All posts by Robin Murphy

A science fiction/science fact review of Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove, the fictionalized version of the Hughes Glomar Explorer expedition 50 years before the OceanGate Titan tragedy.

My new science fiction/science fact article for Science Robotics is out on why deep ocean robotics is hard. Especially when trying to bring up a sunken submarine 3 miles underwater, which the CIA actually did in 1974. It’s even harder if you’re trying to bring up an alien spaceship- which is the plot of Harry Turtledove’s new sci-fi novel Three Miles Under. It’s a delightful Forrest Gump version of that 1974 Hughes Glomar Explorer expedition. Though the expedition was 50 years before the OceanGate Titan tragedy, the same challenges exist for today’s robots. The robotics science in the book is very real, the aliens, not so much.

In 1974, the CIA deployed a 3 mile long, 6 million pound robot manipulator to recover a Russian submarine. The cover story was that Howard Hughes was deep sea mining for manganese nodules- which accidentally started everyone else investing in deep sea mining.

The Glomar Explorer was also a breakthrough in computer control, as the ship had to stay on station and move the arm to the sub in the presence of wind, waves, and currents. All with an array of 16-bit microprocessor, 5MHz clock, 32K words of core memory Honeywell computers. Consider that a late model iPhone uses a 64-bit microprocessor, a 3GHz clock, 6GB of RAM and a GPU.

Turtledove takes one major liberty with the otherwise hard science retrospective: the CIA recovering the Soviet sub was in turn a cover story masking the real mission to salvage the alien space ship that apparently collided with the sub!

The dry humor and attention to scientific details makes for an entertaining sci-fi compare-and-contrast between deep sea robotics and computers in the 1970s and the present day. It’s a fun read- not just for roboticists and computer scientists.

For further robotics science reading:

• about ROVs: https://rov.org/history/
• about the automatic station keeping system: The Jennifer Project

For further scifi reading, check out:

• early (1907) and start of underwater robots in scifi at cyberneticzoo.com
• reddit list

In the realm of disaster response, technology plays a pivotal role in aiding communities during challenging times. In this exploration, we turn our attention to drones and their application in earthquake response, especially as how they are being used in the recent Morocco earthquake. This concise video offers valuable insights into the practical uses of drones and the considerations surrounding their deployment during earthquake-related crises.

Even with the addition of a strange mineral, robots still obey the principle of bounded rationality in artificial intelligence set forth by Herb Simon.

I cover bounded rationality in my Science Robotics review (image courtesy of @SciRobotics) but I am adding some more details here.

Did you like the Western True Grit? Classic scifi like The Martian Chronicles? Scifi horror like Annihilation? Steam punk? How about robots? If yes to any or all of the above, The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud is for you! It’s a captivating book. And as a bonus, it’s a great example of the real world principle of bounded rationality.

First off, let’s talk about the book. The Strange is set in a counterfactual Confederate States of America colony on Mars circa 1930s, evocative of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The colony makes money by mining the Strange, a green mineral which amplifies the sapience and sentience of the Steam Punk robots called Engines. The planet is capable of supporting human life, though conditions are tenuous and though the colony is self-sufficient, all communication with Earth has suddenly stopped without a reason and its long term survival is now in question. The novel’s protagonist is Annabel Crisp, a delightfully frank and unfiltered 13 year old heroine straight out of Charles Portis’ classic Western novel, True Grit. She and Watson, the dishwashing Engine from her parent’s small restaurant, embark on a dangerous trek to recover stolen property and right a plethora of wrongs. Along the way, they deal with increasingly less friendly humans and Engines.

It’s China Meiville’s New Weird meets the Wild West.

Really.

What makes The Strange different from other horror novels is that the Engines (and humans) don’t exceed their intrinsic capabilities but rather the mineral focuses or concentrates on the existing capabilities. In humans it amplifies the deepest aspects of character, a coward becomes more clever at being a coward, a person determined to return to Earth will go to unheard of extreme measures. Yet, the human will not do anything they weren’t already capable of. In robots, it adds a veneer of personality and the ability to converse through natural language, but Engines are still limited by physical capabilities and intrinsic software functionality.

The novel indirectly illustrates important real world concepts in machine intelligence and bounded rationality:

• One is that intelligence is robotics is tailored to the task it is designed for. While the public assumes a general purpose artificial general intelligence that can be universally applied to any task or work domain, robotics focuses on developing forms of intelligence needed to accomplish specific tasks. For example, a factory robot may need to learn to mimic (and improve on) how a person performs a function, but it doesn’t need to be like Sophia and speak to audiences about the role of artificial intelligence in society.
• Another important distinction is that the Public often conflates four related but separate concepts: sapience (intelligence, expertise), sentience (feelings, self awareness), autonomy (ability to adapt how it executes a task or mission), and initiative (ability to modify or discard the task or mission to meet the objectives). In sci-fi, a robot may have all four, but in real-life they typically have very narrow sapience, no sentience, autonomy limited to the tasks they are designed for, and no initiative.

These concepts fall under a larger idea first proposed in the 1950s by Herb Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence- the idea is bounded rationality. Bounded rationality states that all decision-making agents, be they human or machine, have limits imposed by their computational resources (IQ, compute hardware, etc.), time, information (either too much or too little). For AI and robots the limits include the algorithms- the core programming. Even humans with high IQs make dumb decisions when they are tired, hungry, misinformed, or stressed. And no matter how smart, they stay within the constraints of their innate abilities. Only in fiction do people suddenly supersede their innate capabilities, and usually that takes something like a radioactive spider bite.

