Archive 19.10.2022

By Toby Walsh (Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney)

You might suppose Hollywood is good at predicting the future. Indeed, Robert Wallace, head of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service and the US equivalent of MI6’s fictional Q, has recounted how Russian spies would watch the latest Bond movie to see what technologies might be coming their way.

Hollywood’s continuing obsession with killer robots might therefore be of significant concern. The newest such movie is Apple TV’s forthcoming sex robot courtroom drama Dolly.

I never thought I’d write the phrase “sex robot courtroom drama”, but there you go. Based on a 2011 short story by Elizabeth Bear, the plot concerns a billionaire killed by a sex robot that then asks for a lawyer to defend its murderous actions.

The real killer robots

Dolly is the latest in a long line of movies featuring killer robots – including HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 robot in the Terminator series. Indeed, conflict between robots and humans was at the centre of the very first feature-length science fiction film, Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis.

But almost all these movies get it wrong. Killer robots won’t be sentient humanoid robots with evil intent. This might make for a dramatic storyline and a box office success, but such technologies are many decades, if not centuries, away.

Indeed, contrary to recent fears, robots may never be sentient.

It’s much simpler technologies we should be worrying about. And these technologies are starting to turn up on the battlefield today in places like Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh.

A war transformed

Movies that feature much simpler armed drones, like Angel has Fallen (2019) and Eye in the Sky (2015), paint perhaps the most accurate picture of the real future of killer robots.

On the nightly TV news, we see how modern warfare is being transformed by ever-more autonomous drones, tanks, ships and submarines. These robots are only a little more sophisticated than those you can buy in your local hobby store.

And increasingly, the decisions to identify, track and destroy targets are being handed over to their algorithms.

This is taking the world to a dangerous place, with a host of moral, legal and technical problems. Such weapons will, for example, further upset our troubled geopolitical situation. We already see Turkey emerging as a major drone power.

And such weapons cross a moral red line into a terrible and terrifying world where unaccountable machines decide who lives and who dies.

Robot manufacturers are, however, starting to push back against this future.

A pledge not to weaponise

Last week, six leading robotics companies pledged they would never weaponise their robot platforms. The companies include Boston Dynamics, which makes the Atlas humanoid robot, which can perform an impressive backflip, and the Spot robot dog, which looks like it’s straight out of the Black Mirror TV series.

This isn’t the first time robotics companies have spoken out about this worrying future. Five years ago, I organised an open letter signed by Elon Musk and more than 100 founders of other AI and robot companies calling for the United Nations to regulate the use of killer robots. The letter even knocked the Pope into third place for a global disarmament award.

However, the fact that leading robotics companies are pledging not to weaponise their robot platforms is more virtue signalling than anything else.

We have, for example, already seen third parties mount guns on clones of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog. And such modified robots have proven effective in action. Iran’s top nuclear scientist was assassinated by Israeli agents using a robot machine gun in 2020.

Collective action to safeguard our future

The only way we can safeguard against this terrifying future is if nations collectively take action, as they have with chemical weapons, biological weapons and even nuclear weapons.

Such regulation won’t be perfect, just as the regulation of chemical weapons isn’t perfect. But it will prevent arms companies from openly selling such weapons and thus their proliferation.

Therefore, it’s even more important than a pledge from robotics companies to see the UN Human Rights council has recently unanimously decided to explore the human rights implications of new and emerging technologies like autonomous weapons.

Several dozen nations have already called for the UN to regulate killer robots. The European Parliament, the African Union, the UN Secretary General, Nobel peace laureates, church leaders, politicians and thousands of AI and robotics researchers like myself have all called for regulation.

Australian is not a country that has, so far, supported these calls. But if you want to avoid this Hollywood future, you may want to take it up with your political representative next time you see them.

Toby Walsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article appeared in The Conversation.

When it rains, it pours. And when it pours—like it has this year—we get potholes. While minor potholes are an inconvenience, major potholes can destroy car wheels and cause crashes, as dozens of motorists discovered last week on the Hume Freeway.

As the time comes by, the role of robotic welders is growing. To step up into Industry 4.0 and head into Industry 5.0, more and more manufacturers are applying the concepts and principles of automated welding.

You might suppose Hollywood is good at predicting the future. Indeed, Robert Wallace, head of the CIA's Office of Technical Service and the US equivalent of MI6's fictional Q, has recounted how Russian spies would watch the latest Bond movie to see what technologies might be coming their way.

Brenton’s VP of Technology, Mike Grinager, will be presenting on the Innovation Stage on Tuesday at 9:45am in partnership with Beckhoff. Mike will be showcasing our use of linear track technology in our automation.

By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office

Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.

Working together, the microparticles can generate a beating clock that oscillates at a very low frequency. These oscillations can then be harnessed to power tiny robotic devices, the researchers showed.

“In addition to being interesting from a physics point of view, this behavior can also be translated into an on-board oscillatory electrical signal, which can be very powerful in microrobotic autonomy. There are a lot of electrical components that require such an oscillatory input,” says Jingfan Yang, a recent MIT PhD recipient and one of the lead authors of the new study.

