As the Zurich-based developers say, to them Cubli is simply a cool little cube that can balance and walk, but it may have much more potential. I definitely see this newborn technology growing out into more advanced things. Although it will probably be much too power-consuming for most application, it seems quite powerful and an interesting way to create locomotion without moving exterior parts but through angular momentums generated on the inside. Cubli is essentially a kind of modernist project, a technical feat, and it may therefore be a bit surprising that things like this still get millions of YouTube hits in a few weeks, but it is undeniably very impressive and relevant. Watch it in action here:
"WildCat" is the latest work of Boston Dynamics, and the successor of their cat-inspired "Cheetah" project. Where Cheetah was tethered and could run 19mph, this one runs free at 16mph. So, is it mostly creepy or mostly cool? Watch it in action and decide for yourself:
I do suggest that this device needs some 'humanification', so it appears more friendly at least. Creating some vacuum formed shells for it won't be that expensive. In the end, once its use expands beyond the military, it will become more explicitly part of the social fabric and will have to have some capabilities for social communication as well, and possibly could also act to spread information. I'm not saying that it needs to have a face, it just needs to at least be able to communicate its intentions so that people will accept it as part of the social world. Robots are going to look strange, but I think it's easier to accept that when their intentions are known or even better, felt.
The first steps towards robotic products are being taken, also at Lausanne Polytechnique. Researchers there are investigating how robotics can be applied to make furniture move by itself, change shape according to the situation, and repair itself.
So far, they've come up with an ingenious module that can rotate around multiple axes, and can connect to other modules. By combining these robotic modules with static elements, then, they can create a walking table, a shape-changing ottoman, or a chair that assembles itself. Their simulations so far are more impressive than the actual hardware they've built, but I hope to see that table that runs away from you in real life at a furniture or design fair someday soon.
The best robotic locomotion I have seen up to yet comes from Boston Dynamics' recently upgraded 'Littledog'. It learns proper footholds and can learn special manoeuvers for situations that stress the motor capacities of the robot. In short, this is a robot that is starting to incorporate intelligence into its body, not just its brain. I also like how the robot is an unobtrusive, abstract device, without any explicit human interaction points. Maybe it should get a movable spine soon though, because the slips look especially painful, which also makes the movement look less 'natural' to me.
Ok, so earlier I was commenting how the Japanese seemed to be shifting from androids to elegant, minimal, abstract and more human-centred technology. Not so much for American robotics vanguard Boston Dynamics, who are pursuing "physics-based human simulation", and do it in a technologically very sophisticated way. Their 'Petman' project involves a pure biped that adjusts its motions dynamically to its environment, akin to their quadruped system 'Big Dog'. It still looks a bit rough and clumsy, but this is definitely coming eerily close to humanlike locomotion.
I'm still on the outlook for a robotics project where a strong socio-cultural, political, philosophical but moreover artistic vision meets high technology and high design.
Finally the Japanese seem to be moving from recreating humans to empowering human bodies. Honda's latest contraption is called the U3-X and is basically a high-tech motorized unicycle that balances itself through the employment of an inclinometer, and can move in all directions over a surface because of the 'HOT' (Honda Omni Traction) system. So things are little by little getting nice, compact and producty and maybe soon we will truly have a cyborg society. For the next evolutionary step in human locomotion I would like to see a system that can morph in order to allow you to sit on it in offices, use it as an active exoskeleton to enhance walking and running, and even as a kind of go-kart to facilitate participation in higher speed traffic.
Organic technology, anthropomorphization of the technosphere, a becoming one of man and his world, inextricably melting subjects and objects...abstract language that can easily confuse minds that have trouble concentrating. But how much more powerful is this little movie an example of these developments. Apparently iRobot is doing pretty wild visionary stuff too, so the way to industry apparently is closer than if this were ivory-tower lab style work.
Bits of couscous and zucchini drool out of my mouth as I watched this in awe, and I've been exposed to a lot. This is truly paradigm breaking, but more than that, it is starting to match my innermost dreams. Have the movie impact you directly, viscerally, no need to say more because it is completely self-explanatory.
Another step towards the oneness of man and technology has been made with Aleksander Polutnik's Enicycle, a motorized unicycle! Controlling this thing works by leaning forward, and as such it intuitively engages your body as a whole.
Researchers from Boston Dynamics claim to have built 'the most advanced quadruped robot on earth'. While usually I would not be very interested in robots that basically emulate legs, this one is particularly striking, almost walking in a natural, biological way. It can walk at 5 mph, climb 35 degree slopes, and keeps itself balanced even when forcefully kicked or when traversing ice. It is actuated hydraulically, and has a system to reuse energy that would normally be lost in each step.
Generally, this is a nice move towards intelligent motor behaviour, but still it is a kind of backwards emulatory approach to technology design. Reverse engineering systems we find in nature just won't give technology its own intelligence, its own character and its own elegance. Technology needs to develop this from within itself, by self-reflection and gradual adaptation during its entire existence.
The silliness of this approach is almost caricaturally illustrated by a movie of another quadruped robot, Scott II, developed by McGill University:
It is so myopic to develop technology being inspired by things like the jolly tred of your neighbour's puppy teckel. Is this what people need? It seems that many robotics engineers are just too isolated, and a common framework is lacking to develop technology in a more holistic, deeply human way.
I'd say that some virtual technologies can conceptually score way higher on the mind-blowingness scale. Researchers in Oxford, Britain, developed a system to make virtual characters dynamically respond to their environment. No more inverse kinematics, no more mocap; these are clumsy, static, externally imposed and simply unnatural approaches towards the design of intelligently behaving systems. What these guys did was using genetic algorithms to have a virtual character learn it's own way of behaving, depending on the interaction of its own specific body with its own specific environment. 'Dynamic Motion Synthesis' is what they call this process of simulating a motor nervous system and physical body.
The nice thing is that this latter approach does not simply result in blindly evolving systems; the human designer can still specify his desires to some extent, like an end pose of a movement, or the goal of a movement. This is very elegant I think, and can be an inspirational approach to the design of physical products as well. You give the entity room to develop itself, but also provide some overall vision, an over-encompassing framework. So you balance a centripetal and a centrifugal force, which is very human I think. Natural evolution by itself is no holistic solution; it results in loose ends everywhere and a lot of uselessness. It is tedious, messy, and slow. A detached, artificial approach to technology design is opposite to evolution, and does not work either, as it is myopic and does not respect individuals. It dictatorially tries to frame in the world, inviting people to shrink and abstract their lifeworld. These two opposite approaches towards how entities in the world are created results in seeming dichotomies, and a lot of tensions in the world as a whole. We need a new approach that transcends this, stemming from the perspective that all is one and one is all. We are animals, we are technology, and we are the air that surrounds us.
My view is that future technology design needs an entirely different approach, merging these two opposites into one that transcends these. We need to give the artefacts we create an initial potential for positively changing our world, but also the openness and ability to develop themselves from interacting with their world, hence developing individually appropriate behaviour. But we need to constantly monitor and steer all individual development processes, and guide them like a friendly father, informing them, empathizing with them, and gently but convincingly and directly steer them as well. Like we should raise our own children.
My future is one where the biological merges with the technological, and everything feels socially connected as in a global family of highly interactive and morphologically highly diverse entities.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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