specifically right now a prosthetic arm and the technologies that we use are EEG and EMG technology which means that we create an artificial nervous system essentially when you concentrate on and bring your attention level up it'll close the hand prosthetics really are not they're either not functional or not affordable we want to find a balance between functionality and costs so keeping something that's affordable to people but delivers far more functionality than you know your average sort of hook I mean the technology that we're developing it is a broad range of applications from just giving somebody their life back by allowing them functionality of a limb to like surrogate robotics you know we look at what what people have access to now kids have access to now we're just blown away what's it's amazing it at the Maker Faire these kids would come off to us and be like that's an Adreno mega and like and they'd be like he says it yeah but and they ask us like really kind of technical questions technical questions that we don't hear from adults I mean you have in Pittsburgh lots of really good schools right so you have people from all over the country all over the world coming to this region to develop their ideas and learn new things but that doesn't end when classes end these people go out they they interact with the community and it fosters a development process unlike any any educational system could you you also don't need to go to CMU to learn robotics I mean you know I've I did it for a couple hundred bucks and you know library fees we do this stuff all the time there are solutions out there all you have to do is know what questions that ask Pittsburgh smoky city Steel City robot city