What would our real-world robots grow into if they were suddenly smarter? Would they be obsessive about a task, ignoring humans all together, possibly injuring or even killing them as the robots went about their tasks-sort of making OSHA violations? Would they hunt us down and kill us in one of the myriad ways detailed in Robopocalypse? Or would they deliver inventory, meals, and medicine with the kindly charm of an old-fashioned mailman? Would the social manipulation in healthcare and tutoring robots become real sentience, real caring?

Bounded rationality says it depends on us. The robots will simply do whatever we programmed them for within the limits of their hardware and the situation. Of course, that’s the problem- our programming is imperfect and we have trouble anticipating consequences. But for now, even if there was the Strange on Mars, Curiosity and Perseverance would keep on keeping on. And a big shout out to NASA- It’s hard to imagine how they could work better than they already do.

Pick up a copy of The Strange, it’s a great read. Plus Herb Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial. And don’t forget my books too! You can learn more about bounded rationality in science fiction here, in my textbook Introduction to AI Robotics and more science fiction that illustrates how robots work in Robotics Through Science Fiction and Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction through Asimov’s I, Robot Stories.

Even with the addition of a strange mineral, robots still obey the principle of bounded rationality in artificial intelligence set forth by Herb Simon.

I cover bounded rationality in my Science Robotics review (image courtesy of @SciRobotics) but I am adding some more details here.

Did you like the Western True Grit? Classic scifi like The Martian Chronicles? Scifi horror like Annihilation? Steam punk? How about robots? If yes to any or all of the above, The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud is for you! It’s a captivating book. And as a bonus, it’s a great example of the real world principle of bounded rationality.

First off, let’s talk about the book. The Strange is set in a counterfactual Confederate States of America colony on Mars circa 1930s, evocative of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The colony makes money by mining the Strange, a green mineral which amplifies the sapience and sentience of the Steam Punk robots called Engines. The planet is capable of supporting human life, though conditions are tenuous and though the colony is self-sufficient, all communication with Earth has suddenly stopped without a reason and its long term survival is now in question. The novel’s protagonist is Annabel Crisp, a delightfully frank and unfiltered 13 year old heroine straight out of Charles Portis’ classic Western novel, True Grit. She and Watson, the dishwashing Engine from her parent’s small restaurant, embark on a dangerous trek to recover stolen property and right a plethora of wrongs. Along the way, they deal with increasingly less friendly humans and Engines.

It’s China Meiville’s New Weird meets the Wild West.

Really.

What makes The Strange different from other horror novels is that the Engines (and humans) don’t exceed their intrinsic capabilities but rather the mineral focuses or concentrates on the existing capabilities. In humans it amplifies the deepest aspects of character, a coward becomes more clever at being a coward, a person determined to return to Earth will go to unheard of extreme measures. Yet, the human will not do anything they weren’t already capable of. In robots, it adds a veneer of personality and the ability to converse through natural language, but Engines are still limited by physical capabilities and intrinsic software functionality.

The novel indirectly illustrates important real world concepts in machine intelligence and bounded rationality:

• One is that intelligence is robotics is tailored to the task it is designed for. While the public assumes a general purpose artificial general intelligence that can be universally applied to any task or work domain, robotics focuses on developing forms of intelligence needed to accomplish specific tasks. For example, a factory robot may need to learn to mimic (and improve on) how a person performs a function, but it doesn’t need to be like Sophia and speak to audiences about the role of artificial intelligence in society.
• Another important distinction is that the Public often conflates four related but separate concepts: sapience (intelligence, expertise), sentience (feelings, self awareness), autonomy (ability to adapt how it executes a task or mission), and initiative (ability to modify or discard the task or mission to meet the objectives). In sci-fi, a robot may have all four, but in real-life they typically have very narrow sapience, no sentience, autonomy limited to the tasks they are designed for, and no initiative.

These concepts fall under a larger idea first proposed in the 1950s by Herb Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence- the idea is bounded rationality. Bounded rationality states that all decision-making agents, be they human or machine, have limits imposed by their computational resources (IQ, compute hardware, etc.), time, information (either too much or too little). For AI and robots the limits include the algorithms- the core programming. Even humans with high IQs make dumb decisions when they are tired, hungry, misinformed, or stressed. And no matter how smart, they stay within the constraints of their innate abilities. Only in fiction do people suddenly supersede their innate capabilities, and usually that takes something like a radioactive spider bite.

What would our real-world robots grow into if they were suddenly smarter? Would they be obsessive about a task, ignoring humans all together, possibly injuring or even killing them as the robots went about their tasks-sort of making OSHA violations? Would they hunt us down and kill us in one of the myriad ways detailed in Robopocalypse? Or would they deliver inventory, meals, and medicine with the kindly charm of an old-fashioned mailman? Would the social manipulation in healthcare and tutoring robots become real sentience, real caring?

Bounded rationality says it depends on us. The robots will simply do whatever we programmed them for within the limits of their hardware and the situation. Of course, that’s the problem- our programming is imperfect and we have trouble anticipating consequences. But for now, even if there was the Strange on Mars, Curiosity and Perseverance would keep on keeping on. And a big shout out to NASA- It’s hard to imagine how they could work better than they already do.

Pick up a copy of The Strange, it’s a great read. Plus Herb Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial. And don’t forget my books too! You can learn more about bounded rationality in science fiction here, in my textbook Introduction to AI Robotics and more science fiction that illustrates how robots work in Robotics Through Science Fiction and Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction through Asimov’s I, Robot Stories.

It is with great sadness that I am sharing that Joanne Pransky, the World’s First Robotic Psychariatrist, and who Isaac Asimov called the real Susan Calvin passed away recently. I had several delight conversations with her, including an interview and moderated panel.

