4 lessons from robots about being human Ken Goldberg
I know this is gonna sound strange but I
think robots can inspire us to be better
humans see I grew up in Bethlehem
Pennsylvania the home of Bethlehem Steel
my father was an engineer and when I was
growing up he would teach me how things
worked we would build projects together
like model rockets and slot cars here’s
the go-kart that we built together
that’s me behind the wheel my sister and
my best friend at the time and one day
he came home when I was about 10 years
old and at the dinner table he announced
that for our next project we were gonna
build a robot a robot now I was thrilled
about this because at school there was a
bully named Kevin and he was picking on
me because I was the only Jewish kid in
class so I couldn’t wait to get started
to work on this so that I could
introduce Kevin to my robot
but that wasn’t the kind of robot my dad
had in mind see he owned a chromium
plating company and they had to move
heavy steel parts between tanks of
chemicals and so he needed an industrial
robot like this that could basically do
the heavy lifting but my dad didn’t get
the kind of robot he wanted either he
and I worked on it for several years but
it was the 1970s and the technology that
was available to amateurs just wasn’t
there yet so dad continued to do this
kind of work by hand and appears later
he was diagnosed with cancer you see the
what the robot we were trying to build
was telling him was not about doing the
heavy lifting it was a warning about his
exposure to the toxic chemicals he
didn’t recognize that at the time and he
contracted leukemia and he died at the
age of 45 I was devastated by this and I
never forgot the robot that he and I
tried to build when I was a college I
decided to study engineering like him
and I went to Carnegie Mellon and I
earned my PhD in robotics
I’ve been studying robots ever since so
what I’d like to tell you about our four
robot projects and what they how they’ve
inspired me to be a better human by 1993
I was a young professor at Kearney at
USC and I was just building up my own
robotics lab and this was the year that
the World Wide Web came out and I
remember my students were the ones who
told me about it and we would we were
just amazed and we started playing with
this and that afternoon we realized that
we could use this new universal
interface to allow anyone in the war
to operate the robot in our lab so
rather than have it fight or do
industrial work we decided to build a
planter put the robot into the center of
it and we called it the telecard and we
put a camera in the gripper of the hand
of the of the robot and we wrote some
special scripts and software so that
anyone in the world could come in and by
clicking on the screen they could move
the robot around and visit the garden
but we also allowed have setup some
other software that lets you participate
and help us water the garden remotely
and if you wanted a few times we’d give
you your own seed to plant and this was
a project an engineering project and we
published some papers on me on the
design the system design of it but we
also thought of it as an art
installation it was invited after the
first year by the ARS electronica museum
in Austria to have it installed in their
Lobby and I’m happy to say it remained
online there 24 hours a day for over
almost nine years that robot was
operated by more people than any other
robot in history now one day I got a
call out of the blue from a student who
asked a very simple but profound
question he said is the robot real now
everyone else had assumed it was and we
knew it was because we were working with
it but I knew what he meant because it
would be possible to take a bunch of
pictures and flowers in a garden and
then basically index them in a computer
system such that it would appear that
there was a real robot when there wasn’t
and the more I thought about it I
couldn’t think of a good answer for how
could he could tell the difference this
was right about this time that I was
offered a position here at Berkeley and
when I got here I looked up Hubert
Dreyfus he was a world-renowned
professor of philosophy
and I talked with him about this and he
said this is one of the oldest and most
central problems in philosophy it goes
back to the sceptics
and up through Descartes it’s the issue
of of epistemology the study of how do
we know that something is true so he and
I started working together and we coined
a new term tell epistemology the study
of knowledge at a distance we invited
leading artists engineers and
philosophers to write essays about this
and the result the results are collected
in this book from MIT press so thanks to
this student who questions what everyone
else had assumed to be true this project
taught me an important lesson about life
which is to always question assumptions
now for the second project I’ll tell you
about grew out of the teller garden as
it was operating my students and I were
very interested in how people were
interacting with each other and what
they were doing with the garden so we
started thinking what if the robot could
leave the garden and go out into some
other interesting environment like for
example what if I could go to a dinner
party at the white house so because we
were interested more in the system
design and the user interface than in
the hardware we decided that rather than
have a robot replaced the human to go to
the party we’d have a human replaced the
robot we called it the telly actor we
got a human someone who’s very outgoing
and gregarious and she was outfitted
with a helmet with various equipment
cameras and microphones and then a
backpack with wireless internet
connection and the idea was that she
could go into a remote and interesting
environment and then over the Internet
people could experience what she was
experiencing so they could see what she
was seeing but then more importantly
they could participate by interacting
with each other and coming up with ideas
about what she should do next
and where she should go and then
conveying those to the telly actor so we
got a chance to take the telly actor to
the Webby Awards in San Francisco and
that year Sam Donaldson was the host
just before the curtain went up I had
about 30 seconds to explain to mr.
