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Robotic Tele-actor: A virtual tour guide with soul
By Blake Edgar
Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg’s idea of a robot suits
the progressive environs of Berkeley. Not the rampant metallic
cyborg of sci-fi films, Goldberg’s "robot" wears
a human face and responds to democratic consensus. It has a mission,
and uses its technological bells and whistles to educate and entertain,
but more importantly, to transport users to places they might
otherwise never visit, from biotech laboratories and hospital
operating rooms to working steel mills and the Supreme Court’s
back corridors.
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| Ken Goldberg, who is
as much artist as engineer, has exhibited his work in galleries
and museums from Chicago and Minneapolis to Paris and Tokyo.
His cheeky Ouija 2002 art project won a place in the prestigious
2000 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Bart Nagel |
Professor Goldberg, who is affiliated with the departments of
industrial engineering and operations research and electrical
engineering and computer sciences, directs the ALPHA lab, a campus
research center for automated manufacturing and robotics. Taking
a lead role in the lab’s Internet tele-robotics effort is
the Tele-actor – part cyborg, part performance artist. Like
the Sojourner mini-rover that poked around the rocks of Mars a
few years ago, the Tele-actor provides access to off-limits places
for remote visitors, who decide the itinerary of their tour. She
(for the Tele-actor has most recently been operated by art and
engineering undergraduate Annamarie Ho) delivers a dynamic, interactive
exploration, like taking a field trip without leaving the home
or classroom.
"We could have used a robot, but then we’d have to
worry about how to keep it from falling downstairs or walking
into bushes," says Goldberg, who has been called a pioneer
in the technology of letting us be where we are not.
With a helmet-mounted antenna and wireless video camera connected
to a laptop computer concealed in a backpack, the Tele-actor keeps
in touch by cell phone with a local director at some remote location.
The Tele-actor’s camera sends video images to a base station
server, where they are streamed to viewers on the Internet. Based
on viewers’ decisions during elections, a new voting interface
determines the Tele-actor’s next moves.
Goldberg likens the Tele-actor and similar Multiple Operator Single
Robot (MOSR) systems to operating a ship. The input of many people
steers the vessel, but instead of having everyone on the same
boat, a MOSR can theoretically be led by anyone, anywhere. "Many
heads can be better than one, and it is well known that vector
averaging can reduce noise and improve system performance,"
notes Goldberg.
Since the mid-1990s, Goldberg’s lab has developed several
prototypes for collaborative robot teleoperation. One whimsical
project, called Ouija 2000, let Internet users virtually maneuver
around an old-fashioned Ouija board – with or without supernatural
intervention. But Goldberg longed to bring the playfulness of
a game board into a real-world setting and to introduce a human
element. Cue the Tele-actor.
The Tele-actor made her debut at the 2001 Webby Awards in San
Francisco. With video camera mounted inside a pair of opera glasses,
she roamed the cocktail reception at the San Francisco Opera House.
Up to 56 remote participants all over the world followed her mingling
with partygoers and voted answers to simple questions like "Where
should we go next?"
What viewers didn’t see was the base station, where students
selected video images and paired them with text to be uploaded.
Viewers cast votes by positioning colored squares called "votels"
on the computer screen and clicking a mouse. Each can see how
the others voted and individual votes can be changed before an
election ends. Incoming votes get tabulated and gathered for later
analysis. Goldberg envisions tweaking the algorithms by introducing
an economy of votes to see how that affects the decision-making
process, or by somehow rewarding participants who serve as leaders
by anticipating a group decision.
There’s solid science and broad social implications beneath
this playful veneer, as support from both the National Science
Foundation and the recently launched Center for Information Technology
Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) attests. The data
provided by viewers and analyzed by sophisticated clustering algorithms
developed for the project enable Goldberg’s team to study
voting behavior, how groups reach consensus, and how leaders emerge.
Goldberg and doctoral student Dezhen Song are experimenting with
new algorithms that will allow them to optimize the flurry of
votes into a consensus that satisfies the most voters, as well
as to measure collaboration and other behavior that establishes
individual voter profiles. "This is exciting because it provides
a quantitative measure of group dynamics," says Goldberg.
And while researchers stand to learn a lot from the behavior of
a Tele-actor audience, the project has obvious distance learning
applications. Students have already followed the Tele-actor through
the San Francisco Exploratorium – a science and technology
museum full of interactive teaching exhibits. And 25 seventh graders
from the Dolores Huerta Learning Academy in Oakland accompanied
Tele-actor Ho on a virtual field trip to Berkeley’s Microlab,
a clean room where microchips are manufactured in a near-sterile
environment.
Electrical engineering student Mark McKelvin has begun Tele-actor
training and will work with Ho on the "Robot, Clone, Human"
teaching project, a collaboration with Berkeley’s Interactive
University and the San Francisco Unified School District. For
this project, Goldberg’s team will contribute to a mini-high
school biology curriculum, and the Tele-actor will take students
to a local biotechnology company to witness robots in action.
The researchers use off-the-shelf hardware for the Tele-actor
so they can focus on developing the software and interfaces that
enhance the Tele-actor’s educational value. While the Internet
provides the means for remote audience participation, Goldberg
realizes that it also poses constraints of speed and image quality,
and anticipates a brighter future for the Tele-actor on Internet
2, the next generation Internet now being developed. "I’m
trying to see beyond the limitations we’re facing right
now to the technology we’ll have in five to ten years,"
Goldberg says.
Yet Goldberg won’t lose sight of his project’s social
and educational potential. "We don’t want to turn it
into a sci-fi encounter," he says. While attention naturally
turns to the Tele-actor’s high-tech hardware, "it’s
also a very practical technology that allows people to collaborate
and gain access to otherwise inaccessible places."
Author Blake Edgar, science acquisitions editor
at the University of California Press and former senior editor
of California Wild, has co-authored three books on paleoanthropology,
including The Dawn of Human Culture and From Lucy
to Language. His work appears in Bay Area and national magazines.
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