Joanne was a tireless advocate for robotics AND for women in robotics. She didn’t have advanced degrees in robotics but had worked in the robotics industry and then in robot trade journals- she had quite the eye for finding really useful technology versus hype. Her enthusiasm and passion for constantly learning was an inspiration to me and I was privileged to know her as a friend. I interviewed her a few years ago about Asimov which you can see here. She points out how amazing Asimov was- at 19 years old writing about robots and imagining them in a positive way, as helpers, companions, tools to enable us to do more of the “human” stuff- not the shoot-em-up, take over the world Frankenstein monster motif. Joanne was one of the first to really push what is now called human-centered robotics– that there is always a human involved in any robot system.

Since she knew Asimov, she was in a good position to discuss Dr. Susan Calvin- possible the worst stereotype of a woman roboticist ever- no family, no friends, totally obsessed by work. You definitely should hear her discussion- I don’t want to spoil it by trying to paraphrase it. I don’t know if Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of Astounding:John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction- a terrific book, you should read it, would agree but it definitely adds a new dimension to understanding- and enjoying- Asimov’s robot stories.

I also moderated the 100 Years of R.U.R. panel with Joanne and Jeremy Brett for the 2021 We Robot conference. Her talk and comments were brilliant. While I had always heard that “robot” came from the Czech word “robota”, she pointed out that “robota” stems from the Greek work “orphanos” which means a change in status (like being orphaned) – where the “o” and “r” are switched in Slavic languages. So the roots in R.U.R. aren’t just drudgery, it is that being a robot is also a lower status. Both words convey exactly what Capek was trying to express about the dehumanization of workers. What an interesting detail!

That sums up Joanne: smart, seeing things that others missed, warm, positive, enthusiastic, engaging, wanting everyone to know more, do more, have a better life through robotics.

Joanne, I miss you.

And if you never met her, please check out her interview:

Eando Binder’s Adam Link scifi series predates Isaac Asimov’s more famous robots, posing issues in trust, control, and intellectual property.

Read more about these challenges in my Science Robotics article here.

And yes, there’s a John Wick they-killed-my-dog scene in there too.

Snippet for the article with some expansion:

In 1939, Eando Binder began a short story cycle about a robot named Adam Link. The first story in Binder’s series was titled “I, Robot.” That clever phrase would be recycled by Isaac Asimov’s publisher (against Asimov’s wishes) for his famous short story cycle that started in 1940 about the Three Laws of Robotics. But the Binder series had another influence on Asimov: the stories explicitly related Adam’s poor treatment to how humans reacted to the Creature in Frankenstein. (After the police killed his dog- did I mention John Wick?- and put him in jail, Adam conveniently finds a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the penny drops on why everyone is so mean to him…) In response, Asimov coined the term “the Frankenstein Complex” in his stories[1], with his characters stating that Three Laws of Robotics gave humans the confidence in robots to overcome this neurosis.

Note that the Frankenstein Complex is different from the Uncanny Valley; in the Uncanny Valley, the robot is creepy because it almost looks and moves like a human or animal but not quite, in the Frankenstein Complex people believe that intelligent robots regardless of what they look like will rise up against their creators.

Whether humans really have a Frankenstein Complex is a source of endless debate. Frederic Kaplan in a seminal paper presented the baseline assessment of the cultural differences and the role of popular media in trust of robots that everyone still uses[2]. Humanoid robotics researchers even have developed a formal measure of a user’s perception of the Frankenstein Complex.[3] So that group of HRI researchers believes the Frankenstein Complex is a real phenomena. But Binder’s Adam Link story cycle is also worth reexamining because it foresaw two additional challenges for robots and society that Asimov, and other early writers, did not: what is the appropriate form of control and can a robot own intellectual property.

You can get the Adam Link stories from the web as individual stories published in the online back issues of Amazing Stories but it is probably easier to get the story collection here. Binder did a fix-up novel where he organized the stories to form a chronology and added segue ways between stories.

If you’d like to learn more about

• robot control and what is appropriate for what types of tasks, see Introduction to AI Robotics, second edition
• Asimov’s Three Laws and whether they really would prevent the Frankenstein Complex, see Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction from Asimov’s I, Robot Stories, and links about Asimov

References

[1] Frankenstein Monster, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster, accessed July 28, 2022

[2] F. Kaplan, “Who is afraid of the humanoid? Investigating cultural differences in the acceptance of robots,” International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 1–16 (2004)

[3] Syrdal, D.S., Nomura, T., Dautenhahn, K. (2013). The Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire – Results from a Quantitative Cross-Cultural Survey. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_27

Eando Binder’s Adam Link scifi series predates Isaac Asimov’s more famous robots, posing issues in trust, control, and intellectual property.

Read more about these challenges in my Science Robotics article here.

And yes, there’s a John Wick they-killed-my-dog scene in there too.

Snippet for the article with some expansion:

In 1939, Eando Binder began a short story cycle about a robot named Adam Link. The first story in Binder’s series was titled “I, Robot.” That clever phrase would be recycled by Isaac Asimov’s publisher (against Asimov’s wishes) for his famous short story cycle that started in 1940 about the Three Laws of Robotics. But the Binder series had another influence on Asimov: the stories explicitly related Adam’s poor treatment to how humans reacted to the Creature in Frankenstein. (After the police killed his dog- did I mention John Wick?- and put him in jail, Adam conveniently finds a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the penny drops on why everyone is so mean to him…) In response, Asimov coined the term “the Frankenstein Complex” in his stories[1], with his characters stating that Three Laws of Robotics gave humans the confidence in robots to overcome this neurosis.