Donaldson what we were gonna do I said
the telly actor is a is going to be
joining you on stage and this is a new
experimental project and people are
watching her on their screens and she’s
got there’s cameras involved and there’s
a there’s microphones and she’s got an
earbud in her ear and people over the
network are giving her advice about what
to do next and he said wait a second
that’s what I do
so he loved the concept and when the
tele actor walked on stage she walked
right up to him and she gave him a big
kiss right on the lips
we were totally surprised we had no idea
that would happen and he was great he
just gave her a big hug and returned and
it worked out great but that night as we
were packing up I asked a Tele actor how
did the toilet directors decide that
they would give a kiss to Sam Donaldson
and she said they hadn’t said when she
was just about to walk onstage the
teller directors still were trying to
agree on what to do and so she just
walked onstage and did what felt most
natural
so the success of the telly actor that
night was that it was due to the fact
that she was a wonderful actor she knew
when to trust her instincts and so that
project taught me another lesson about
life which is that when in doubt
improvise
now the third project grew out of the my
experience when my father was in the
hospital he was undergoing a treatment
chemotherapy treatments and there’s a
related treatment called brachytherapy
where tiny radioactive seeds are placed
into the body to treat cancerous tumors
and the way it’s done as you can see
here is that surgeons insert needles
into the body to deliver the seeds and
all this all these needles are inserted
in parallel so it’s very common that
some of the needles penetrate sensitive
organs and as a result the the needles
damaged these organs cause damage which
leads to trauma and side effects so my
students and I wondered what if we could
modify the system so that the needles
could come in at different angles so we
simulated this and we developed some
optimization algorithms and we simulated
this and we were able to show that we
are able to avoid the delicate organs
and yet still achieve the coverage of
the of the tumors with the can’t with
the radiation so now we’re working with
doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns
Hopkins and we’re building a robot that
has a number of it’s a specialized
design with different joints that can
allow the needles to come in at an
infinite variety of angles and as you
can see here they can avoid delicate
organs - and still reach the targets
they’re aiming for so by questioning
this assumption that all the needles
have to be parallel this project also
taught me an important lesson
when in doubt when your path is blocked
pivot and the last project also has to
do with medical robotics and this is
something that’s grown out of a product
out of a system called The Da Vinci
Surgical robot and this is a
commercially available device that’s
being used in over 2,000 hospitals
around the world and the ideas that
allows the surgeon to operate
comfortably in its own coordinate frame
and it’s but many of the subtasks in
surgery are very routine and tedious
like suturing and currently all these
are performed under the specific and
immediate control of the surgeon so the
surgeon becomes fatigued over time and
we’ve been wondering what if we could
program the robot to perform some of
these subtasks and thereby free the
surgeon to focus on the more complicated
parts of the of the surgery and also cut
down on the time that the surgery would
take if we could get the robot to do
them a little bit faster now it’s hard
to program robot to do delicate things
like this but it turns out my colleague
Peter ABEO who’s here at Berkeley has
developed a new set of techniques for
teaching robots from example so he’s
gotten robots to fly helicopters to
incredibly interesting beautiful
acrobatics by watching human experts fly
them so we got one of these robots we
started working with Peter and his
students and we asked a surgeon to
perform a task and what we do is we
Swift the robot so what we’re doing is
asking the robot the surgeon to perform
the task and we record the motions of
the robot so here’s an example I’ll use
a figure eight tracing out a figure
eight as an example so here’s what it
looks like when the robot this is what
the robots path looks like those three
examples now those are much better than
what a novice like I could do but
they’re still jerky and imprecise so we
record all these examples the data and
then we we go through a sequence of
steps
first we used a technique called dynamic
time warping from speech recognition and
this allows us to temporally align all
the examples and then we apply common
filtering a technique from control
theory that allows us to statistically
analyze all the noise and extract the
desired trajectory that underlies them
now so what we’re doing is we take those
human demonstrations are all noisy and
perfect and we extract from them an
inferred task trajectory and control
sequence for the robot we then execute
that on the robot we observe what
happens then we adjust the controls
using a sequence of techniques called
iterative learning then we do is we
increase the velocity a little bit we
observe the results adjust the controls
again and observe what happens we go
through this several rounds and here’s
the result that’s the inferred trijet
task trajectory and here’s the robot
moving at this compute slew speed of the
human here’s four times the speed of the
human here’s seven times and here’s the
robot operating at ten times the speed
of the human so we’re able to get a
robot to perform a delicate task like I
got a surgical sub task at 10 times the
speed of a human so this project also
because of its involves practicing and
learning doing something over and over
again this project also has a lesson
which is if you wanted to if you want to
do something well there’s no substitute
for practice practice practice so these
are for the lessons that I’ve learned
from robots over the years and 10 and
robotics the field of robotics has
gotten much better over time nowadays
high school students can build robots
like the industrial robot my dad and I
tried to build but it’s very it now and
now I have a daughter named Odessa
she’s eight years old and she likes
robots too maybe it runs in the family I
wish she could meet my dad and I and now
I get to teach her how things work we
get to build projects together and I
wonder what kind of lessons that she’ll
learn from them robots are the most
human of our machines they can’t solve
all of the world’s problems but I think
they have something important to teach
us I invite all of you to think about
the innovations that you’re interested
in the machines that you wish for and
think about what they might be telling
you because I have a hunch that many of
our technological innovations the
devices we dream about can inspire us to
be better humans thank you
you