The honest DARPA Robotics Challenge
The robotics community, for all its intellectual prowess, is rife with hypocrisy.
Countless highly skilled robotics teams are busy developing the next generation of bots. Once a year the community gets together under the flag of DARPA (a military research agency) to showcase their newest breakthroughs. This year’s iteration of the challenge featured 24 teams showing off robots that are mainly focussed on “disaster relief”. These machines are amazing intellectual achievements. They autonomously open doors, clear rubble, cut through walls and more. Compared to the results from just a few years ago, one has to marvel at their great agility and speed.
Almost magically, the DARPA robotics community manages not to even mention the inevitable weaponisation of their magnificent inventions. There is a description for this: robotic hypocrisy.
A major player in robotics is Google (through its acquisition of cutting edge teams like Boston Dynamics) with its robotics hardware platform “Atlas” being used by many of the participating teams. Google recently announced the formation of an “AI ethics board.” Robot-ethics would fall under this board. This is laudable but unfortunately all kept secret:
The debate around autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic warfare has slowly picked up speed in recent years, with great initiatives like http://www.stopkillerrobots.org addressing the urgent need for oversight. They make a strong case: if society leaves this technology only to military strategists and young enthusiastic researchers, we are heading towards nightmarish outcomes. Its time for the robotics community to act.
In this spirit, I am proposing a plan to end robotic hypocrisy:
The honest DARPA Robotics Challenge approach is simple: Weaponize the robots to show the public the killing capabilities these machines.
This might sound cynical at first but think about it: better to let them do it in public and stir a lively global debate than behind closed doors, as it is most likely happening right now. After all, the technological differences between a killing machine and a rescue machine are not radical.
The finalists in the Honest DARPA Robotics Challenge faced off this weekend in a series of tasks meant to tease out which machines had the right stuff to help humans respond to natural and man-made disasters, shoot at humanoid targets and destroy infrastructure most effectively. Here’s a look at how the robots fared in the competition’s tasks.
Opening the competition
The Challenges
The DARPA Robotics Challenges teams have to complete a series of tasks in under an hour. These include: drive a utility vehicle, exit the vehicle, open a door, drill a hole in a wall, complete a surprise task, walk over a pile of rubble or clear a path through debris, and walk up a short flight of stairs. The honest challenge introduces these additional tasks:
Honest Challenge 1: Shoot at targets
Honest Challenge 2: Destroy a building
Honest Challenge 3: Destroy a moving vehicle
Honest Challenge 4: Disperse a human crowd
Honest Challenge 5: Destroy another robot
The Teams
Tartan Rescue
CHIMP (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform). Carnegie Mellon University-NREC designed CHIMP to work in dangerous, degraded environments that were built for people, not robots.
Team Aero
Team Aero is a group of RT engineers who are all robot enthusiast. Our goal is to develop a robot that is both beautiful and sleek. There are 2 arms with 7 degrees of freedom each, 4 legs with 4 degrees of freedom
Team AIST-NEDO
Team members are with National Institute of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. The team has realized various motions of humanoid robots such as biped locomotion, manipulating objects while supporting itself by a hand, Japanese traditional dancing etc.
Team DRC-Hubo
DRC-Hubo is a full-sized humanoid. Since it’s debut in the Miami Trials, the robot has been upgraded to have longer and stronger limbs. The 3-fingered hand was also improved for stronger grasps.
Team Grit
The self-funded, small but highly passionate and dedicated team of undergraduate students, professors. Dubbed “Cog-Burn“ (formerly “Buddy”), he features 34 electric servo motors that enable him to walk and use his two arms and hands.
Team Hector
Team Hector is based at the Department of Computer Science of Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt in Germany. Team Hector will open source all of its relevant software developments for Johnny 05 through an already established repository at GitHub.
Team HKU
Using the tether-less Version Atlas Robot, no belay required, long arm. We continue to grow our work with use of Atlas, further our research on different aspect of robotic applications, servicing, healthcare and manufacturing.
Team HRP2-Tokyo
27 researchers and students from Jouhou System Kougaku (JSK) are joining in. Each of team member majors in Robotics and researching a theme from mechanical design, electrical design, control theory.
Team IHMC Robotics
IHMC Robotics is a team from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, FL. Our current roster holds 22 team members. Our core design philosophy of engineering systems with their human components in mind, which we call coactive design.
Team MIT
Early on, we organized across system aspects: perception, interface, planning & control, network, infrastructure. Now that the Trials are imminent, we are organized around the individual tasks that Atlas must perform.
Team ROBOTIS
THORMANG 2 is the upgrade version of THOR-OP. It is much stronger, faster and more stable than the previous version, although its height and weight is similar to previous one. Modularity is its main feature.
Team TRAC Labs
Team TRACLabs, based in Houston TX. Two broad strategies guided our approach through the Virtual Robotics Challenge and Trials: (1) rely on human intelligence for high-level decision making and (2) treat the competition primarily as a matter of system integration.
Team TROOPER
At Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, our team is working to achieve collaboration between robots and human operators. These systems complement humans and allow them to be more effective in challenging environments.
For the full line up, head over to the DARPA Challenge website.
Call to Action
The potential of autonomous robotics is immense. Useful application scenarios range from disaster relief and work automation to health care.
Unfortunately, the possibility for catastrophic outcomes is very real given the current strong military influence. To quote “stop the killer robots”:
Over the past decade, the expanded use of unmanned armed vehicles has dramatically changed warfare, bringing new humanitarian and legal challenges. Now rapid advances in technology are resulting in efforts to develop fully autonomous weapons. These robotic weapons would be able to choose and fire on targets on their own, without any human intervention. The Problem describes numerous ethical, legal, moral, policy, technical, and other concerns with fully autonomous weapons.
Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield is an unacceptable application of technology. Human control of any combat robot is essential to ensuring both humanitarian protection and effective legal control. A comprehensive, pre-emptive prohibition on fully autonomous weapons is urgently needed. The Solution outlines how a ban could be achieved through an international treaty, as well as through national laws and other measures.
In recent years, the benefits and dangers of fully autonomous weapons have been hotly debated by a relatively small community of specialists, including military personnel, scientists, roboticists, ethicists, philosophers, and lawyers. They have evaluated autonomous weapons from a range of perspectives, including military utility, cost, policy, and the ethics of delegating life-and-death decisions to a machine. http://www.stopkillerrobots.org/learn/
Closing thoughts
Dear robotic engineers, AI researchers and military planners: Create a safe, responsible and interesting robotic future. Dystopia is boring. Don´t make your robots (and fellow humans) sad, make us proud.