Note that the Frankenstein Complex is different from the Uncanny Valley; in the Uncanny Valley, the robot is creepy because it almost looks and moves like a human or animal but not quite, in the Frankenstein Complex people believe that intelligent robots regardless of what they look like will rise up against their creators.

Whether humans really have a Frankenstein Complex is a source of endless debate. Frederic Kaplan in a seminal paper presented the baseline assessment of the cultural differences and the role of popular media in trust of robots that everyone still uses[2]. Humanoid robotics researchers even have developed a formal measure of a user’s perception of the Frankenstein Complex.[3] So that group of HRI researchers believes the Frankenstein Complex is a real phenomena. But Binder’s Adam Link story cycle is also worth reexamining because it foresaw two additional challenges for robots and society that Asimov, and other early writers, did not: what is the appropriate form of control and can a robot own intellectual property.

You can get the Adam Link stories from the web as individual stories published in the online back issues of Amazing Stories but it is probably easier to get the story collection here. Binder did a fix-up novel where he organized the stories to form a chronology and added segue ways between stories.

If you’d like to learn more about

• robot control and what is appropriate for what types of tasks, see Introduction to AI Robotics, second edition
• Asimov’s Three Laws and whether they really would prevent the Frankenstein Complex, see Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction from Asimov’s I, Robot Stories, and links about Asimov

References

[1] Frankenstein Monster, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster, accessed July 28, 2022

[2] F. Kaplan, “Who is afraid of the humanoid? Investigating cultural differences in the acceptance of robots,” International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 1–16 (2004)

[3] Syrdal, D.S., Nomura, T., Dautenhahn, K. (2013). The Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire – Results from a Quantitative Cross-Cultural Survey. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_27

Robots: humanoids, teleoperated reconfigurable robots, swarms.

Recommendation: Read this classic hard sci-fi novel and expand your horizons about robots, teleoperation, and swarms.

Stanislaw Lem was one of the most read science fiction authors in the world in his day, especially the 70s and 80s, though not in America because there were rarely translations from his native Polish to English. Europeans could parse the French translations, we couldn’t even parlez vous francais. Lem famously did not like American science fiction, with a very few exceptions. One being Philip K. Dick- and it is no wonder since Lem’s 1987 novel Peace on Earth shares many of the same themes that Dick covered: militarization of robots, people losing their memory or not being what they seem, and government conspiracies. In some ways Peace on Earth is like the longer, more detailed, and, actually, *better* version of Dick’s 1953 short story Second Variety (which was basis for the Peter Weller movie Screamers).

Peace on Earth has a sort of a Battlestar Galatica (reboot) backstory. Mankind has put all their military robots on the moon to do whatever military robots do. The rapidly evolving, super smart robots can continue to use simulations and machine learning to improve or work out alternatives to Clauswitz style of warfare but out of the way so that it can’t impact humans.

Or can it?

Except after a couple of decades no one has heard from the robots. This is not unexpected, but people, being people, are beginning to wonder if the robots are still up there. Or maybe the robots have evolved into something peaceful. Or into some supreme intelligence that might want to take over the Earth. Or maybe the robots have run out of things to shot at up there and the winners are now thinking about shooting at Earth. Oooops. Maybe we should send someone to check in on them, just in case…

The story is told from the viewpoint of the astronaut, Ijon Tichy, sent to check in on the robots. The book starts with his return on Earth with brain damage that has severed his corpus callosum, left him with major memory loss as to what happened and why he is on the run. We are in Christopher Nolan Momento territory (without the tattoos) or Jonathan Nolan’s/HBO’s Westworld out of sequence story telling as Tichy tries to figure out what happened on the Moon and what it means.

Along the way we get some interesting descriptions of telerobotics and telepresence as well as swarm and distributed robotics. Lem was a hard science ficition writer, who had gone to medical school before switching to physics. He was very much into the science component of his books and in this case more of the ideas of biological evolution. He posits that biological evolution has been about the evolution of small to large— from viruses and bacteria to single cells to animals and people, but that robotics evolution will be from large to small. We started with big robots improving, then getting smaller with miniaturization of sensors and actuators, then smaller computation as a single robot would not need to carry all its computation onboard but could rely on distributed computation, and the trend will continue finally a robot becomes a collection of tiny, simple robots that can cast itself into a larger shape with greater intelligence— the idea behind Michael Crichton’s novel Prey. These swarms of what we would now call nanorobots would provide the ultimate flexibility in reconfigurable robots. Of course, Lem hand waves over limiting factors such as power and communication. But that aside, it’s a thought-provoking idea and a radically different take than Dick’s on how military robots would evolve.

One of the interesting scientific themes in Peace on Earth is Tichy’s use of teleoperation robots to land on the Moon and attempt to check out the robots in the different sectors of the Moon. Eventually Tichy quits using humanoid robots and begins using a reconfigurable robot body that can transform into different animal shapes so as to move more effectively through the different structures built by the robots.

Teleoperated robots are sometimes called avatars, though the term avatar was originally restricted to software simulations- James Cameron changed that connotation with his movie. There is increasing interest in telecommuting (and telesex) through robots, so much so, there is now a XPrize competition on avatars.

My favorite shape that Tichy’s teleoperated robot took on was that of a dachshund. And here is where Lem underestimated the scientific challenges of teleoperation. Lem focused on the physical science— how the avatar might reconfigure into a new shape. He assumed that Tichy would have little difficulty adjusting to the new shape because Tichy would be wearing a suit that sensed his body movements. Except this ignores the human-robot interaction component— how does Tichy know to move like a dog and synthesize perception from angles much lower than a human? The degrees of freedom are different, the movement patterns are different, the location of sensors are different. Operators get rapidly fatigued with humanoid robots where there is a one-to-one correspondence between the human and robot and there is no change in size. The cognitive load for trying to control a four legged animal would be huge. It is hard to imagine that Tichy would be successful without an intermediary intelligent assistance program that would translate his intent into the appropriate motions for the current shape.

