Seeing Silicon: ‘Robots are fragile, we’ve to take care of them’

FRom a brilliant sunny daylight on the leland stanford campus, I head up shoot down into the basement of its Electrical Engineering building. It’s not dark or dingy, rather, the newly opened Stanford Robotics Center is polished and rather sparkly, the open space gleaming in excitement, segueing off into glass rooms on either side. Before I can introduce myself on the tour – we’re all here to see robots – I’m distracted by two rather tiny and completely non threatening bots that come and kind of sniff us. One’s a dog-shaped one, its four legs moving jaggedly. The second is an egg-shaped Relay Robot, an autonomous delivery robot that twirls in greeting.The Stanford Robotics Center opened earlier this year as a space for interdisciplinary projects of all departments of the university. “It’s a space for challenging projects, where different people from different fields collaborate and think about how robots can help humans and the planet,” explains Dr Oussama Khatib, the director of Stanford Robotics Center who is a professor in the department of computer science. After all, mechatronics, as robotics is increasingly being called now, is a multidisciplinary field that integrates mechanical, electrical and computer engineering, and requires advances in sensors, motors, actuators, mechanisms, designs, algorithms, control architecture and materials to come together. That’s a lot of skills and expertise. “Robotics also has different users, different use cases and that requires different areas of expertise from medical to mining,” he said, adding that it took him five years to get space, funds and people together for the centre.The whole stretch of open space separates out into different rooms where different robots are being trained, ranging from mining, industry, household to medical. On our left is a dance studio with sensors which scan movement of dancers and use it to learn motion for robots. Across from us, in another room, a household humanoid robot walks in a scattered room picking up clothes and replacing books back into the shelves. It’s clunky and delicate. It also costs $90,000 and does 15 minutes of cleaning.“Robots are not dangerous but they’re fragile,” Khatib says, adding that what they have, even with AI, is functional autonomy, not cognitive autonomy like humans. They have to be maintained, taken care of, protected by humans. They also tend to become obsolete.Also Read: Seeing Silicon | The ones who found quarksFurther down the hall, in the medical section, we meet an obsolete robot, da Vinci Surgical System, which has been gifted to the center so researchers can use them in projects. There’s also a brand-new millirobot, a miniscule medical robot that can be injected into the bloodstream, controlled with spinning magnets to tackle a tumour in the human body. “It’s a result of discussion between researchers in robotics and brain surgeons,” said Khatib, driving his point about collaborations. Next door has industrial robots, where a bot is doing repairs for future datacenters. In the tour crowd, someone comments on the most difficult thing to copy – the dexterity in human hands.The robots here make me feel that the future is not replacement of humans, but collaboration between robots and humans. I try out a haptic feedback system – a sleeve I wear on my hand so I can feel the same things that a robotic arm is touching. The haptic feedback system is being used in a lot of robots today. Feedback comes through vibration motors, ultrasonic waves and microfluidics in the haptic system. As the robotic arm touches things, through the sensors, my skin feels wet, squiggly, thorny or velvety.Also read: Seeing Silicon | How India’s first garage startup became a heavyweight in the tech industryIt’s the same haptic feedback system that Khatib has used in his massively popular OceanOne – a diving robot that can descent nearly a kilometre to explore sunken ships, planes and help marine biologists. The robot’s upper body is humanoid and can be controlled by a human using haptic and a stereoscopic vision. Imagine touching a shipwreck sunken in the ocean, while you’re in the lab. The underwater robot becomes your avatar, allowing you to experience its environment.Interaction is the future of robotics, Khatib tells me. It will be through haptic devices, or interfaces where you’ll be able to operate robots in challenging environments like underwater, in a mine or in a fire. A month ago, Khatib was at IIT Mandi, installing a haptic device for ultrasonic imaging, so computer science researchers in Mandi can experience imaging happening real-time at Stanford university. It’s an experiment. In the future, surgeons might use the same sleeve system to operate on their patients remotely.Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.