The particles used to create the new oscillator perform a simple chemical reaction that allows the particles to interact with each other through the formation and bursting of tiny gas bubbles. Under the right conditions, these interactions create an oscillator that behaves similar to a ticking clock, beating at intervals of a few seconds.

“We’re trying to look for very simple rules or features that you can encode into relatively simple microrobotic machines, to get them to collectively do very sophisticated tasks,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Strano is the senior author of the new paper, which appears in Nature Communications. Along with Yang, Thomas Berrueta, a Northwestern University graduate student advised by Professor Todd Murphey, is a lead author of the study.

Collective behavior

Demonstrations of emergent behavior can be seen throughout the natural world, where colonies of insects such as ants and bees accomplish feats that a single member of the group would never be able to achieve.

“Ants have minuscule brains and they do very simple cognitive tasks, but collectively they can do amazing things. They can forage for food and build these elaborate tunnel structures,” Strano says. “Physicists and engineers like myself want to understand these rules because it means we can make tiny things that collectively do complex tasks.”

In this study, the researchers wanted to design particles that could generate rhythmic movements, or oscillations, with a very low frequency. Until now, building low-frequency micro-oscillators has required sophisticated electronics that are expensive and difficult to design, or specialized materials with complex chemistries.

The simple particles that the researchers designed for this study are discs as small as 100 microns in diameter. The discs, made from a polymer called SU-8, have a platinum patch that can catalyze the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen.

When the particles are placed at the surface of a droplet of hydrogen peroxide on a flat surface, they tend to travel to the top of the droplet. At this liquid-air interface, they interact with any other particles found there. Each particle produces its own tiny bubble of oxygen, and when two particles come close enough that their bubbles interact, the bubbles pop, propelling the particles away from each other. Then, they begin forming new bubbles, and the cycle repeats over and over.

“One particle by itself stays still and doesn’t do anything interesting, but through teamwork, they can do something pretty amazing and useful, which is actually a difficult thing to achieve at the microscale,” Yang says.

MIT chemical engineers showed that specialized particles can oscillate together, demonstrating a phenomenon known as emergent behavior. At left, two particles oscillate together, and at right, eight particles. Video courtesy of the researchers.

The researchers found that two particles could make a very reliable oscillator, but as more particles were added, the rhythm would get thrown off. However, if they added one particle that was slightly different from the others, that particle could act as a “leader” that reorganized the other particles back into a rhythmic oscillator.

This leader particle is the same size as the other particles but has a slightly larger platinum patch, which enables it to create a larger oxygen bubble. This allows this particle to move to the center of the group, where it coordinates the oscillations of all of the other particles. Using this approach, the researchers found they could create oscillators containing up to at least 11 particles.

Depending on the number of particles, this oscillator beats at a frequency of about 0.1 to 0.3 hertz, which is on the order of the low-frequency oscillators that govern biological functions such as walking and the beating of the heart.

Oscillating current

The researchers also showed that they could use the rhythmic beating of these particles to generate an oscillating electric current. To do that, they swapped out the platinum catalyst for a fuel cell made of platinum and ruthenium or gold. The mechanical oscillation of the particles rhythmically alters the resistance from one end of the fuel cell to the other, which converts the voltage generated by the fuel cell to an oscillating current.

“Like a dripping faucet, catalytic microdiscs floating at a liquid interface use a chemical reaction to drive the periodic growth and release of gas bubbles. The study shows how these oscillatory dynamics can be harnessed for mechanical actuation and electrochemical signaling relevant to microrobotics,” says Kyle Bishop, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study.

Generating an oscillating current instead of a constant one could be useful for applications such as powering tiny robots that can walk. The MIT researchers used this approach to show that they could power a microactuator, which was previously used as legs on a tiny walking robot developed by researchers at Cornell University. The original version was powered by a laser that had to be alternately pointed at each set of legs, to manually oscillate the current. The MIT team showed that the on-board oscillating current generated by their particles could drive the cyclic actuation of the microrobotic leg, using a wire to transfer the current from the particles to the actuator.

“It shows that this mechanical oscillation can become an electrical oscillation, and then that electrical oscillation can actually power activities that a robot would do,” Strano says.

One possible application for this kind of system would be to control swarms of tiny autonomous robots that could be used as sensors to monitor water pollution.

The research was funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

For their first trip to a celebrated robotics contest for high school students from scores of countries, a team of Ukrainian teens had a problem.

As mobile robots become more advanced, they also become easier to deploy in a wide range of real-world settings. One of the factors that will enable their large-scale implementation is their ability to autonomously move around within different types of environments.

Imagine being able to morph your legs into flippers before you jump in the water. Yale researchers have created a robot that accomplishes this feat through a process they dubbed "adaptive morphogenesis."

Most accurate robot in class for 1.5 kg payloads for highest manufacturing quality, 50 percent higher payload than comparable robots. Consumes 20 percent less energy using OmniCore E10 controller enabling manufacturers to improve energy efficiency, reduce costs.

Researchers have designed a state-of-the-art walking robot that could revolutionize large construction projects in space. They tested the feasibility of the robot for the in-space assembly of a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. They present their findings in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. A scaled-down prototype of the robot also showed promise for large construction applications on Earth.