And that type of assistive AI is a hard, open research question.

The XPrize ANA Avatar competition is making a similar assumption, that if you can build a humanoid avatar, it will be easy and natural for a human to control. That hasn’t been supported by decades of research in telerobotics and the humanoid robots in the DARPA robotics challenge often required multiple operators.

But back to Peace on Earth. It’s a very readable book jam packed with scientific ideas that were ahead of its time, combined with a serious jab at the stupidity of the nuclear arms race that was in progress at the time.

More importantly, Lew foresaw a world in which robots could be a threat, though politicians were a bigger threat, and were a solution to the threat. A refreshing take on robotics and the New World Order. What a shame Lem has been relatively unknown in the US.

You really should read this one, especially if you like hard science fiction like Arthur C. Clarke or if you want to get beyond the US viewpoint of sci-fi.

For an audio version of this review, click below…

Original article posted in Robotics Through Science Fiction blog.

Roboticists are working on real-world versions of Sox, a robot companion in Lightyear, to play therapeutic roles.

Check out how Sox compares to real world robot cats (and other pet companions) in my Science Robotics article. Sox actually checks off four of the requirements for a suitable therapy companion robot given in a 2021 paper by Koh, Ang, and Casey. The first robot cat NeCoRo has been unflatteringly described as “It’s like your deceased pet, that you had stuffed at a discount taxidermist, came back to life because you read a passage from that dusty old book you found in the attic.” You can see just how creepy it moves and acts here.

Sox is a great starting point to learn more about robot design, see the topics page on Robot Design for more scifi and of course my books to learn more.

I have loved science fiction ever since I was a kid and read all my Dad’s ancient issues of Analog Science Fiction and Fact from the 1940s. The first book I can remember reading was The Green Hills of Earth anthology by Robert Heinlein. Fast forward to the 1990s, when, as a new professor of computer science, I began adding sci-fi short stories and movies as extra credit for my AI and robotics courses. Later as a Faculty Fellow for Innovation in High-Impact Learning Experiences at Texas A&M, I created the Robotics Through Science Fiction book series as a companion to my textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics.

The books I picked & why

Little Eyes By Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell A Firby-like robot pet becomes an international fad, where a “keeper” buys a little wheeled robot and is randomly paired with a “dweller” who teleoperates the robot. The robot has only a camera and microphone, but no audio output, and the identity of the keeper and dweller are hidden. The game is that the keeper is entertained trying to figure out why the robot does what it does, while the dweller is entertained by exploring a new place. What could go wrong? Lots. Lots! Little Eyes absolutely terrified me, much more than any Stephen King novel because there is nothing supernatural, it could really happen.

The Warehouse By Rob Hart This is my favorite introduction to the state of automation and autonomy in manufacturing. In a near future, a Sam Walton type has made a fortune through drone delivery and warehouse automation. The warehouse automation is based on a well-intentioned, but shallow, interpretation of the outdated Fitts Law in human factors that divide different jobs between robots and humans. Except humans can’t match robot speed and endurance. The tension is whether a corporate spy who has infiltrated a warehouse to steal secrets is there to expose the inherent cruelty or, worse, to replicate the work practices at a competitor’s facility.

Rendezvous with Rama By Arthur C. Clarke This 1973 hard sci-fi classic is perhaps the best fictional introduction to behavioral robotics there is, appearing a decade before researchers, most notably Rod Brooks, created the behavioral paradigm. An alien spaceship is passing through our solar system on a slingshot orbit. It is autonomous but controlled strictly by simple biological affordances that enable it to respond to the human intruders without applying any of the HAL 9000 reasoning Clarke popularized in his more famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mentally throw this book at engineers when they try to make unnecessarily complex robots.

Kill Decision By Daniel Suarez When Kill Decision came out, I sent an email to all my Department of Defense colleagues saying: finally, a book that gets swarms, drones, computer vision, and lethal autonomous weapons right! The book shows behavioral robotics can duplicate insect intelligence to create simple, but relentlessly effective, drones. The inexpensive individual drones are limited in intelligence but a greater, more adaptive intelligence emerges from the swarm. It’s on par with a Michael Crichton technothriller with lots of action (plus romance), making it an easy read.

Head On: A Novel of the Near Future By John Scalzi The second in his entertaining detective series in a near future where 2% of the population is paralyzed and has to teleoperate robots in order to interact with the world (interestingly, it was written before the pandemic). The protagonist, Chris (we never are told their gender, making for a delightful guessing game), is an FBI agent investigating a murder and along the way faces the kind of casual discrimination that the disabled undoubtedly face every day. Chris maintains a wry sense of humor through it all, adding an Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake vibe that makes me laugh out loud.

Original article published in Shepherd. Shepherd also has bookshelves about robots and robotics.

Valentine’s Day is approaching… Do want to sneak in a robot movie to watch on date night? Do you wonder about whether robots and love is possible? Here are five recommendations for sci-fi movies with a discussion of the related real-world robotics science. And remember to check out Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction from Asimov’s I, Robot Stories– it’s a great primer on social interactions!

Can roboticists make the perfect partner? The original 1975 The Stepford Wives argues “yes”– if your definition of the perfect partner is limited to their appearance and willingness to selflessly perform subservient tasks. The movie, and book it is based on, extrapolated the advances in animatronics at Disney which had opened the Hall of Presidents attraction in 1971 to great acclaim. The assumption was that the hard part in creating a human substitute is creating robots that looked and moved like humans.

