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Smart Sensors and Small Robots IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Budapest, Hungary, May 21-23, 2001. Smart Sensors and Small Robots Mel Siegel Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2605, USA Phone: +1 412 268 88025, Fax: +1 412 268 5569 Email: [email protected], URL: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mws Abstract – Robots are machines that sense, think, act and (more Thinking: Cognition is a prerequisite for adaptability, with- recently) communicate. Sensing, thinking, and communicating out which no real machine could operate for any significant have all been greatly miniaturized as a consequence of continuous progress in integrated circuit design and manufacturing technol- time in any real environment. No predetermined plan could ogy. More recent progress in MEMS (micro electro mechanical realistically anticipate every feature of the environment - and systems) now holds out promise for comparable miniaturization of if it could, the mission might be utilitarian, but it would the heretofore-retarded third member of the sense-think-act- hardly be interesting, as what would be its purpose if there communicate quartet. More speculatively, initial experiments toward microbiological approaches to robotics suggest possibilities were no new knowledge to be gained? Anyway, even a toy for even further miniaturization, perhaps eventually extending mission in a completely known environment would soon fail down to the molecular level. Alongside smart sensing for robots, in open-loop operation, as accumulated mechanical and sen- with miniaturization of the electromechanical components, i.e., the sor errors would inevitably lead to disastrous discrepancies machinery of robotic manipulation and mobility, we quite natu- rally acquire the capability of smart sensing by robots. This paper between predicted and actual states. Of course, "dumb" summarizes the state-of-the-art, particularly with respect to the "black-box" mechanisms do sometimes exhibit seemingly role of and the requirements for sensing. Three main cases are intelligent behavior, but only in very limited domains [2]. described: (1) the robot's mission is to carry sensors; (2) environ- mental sensing is required for the robot to accomplish its mission; and (3) proprioception, i.e., sensing for robot self-awareness. Acting: An ability to act on the environment is regarded, alongside an ability to sense it, as an essential requirement for Keywords – autonomous, mobile, robot, nanorobot, microrobot, the evolution of intelligence. Although both manipulation minirobot, sensing, remote sensing, teleoperation, proprioception and mobility are necessary components of action, we can imagine missions - and we can identify many real missions - I. INTRODUCTION in which either no manipulation is required, or in which very simple manipulation that is actuated by the mobility compo- When we were inventing robotics as an academic discipline, nent is adequate. Thus we focus mostly on mobility. In ro- we divided the field into specialties that correspond to Allen botics’ beginnings, mobility was more a dream than a reality: Newell’s three-component definition: a robot is a machine robots were then essentially one-armed iron-laborers bolted at that senses, thinks, and acts [1]. The robotics educational their waists to the factory floor. But much progress has been curriculum that emerged correspondingly requires each stu- made, particularly in the mobility domain vs. the manipula- dent to become proficient in the sciences and technologies of tion domain. The current image of a robot, both in the re- perception, cognition, and manipulation and mobility. search community and in the public’s eye, is of a rather agile mobile creature, propelled usually by wheels - though some- Sensing: Robots require sensors for many reasons, most of times by legs - usually in a two-dimensional environment, but them falling into one of three broad categories: (1) sensing is sometimes by aerodynamic lift or rocket propulsion in a the purpose of the mission, e.g., to gather and transmit images three-dimensional environment. and chemical analyses of rocks on a planetary exploration mission ("robots for sensing" types of applications); (2) sens- Communicating: As mobility becomes more-and-more a ing is required to enable the machines to survive in the mis- taken-for-granted attribute of the machines we call robots, it sion’s environment, e.g., to recognize the obstacles between seems inevitable that we will have to append communicate to present position and desired position ("sensing for robots" the original sense, think, and act list. Only with effective types of applications); and (3) proprioception, enabling the communication will mobile robots be able to cooperate effec- robots to sense their own "personal" configurations, and their tively with each other, and with the humans they are meant to relationships to the environment, e.g., to achieve a pose that serve [3]. permits the manipulator to lift an environmental object in a manner that is consistent with its own materials strength and In this "state-of-the-art review" I will, within the sense-think- power limitations ("sensing for robotics" types of applica- act-communicate framework, summarize the current histori- tions). It is perhaps already apparent that the really interest- cal moment for small mobile robots. I will particularly em- ing applications also involve mobility and communication. phasize, for the instrumentation-and-measurements-oriented mobility applications resists great shrinkage in practice. audience, the sensing component - where it is strong, where it Even the MEMS approach has to date produced only large- is weak, and where it is absent. In the main text and in the insect sized robot-like artifacts, and these remain laboratory conclusions, I will, as comprehensively as I can, summarize curiosities, despite the numerous practical medical, industrial, and critique the state-of-the-art, and as best I can, I will offer etc., applications that beg for these and even smaller devices. educated guesses about the near term prospects, long term promises, and the scientific and technical gaps that will need Furthermore, whatever progress is made toward smaller ac- to be bridged in order to achieve the prospects and promises. tuators, there looms an inevitable barrier: the limited energy carrying capacity of small devices. For a machine with char- Section II briefly summarizes the BACKGROUND, particu- acteristic linear dimension R, energy-carrying capacity scales larly with respect to the driving forces underlying the re- as R3, whereas power dissipation to internal and external fric- quirements for small sensory robots, and some of the inherent tion scales more-or-less as R2. Thus the operating time of bottlenecks that will need to be overcome to achieve practical any stored-power device is more-or-less proportional to R. In success. Section III is a lighthearted census of the SIZE- practice, the best self-powered small robots built to date have DISTRIBUTION OF ROBOTS, including an attempt to about the same operating time as the "best" microbes have discern from the compiled statistics how terms like nanoro- between feedings: less than one hour. But the microbes are bot, microrobot, etc., are defined by common usage, and the 10,000 or so times smaller than the smallest actual robots, identification of a scaling law for deducing the appropriate which means, according to this scaling relation, that their SI-prefix to put in front of "robot" as a function of its charac- energy carrying capacity is more efficient by the same factor. teristic linear dimension. Section IV discusses SMALL The size of this gap forcefully argues that, for a long time ROBOTS in four subsections corresponding to the categories into the future, small robots will have to be powered either by molecular robots, nanorobots, microrobots, and millirobots a "feeding" mechanism that extracts energy from the envi- (or minirobots). Section V constitutes the CONCLUSIONS, ronment, or through an umbilicus. structured as a systematic summary the state-of-the-art, the future requirements, and the future prospects for sensing and Most readers will recognize that an umbilicus is the Achilles ‘smart sensing’ for the small robots discussed in the previous heel of current generation full-sized mobile robots: these ma- section. chines most typically fail by tangling or cutting their own umbilicus - it is the robotic analog of "tripping over your own shoelaces". Until we learn - perhaps from future advances in II. BACKGROUND biological science - how to make tiny robots that can forage for their energy, small mobile robots will require some kind With mobility taken as a given, both individual robot size and of umbilicus to accomplish any task that requires more than a the number of robots constituting a system become crucial few minutes. Given the many-times-demonstrated impracti- issues. If we are to be adequately served by mobile robots, cality of even the most thoughtfully designed physical um- we will need large numbers of them. If we are to have large bilicus, only a completely ethereal umbilicus, e.g., a tracking numbers, they will have to be cheap; and to be cheap – and laser beam with sufficient power to "feed" the robot, seems to also to be able to work effectively in the environments be a viable alternative. With an ethereal umbilicus, being wherein most applications are anticipated - they will have to 1 small is actually highly advantageous: surface-to-volume be small . Typical anticipated
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