Developing a vaccine that could save hundreds of thousands of lives

Developing a vaccine that could save hundreds of thousands of lives

ROI presentations are transaction-based covering metrics and measures focused solely on the ability to reduce costs. A new transformative-based approach to determining the ROI for robots and automation includes evaluating key benefits and opportunities,

The new World Robotics report shows an all-time high of 517,385 new industrial robots installed in 2021 in factories around the world. This represents a growth rate of 31% year-on-year and exceeds the pre-pandemic record of robot installation in 2018 by 22%. Today, the stock of operational robots around the globe hits a new record of about 3.5 million units.”

“The use of robotics and automation is growing at a breathtaking speed,” says Marina Bill, President of the International Federation of Robotics. “Within six years, annual robot installations more than doubled. According to our latest statistics, installations grew strongly in 2021 in all major customer industries, although supply chain disruptions as well as different local or regional headwinds hampered production.”

Asia, Europe and the Americas – overview

Asia remains the world’s largest market for industrial robots. 74% of all newly deployed robots in 2021 were installed in Asia (2020: 70%).

Installations for the region´s largest adopter China grew strongly by 51% with 268,195 units shipped. Every other robot installed globally in 2021 was deployed here. The operational stock broke the 1-million-unit mark (+27%). This high growth rate indicates the rapid speed of robotization in China.

Japan remained second to China as the largest market for industrial robots. Installations were up 22% in 2021 with 47,182 units. Japan’s operational stock was 393,326 units (+5%) in 2021. After two years of declining robot installations in all major industries, numbers began growing again in 2021. Japan is the world´s predominant robot manufacturing country: Exports of Japanese industrial robots achieved a new peak level at 186,102 units in 2021.

The Republic of Korea was the fourth largest robot market in terms of annual installations, following the US, Japan and China. Robot installations increased by 2% to 31,083 units in 2021. This followed four years of declining installation figures. The operational stock of robots was computed at 366,227 units (+7%).

Europe

Robot installations in Europe were up 24% to 84,302 units in 2021. This represents a new peak. Demand from the automotive industry was steady, while demand from the general industry was up by 51%. Germany, which belongs to the five major robot markets in the world, had a share of 28% of total installations in Europe. Italy followed with 17% and France with 7%.

The number of installed robots in Germany grew by 6% to 23,777 units in 2021. This is the second highest installation count ever recorded, following the peak caused by massive investments from the automotive industry in 2018 (26,723 units). The operational stock of robots was calculated at 245,908 units (+7%) in 2021. Exports of industrial robots from Germany were up 41% to 22,870 units, exceeding the pre-pandemic level.

Italy is the second largest robot market in Europe after Germany. The main growth driver between 2016 and 2021 was the general industry with an annual average growth rate of 8%. The operational stock of robots was computed at 89,330 units (+14%) in 2021. The 2021 results were driven by catch-up effects and earlier purchases due to a reduction of tax credits in 2022. This created a 65% increase of robot installations to a new record level of 14,083 units in 2021.

The robot market in France ranked third in Europe in 2021 regarding annual installations and operational stock, following Italy and Germany. In 2021, robot installations increased by 11% to 5,945 units. The operational stock of robots in France was calculated at 49,312 units, a 10% increase over the previous year.

In the United Kingdom, industrial robot installations were down by 7% to 2,054 units. The operational stock of robots was calculated at 24,445 units (+6%) in 2021. This is less than a tenth of Germany´s stock. The automotive industry reduced installations by 42% to 507 units in 2021.

The Americas

In 2021, 50,712 industrial robots were installed in the Americas, 31% more than in 2020. This is a remarkable recovery from the pandemic dip in 2020 and the second time that robot installations in the Americas exceeded the 50,000-unit mark, with 55,212 units in 2018 setting the benchmark.

New installations in the United States were up by 14% to 34,987 units in 2021. This exceeded the pre-pandemic level of 33,378 units in 2019 but was still considerably lower than the peak level of 40,373 units in 2018. The automotive industry is still by far the number one adopter with 9,782 units installed in 2021. However, demand had been continuously declining for five years (2016-2021). In 2021 installations were down 7% compared to 2020. Installations in the metal and machinery industry surged by 66% to 3,814 units in 2021, putting this industry into second place in terms of robot demand. The plastic and chemical products industry had 3,466 robots (+30%) newly installed in 2021. The food and beverage industry installed 25% more robots, reaching a new peak level of 3,402 units in 2021. The robotics industry offers hygienic solutions that experienced growing demand during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Outlook

Rising energy prices, intermediate product prices and scarcity of electronic components are challenging all branches of the global economy. But order books are full and demand for industrial robots has never been higher. In total, global robot installations are expected to grow by 10% to almost 570,000 units in 2022. The post-pandemic boom experienced in 2021 is expected to fade out in 2022. From 2022 to 2025, average annual growth rates in the medium to upper single-digit range are forecast.

Orders for World Robotics 2022 Industrial Robots and Service Robots reports can be placed online. Further downloads on the content are available here.