Mimicking human movement and facial expressiveness is certainly a challenge for the mechanics and control of a robot, think Hanson’s Sophia and Ishiguro’s Geminoid series of ‘bots. But physical fidelity is not the same as creating the artificial general intelligence needed to avoid the Uncanny Valley or hold a meaningful conversation. See more about the science of making life-like robots here.

Creating the perfect sex partner is a real issue in robotics, with major capital investments in the sexbot industry. This presents real legal and ethical issues. See the RTSF interview with Dr. Van Wynsberghe of the The Foundation for Responsible Robotics here. The FRR has been working to get governments to set policies— see their report Our Sexual Future with Robots. As a woman, I appreciate The Campaign Against Sex Robots which argues that acting out sexual fantasies with sexbots that would make even Takashi Kovacs in Altered Carbon blush have toxic gender, cultural, and mental health implications. Check out the great article on the legal status of sexbots in the US here.

Nominally a horror movie, The Stepford Wives is likely to make you both grateful for whatever positive relationship you have with each other. But get the 1975 original, not the 2004 remake.

Can roboticists make a robot that is better at social interactions, including love, than we are? In the 1987 movie Making Mr. Right, a neuroatypical scientist, played by John Malkovich, builds an android, also played by John Malkovich, that is much more socially competent than he is. A press agent is assigned to handle public relations and teach it to be more emotional. Love ensues.

Social interaction skills are a hot topic in human-robot research, see the large number of papers in venues such as the annual IEEE/ACM Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. But, sadly, most of the touted skills are social engineering tricks that make us think the robots have human skills. Noel Sharkey has a great set of articles on this type of advance/parlor trick in robotics.

Making Mr. Right is a romantic comedy, not a particularly good one, but it *is* the opposite of The Stepford Wives and, well, a romcom. It might inspire some snuggles.

Can’t roboticists make it where we can just download our brains to speed up the process of making robots more human like? In science fiction, that never works and three movies illustrates how it could lead to some tainted love. Saturn 3 and Eve of Destruction, and Demon Seed (FYI, the book is waaay better than the movie) are delightfully, MST3K worthy movies. All three have robot creators who download their brains, apparently missing the class on Freud and the Id. Ooops! Each movie has top actors, including Harvey Keitel, Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, Gregory Hines, and Julie Christie, who probably regret their decision to participate.

In the real world, downloading probably won’t work either, even if we can edit out our Id. There is some work on transfer learning and brain-computer interfaces but that work is more about motor skills and control, not abstract reasoning and memories.

If togetherness means throwing popcorn at a big screen TV and shouting out derisive comments then any of these three movies are terrific choices to watch with your special someone! My favorite is Saturn 3.

Here’s another link to a slideshow discussing emotions in robots and the general topic page. Whatever you decide to watch, enjoy and keep learning about robots!

Scifi robot books of 2021

2021 produced four new scifi books with good hard science underpinning their description of robots and three where there was less science but lots of interesting ideas about robots. Not only are these books enjoyable on their own, fiction can serve as teachable moments in robots and STEM and inspire a robot-obsessed teen to read more and improve their reading comprehension.

• Termination Shock
• Machinehood
• Stupid Machine
• Day Zero
• Fugitive Telemetry
• Fan Fiction
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Let’s start with the scifi book I most frequently recommended to friends to read in 2021: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. It is not a robot book per se but robots and automation are realistically interspersed through it- and the book is one of Stephenson’s best, pulling together LOTS of technology, subplots, and themes similar to what he did in Diamond Age. One of the technology threads is how drones are ubiquitous throughout the book, with small drones being used singly or in swarms for surveillance and social media and bigger drones used for delivery, human transport, and, well, mayhem. Nominally the book is about climate change and how a group of individuals led by a rich Texan plan to cut through the COP26 meetings blather and get on with geoengineering the environment. Except money and geoengineering is the easy part… It’s a dramedy of a book and manages to never lecture or push political agendas, instead it is hard science wrapped with memorable characters, a compelling plot, and a sense of humor, with an “oh my!” twist at the end.

A great way to think about how drones are becoming subtly integrated as tools into military, security, and journalism. And that at the end of the day, despite the huge investment in anti-drone technology, a shotgun with bird shot may be our best defense for small drones. Check out the RTSF topics page for more links to the science.

Unlike Termination Shock, robots and AI *are* the subject of S.B. Divya’s Machinehood. It’s a thorny book with a piercingly sharp commentary on the gig economy, climate change, automation, and ethics. A rogue neo-Buddhist decides that intelligent machines deserve legal rights and protections, similar to animals, which she calls the Machinehood Manifesto. Then she leads a terrorist cell to force governments to incorporate machinehood protections into their legal framework. A SpecialOps operator is tasked to take her down, which she does with the help of her sister-in-law. Lots of action, lots of ideas, lots of realism and full of thought provoking jabs. The book echoes real-world arguments since the 1980’s about treating robots as animals from a legal perspective.

It is a wonderful, very useful introduction to issues in robot ethics and autonomy and the very real concept of treating robots like animals- which is covered in the non-fiction book The New Breed by Kate Darling. You can read more about that in my recent Science Robotics article.

Stupid Machine by Mark Niemann-Ross is a comedy with an interesting and timely plot about autonomous cars, cyber hackers, and social justice warriors in Portland. It would be tempting to hack an autonomous car to drive an annoying semi-full time, I-protest-everything activist off a bridge, wouldn’t it? Plus there is a nice Ubik-like smart house subplot. Not as well-written, plotted, and memorable as Termination Shock and Machinehood, but a quick, easy read.

