II-NEW: Multi-Robot Lab for Quality of Life Applications 1 Introduction

II-NEW: Multi-Robot Lab For Quality of Life Applications 1 Introduction NSF funds will support the purchase of ?? small humanoid robots to establish a multi-robot research and education facility. Our vision of the future is one in which humans interact with a large number of devices and robots in a human-robot community. In order to develop the research and educational foundation for such a future, we propose establishing a multi-robot research and education facility at CMU. We will focus on research and education about how robots can help everyone, with additional emphasis on helping children with developmental disorders and older adults. To work towards a future of human-robot community, we need to develop techniques for and educational materials on multi-robot perception, control, navigation, manipulation, reasoning, learning, and human-robot interaction. We need to explore how multiple robots can help each other perform better, and ex- change information effectively to achieve useful tasks. We have extensively explored how individual robots operate in human environments and have investigated and developed multi-robot systems in customized environments. We are now ready to experiment with multiple robots in our daily human environments. Fac- ulty who have expressed an interest in such a research facility include faculty from the Robotics Institute (Atkeson, Kanade, Likhachev, Rybski, Sheikh, Siegel, Simmons, Steinfeld, Thorpe), Computer Science De- partment (Touretzky, Veloso), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (Forlizzi, Cassell), Machine Learning Department (Gordon), Language Technologies Institute (Rudnicky), and Mechanical Engineering (Mess- ner). Choset will participate in his role as Director of the Robotics Undergraduate Minor. We will also integrate this multi-robot research and education facility into the research and education programs of our NSF Engineering Research Center on Quality of Life Technologies (QoLT) which is a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh. Example research projects include studies on how the sensors on all robots can be most effectively combined to monitor a large space, how to allocate resources to handle errors and emergencies (a human or robot accident such as a spill), and how such a system can be used to present a consistent interface to humans traveling through the space. We also contemplate experiments in which the robots are installed in other facilities such as homes, student dorms, and nursing homes or other care facilities, where we would do studies as to how a team of robots could make residents happier, monitor residents, and reduce the burden on caregivers. We expect the underlying foundational issues of multi-robot perception, control, and interaction to be very similar at our multiple study sites. We also expect the multi-robot facility to play a major role in education. We have several courses that already use small numbers of simple robots to work towards these goals (including 15-491: CMRoboBits: Creating Intelligent Robots, 16-264: Humanoids, and 16-362: Mobile Robot Programming Laboratory). With the availability of this multi-robot facility, we will see inclusion of hands on robotics in courses on AI, machine learning, HCI, speech (LTI), optimization, mechanical engineering, and programming. We also expect extensive involvement in Andrew’s Leap, the SAMS program, and other K-12 and minority outreach programs. We believe two possible applications will be wildly motivating for undergraduates. The first is team sports (Figure 1). We find that the element of competition is highly motivating for students. We also find that interactive games and theater is a rich realm for developing and exploring human-robot interaction. With a set of robots, video games can become physical games. One proposed educational project is a robot play or musical. We have found that assistive and story-based projects are especially attractive and engaging for female students. We are focusing on humanoid robots for two reasons. The first is that there are complete humanoid robots now available in the market, which are aiming to serve both research and education, and for which we are able to negotiate a significantly reduced price. The second reason is that the humanoid robot artifact 1 Figure 1: Left: Prof. Manuela Veloso currently uses NAO robots in her studies of teams of intelligent agents in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments, in particular adversarial environments. We will build on this experience base. Right: Schematic of NAO robot. offers compelling research and educational features, including a complex and motivating articulated body that allows for a rich walking motion, body poses, and gestures, as well as on board sensing, cognitive, and actuation capabilities that permit sophisticated interaction with humans. We believe others will be able to replicate this multi-robot laboratory as the cost of small robots decreases and the entertainment robotics market matures. The proposed facility is a new facility, and we estimate its lifetime as at least 10 years. The compelling new research and education opportunities are described below, and include use of multiple state of the art humanoid robots in classes that teach kinematics, dynamics, control, machine perception, artificial intelli- gence and reasoning, machine learning, systems integration, and human-computer interaction, and research in how communities of humans and robots can work together so that robots assist humans in their daily tasks, robots help older adults, robots help children with developmental disorders, and working with robots helps us understand how the brain works. Researchers, educators, and students from CMU and from the University of Pittsburgh will be able to use our facility and our robots. Most of our faculty teach and do research in synergistic areas, so we expect a great deal of cross fertilization between teaching and research, and between different areas. We expect this facility and its resources to be a major magnet in drawing students into research. CMU and the investigators involved have committed to supporting any infrastructure modification necessary to support robot use across several buildings such as indoor navigation aids and au- tomatic door and elevator controls accessible from the computer network. We will operate and maintain the facility using CMU contributions such as CMU Robotics Institute funding of our Robotics Education Lab, and support from the research grants of the users (as we do now for our shared research facilities such as high performance computer clusters). 2 The Multi-Robot Research and Education Facility With the NSF funding, we will create a multi-robot research and education facility at CMU. It will include ?? small humanoid robots. The robots will be housed in our 800 square foot Robot Education Lab (Newell Simon Hall xxx). Faculty and students will be able to use them there, as well as check them out. Manuela Veloso’s and Chris Atkeson’s laboratories will provide additional support. 2 Figure 2: Some challenging dynamic tasks we programmed on a Sarcos humanoid robot. We will also instrument a large indoor space spanning across three connected buildings (the Gates- Hillman Complex, Newell Simon Hall, and Wean Hall) to support robot use. These buildings are connected by robot-navigable bridges and have been used extensively in the past for individual robot studies. Robots would be able to work in the Wean and NSH 4th floor hallways and GHC floors 3-5 without opening doors and using stairs, and with assistance or additional technology will be able to pass through doors and ride elevators to go further. This space includes classrooms, offices, laboratories, hallways, restrooms, lounges, kitchens, and larger scale commercial eating facilities. It is our expectation that much use of the robots will occur in these buildings. We will also support use of the robots in the student’s homes or dorm rooms, as well as, use in nursing homes or other care facilities as part of the research and educational activities of our NSF ERC on QoLT, We have selected NAO H25 humanoids manufactured by the Aldebaran company (www.aldebaran- robotics.com) as the primary robot in our facility. We have negotiated a $7000 price for the full humanoid. The NAO robot is one of the most widely-used humanoid robot for academic purposes worldwide. It is also widely used in Secondary Education STEM activities. The robot is a 58 cm tall humanoid robot with a body with 25 degrees of freedom (DOF), each actuated by electric gearmotors with Hall effect sensors (36) and dsPICS microcontrollers. The neck has 2 DOF, each arm has 4, the pelvis has 1, each leg has 5, and each hand has 2. There are many sensors: 2 CMOS video cameras, 4 microphones, a sonar distance sensor with two channels, 2 IR emitters and receivers, 2 single axis gyros, one 3 axis accelerometer, 9 contact sensors, and 8 FSR pressure sensors to measure force. There are various output devices, including 2 high quality speakers and a voice synthesizer, and 33 LED lights. Power is provided by a 55 Watt-Hours battery, giving the robot 1.5 hours without recharging or more depending on the usage. The robot weights approximately 5 kg. The robot is fully programmable with a x86 AMD GEODE 500MHz CPU with 256MB SDRAM and 2GB Flash Memory. The CPU (located in the head) runs a Linux kernel and supports ALDEBARANs own proprietary middleware (NAOqi). There is a second CPU (located in the torso). There is both wired and wireless ethernet, as well as infrared

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