The idea that autonomous cars will be both ubiquitous and hackable makes it a nice teachable moment about cybersecurity. A recent scifi book that explains more about the workings of autonomous driving is David Walton’s There Laws Lethal. You can read my Science Robotics article on autonomous cars in scifi here.

Like Machinehood, Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill is set a near future. It’s the prequel to Sea of Rust, one of my all time favorite robot scifi books. Sea of Rust is an evocative story about what happens after the robot revolution and how the robots themselves descend into a kind of Mad Max hell. Day Zero isn’t as striking as Sea of Rust, but very enjoyable as a prequel. If you loved Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, then you’ll doubly love Day Zero because it is told from the POV of Pounce, the Teddy-like robot, who protects his boy Ezra during the robot revolution. You don’t have to read Sea of Rust first, Day Zero is a stand alone, but I recommend you do. I hope there are more books in the Sea of Rust series.!

In terms of robotics, Day Zero is a good introduction to nursebots, healthcare robots, and domestic assistance robots. You can learn more about the science of nannybots at the Science Robotics article and domestic robotics, sometimes called domotics at Science Robotics here.

Of course, there was a lot of other robot science fiction in 2021, just with less science. Here are three books for you to consider that have some robots in with real world science.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is one of my top “you’ve got to read!” The latest addition, Fugitive Telemetry, continues the delightful Bildungsroman of the galaxy’s snarkiest robot. ROFL as always, it maintains the usual clever plotting and action that makes the Murderbot Diaries a favorite of both the Hugos and Nebulas awards. And Murderbot, like the humans in Termination Shock, has a swarm of drones and knows how to use them. Oh, SecUnit, I love you!

And I love the series as way of illustrating real-world problems in software engineering and cybersecurity for robotics. Check out the discussions of software engineering in the first book and the Internet of Things in the fourth.

It’s hard not to like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek and Picard, right? Well, it’s hard not to like Brent Spiner, the nice Jewish boy from Houston who grew up to write a funny, self-mocking semi-fictional autobiography as well as star in a hit TV series. He calls his book, Fan Fiction, a “mem-noir” where an actor, conveniently named Brent Spiner, on the third season of a modest hit conveniently called “ST:TNG” is being stalked by a someone purported to be Lal, Data’s short-lived robot daughter. The hapless actor finds it is as if he is living in a Raymond Chandler novel. Brent reflects on his life and how he got to this point in his career as he tries to go about shooting episodes, going to parties at the Roddenberrys, signing autographs at cons, and hanging out with Patrick Stewart, Levar Burton, and Jonathan Frakes. Yet Spiner comes across as a regular guy, grounded and grateful- and amused- at “making it” in Hollywood. It makes me long for a follow up- what was life for that actor after the years of grueling 16 hour days on set and the increasing fame?

OK, there is not much there in terms of teachable moments about robots, but it is still fun.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, the reigning comfort lit scifi writer (and that’s a good thing!), is a sentimental Solar-punk book. The book doesn’t have a lot of action but could be perfect for middle schoolers (though some f-bombs are dropped) or a read-aloud to younger children. Or something to just to enjoy instead of listening to Lake Woebegone tales or re-reading Cadfael books. The premise is that in a future world, robots spontaneously gained sentience and then left human occupied terrorizes to explore being a robot. Now they are back, self-actualized, and ready to explore humanity by asking “what do humans need?”

Doesn’t sound like there’s much about real robots, does it? And yet, it has one of the most cogent explanations of agency, of what makes something more than a machine, which is a fundamental concept in artificial intelligence and in how autonomy is different than automation.

Hopefully this list of books gives you something to read and, more importantly, something to think about in 2022!

Sure the average video gamer is 34 years old, but the most active group is boys under 18, a group famously resistant to reading. Here is the RTSF Top 10 recommendations of books that have robots plus enough world building to rival Halo or Doom and lots of action or puzzles to solve. What’s even cooler is that you can cleverly use the “Topics” links to work in some STEM talking points by asking things like: do you think it would be easy reprogram cars to hit pedestrians instead of avoiding them? How would you fool a security drone? or Do you think robots should have the same rights as animals? But you may want to read them too, the first six on the list are books that I routinely recommend to general audiences and people tell me how much they loved them.

Head On – The rugby-like game in the book, Hilketa, played with real robots, is the best multiplayer game that never was. And paralyzed people have an advantage! (FYI: a PG-13 discussion of tele-sex through robots). Good for teachable moments about teleoperation.

Robopocalypse– Loved World War Z and read the book? They’ll love this more and it’s largely accurate about robots. Good for teachable moments about robot autonomy.

The Murderbot Diaries (series)- Delightfully snarky point of view of a security robot trying to save clueless scientists from Aliens-like corpos and creatures. Good for teachable moments about software engineering and whether intelligence systems would need a governor to keep them in line.

The Electric State– This is sort of a graphic novel the way Hannah Gadsby is sort of a comedian- it transcends the genre. Neither the full page illustrations nor the accompanying text tell the whole story of the angry teenage girl and her robot trying to outrun the end of the world. Like an escape room, you have to put the text and images together to figure out what is going on. Good for teachable moments about autonomy.

Tales from the Loop– the graphic novels, two in the series, are different from the emo Amazon streaming series. The books are much more suited to a teenage audience who love world building and surprising twists. Good for teachable moments about bounded rationality.

Kill Decision– Scarily realistic description of killer drones, with cool Spec Ops guy who has two ravens with call out to Norse mythology. Good for teachable moments about swarms (aka multi-robot systems).

Robots of Gotham– It’s sort of Game Lit without being based on a video game. Excellent discussion of how computer vision/machine learning works. Good for teachable moments about computer vision and machine learning.

The Andromeda Evolution– Helps if they’ve seen or read the original Andromeda Strain movie, but it can be read as a stand-alone. This commissioned sequel is a worthy addition. Good for teachable moments about drones and teleoperation.

Machinehood – A pro-Robots Rights group is terrorizing the world, nice discussion of ethics amid a lot of action- no boring lectures. Good for teachable moments about robot ethics.

The Themis Files– A earnest girl finds an alien Pacific Rim robot and learns to use it to fight evil giant piloted mecha invaders while shadowy quasi-governmental figures try to uncover its origins. Good for teachable moments about exoskeletons.

Texas A&M’s Robin Murphy has deployed robots at 29 disasters, including three building collapses, two mine disasters and an earthquake as director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. She has also served as a technical search specialist with the Hillsboro County (Florida) Fire and Rescue Department. The Conversation talked to Murphy to provide readers an understanding of the types of technologies that search and rescue crews at the Champlain Towers South disaster site in Surfside, Florida, have at their disposal, as well as some they don’t. The interview has been edited for length.

What types of technologies are rescuers using at the Surfside condo collapse site?

We don’t have reports about it from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, but news coverage shows that they’re using drones.

A standard kit for a technical search specialist would be basically a backpack of tools for searching the interior of the rubble: listening devices and a camera-on-a-wand or borescope for looking into the rubble.

How are drones typically used to help searchers?

They’re used to get a view from above to map the disaster and help plan the search, answering questions like: What does the site look like? Where is everybody? Oh crap, there’s smoke. Where is it coming from? Can we figure out what that part of the rubble looks like?

In Surfside, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also flying up to look at those balconies that are still intact and the parts that are hanging over. A structural specialist with binoculars generally can’t see accurately above three stories. So they don’t have a lot of ability to determine if a building’s safe for people to be near, to be working around or in, by looking from the ground.

Drones can take a series of photos to generate orthomosaics. Orthomosaics are like those maps of Mars where they use software to glue all the individual photos together and it’s a complete map of the planet. You can imagine how useful an orthomosaic can be for dividing up an area for a search and seeing the progress of the search and rescue effort.

Search and rescue teams can use that same data for a digital elevation map. That’s software that gets the topology of the rubble and you can start actually measuring how high the pile is, how thick that slab is, that this piece of rubble must have come from this part of the building, and those sorts of things.

How might ground robots be used in this type of disaster?

The current state of the practice for searching the interior of rubble is to use either a small tracked vehicle, such as an Inkutun VGTV Extreme, which is the most commonly used robot for such situations, or a snakelike robot, such as the Active Scope Camera developed in Japan.

Teledyne FLIR is sending a couple of tracked robots and operators to the site in Surfside, Florida.

Ground robots are typically used to go into places that searchers can’t fit into and go farther than search cameras can. Search cams typically max out at 18 feet, whereas ground robots have been able to go over 60 feet into rubble. They are also used to go into unsafe voids that a rescuer could fit in but that would be unsafe and thus would require teams to work for hours to shore up before anyone could enter it safely.

In theory, ground robots could also be used to allow medical personnel to see and talk with survivors trapped in rubble, and carry small packages of water and medicine to them. But so far no search and rescue teams anywhere have found anyone alive with a ground robot.

What are the challenges for using ground robots inside rubble?

The big problem is seeing inside the rubble. You’ve got basically a concrete, sheetrock, piping and furniture version of pickup sticks. If you can get a robot into the rubble, then the structural engineers can see the interior of that pile of pickup sticks and say “Oh, OK, we’re not going pull on that, that’s going to cause a secondary collapse. OK, we should start on this side, we’ll get through the debris quicker and safer.”

Going inside rubble piles is really hard. Scale is important. If the void spaces are on the order of the size of the robot, it’s tricky. If something goes wrong, it can’t turn around; it has to drive backward. Tortuosity – how many turns per meter – is also important. The more turns, the harder it is.

There’s also different surfaces. The robot may be on a concrete floor, next thing it’s on a patch of somebody’s shag carpeting. Then it’s got to go through a bunch of concrete that’s been pulverized into sand. There’s dust kicking up. The surroundings may be wet from all the sewage and all the water from sprinkler systems and the sand and dust start acting like mud. So it gets really hard really fast in terms of mobility.

What is your current research focus?

We look at human-robot interaction. We discovered that of all of the robots we could find in use, including ours – and we were the leading group in deploying robots in disasters – 51% of the failures during a disaster deployment were due to human error.

It’s challenging to work in these environments. I’ve never been in a disaster where there wasn’t some sort of surprise related to perception, something that you didn’t realize you needed to look for until you’re there.

What is your ideal search and rescue robot?

I’d like someone to develop a robot ferret. Ferrets are kind of snakey-looking mammals. But they have legs, small little legs. They can scoot around like a snake. They can claw with their little feet and climb up on uneven rocks. They can do a full meerkat, meaning they can stretch up really high and look around. They’re really good at balance, so they don’t fall over. They can be looking up and all of a sudden the ground starts to shift and they’re down and they’re gone – they’re fast.

How do you see the field of search and rescue robots going forward?

There’s no real funding for these types of ground robots. So there’s no economic incentive to develop robots for building collapses, which are very rare, thank goodness.

And the public safety agencies can’t afford them. They typically cost US\$50,000 to \$150,000 versus as little as \$1,000 for an aerial drone. So the cost-benefit doesn’t seem to be there.

I’m very frustrated with this. We’re still about the same level we were 20 years ago at the World Trade Center.

Robin R. Murphy volunteers with the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. She receives funding from the National Science Foundation for her work in disaster robotics and with CRASAR. She is affiliated with Texas A&M.

Original post published in The Conversation.