There are elements of this that exist,
not at the human level,
but at the animal-trial mice level.
Hi, I'm Dr. Ayanna Howard.
I'm the dean of engineering at The Ohio State University.
I was chair of interactive computing at Georgia Tech.
I was a robotics researcher at NASA's JPL.
Today, we're going to look at robotics scenes in movies
and judge how real they are.
So, that actually exists now.
Primarily it's in the VR/AR space,
which requires you to usually have
some type of augmented goggles or a device
to see the 3D rendition in the free space
and for you to move around it.
Believe it or not, jet packs do exist.
Not as much control as the actual Iron Man,
but, you know, has some vertical lift.
In the healthcare medical space,
there are exoskeletons that provide you,
I would say, superhuman ability or capability.
And so pieces of the Iron Man suit do exist.
They aren't as advanced, but they all exist.
So I would say an 8.5.
Another three or four years, it would probably be a 10.
Hello. I am Baymax,
your personal healthcare companion.
Oh, it's such a cute movie.
So unrealistic.
The only thing that exists is the fact that you have people
and a robot of form factor.
Everything else is just imaginary.
It's what we would like in our life.
But we're kind of far
from even the components of them existing.
Vinyl?
Yeah. Going for a nonthreatening huggable kind of thing.
So, soft robotics does exist.
Soft-body robotics is where you have
material that's compliant.
I always think of it as it's squishy.
It actually can apply some forces.
Usually the focus is on movement.
They are considered safe.
It means you can have robots working next to people,
and the soft robot wouldn't hurt a person
if by some chance the robot and the human collided.
So really it's about safety.
They aren't really designed to do things
like walk like a human.
Baymax: You are not allergic to bacitracin.
You do have a mild allergy to peanuts.
I will say, in the medical-robotics domain,
as related to this video clip,
there are elements that exist.
For example, there are systems that
can do diagnosis based on data.
They can have an image that looks for things such as tumors.
And sometimes in some cases at more accuracy
or higher accuracy than, say, a untrained radiologist.
So those kind of things do exist.
They're usually not coupled to a moving platform.
I would probably rate it about a 2.
You can now access the CPU.
Central processing unit is what CPU stands for.
The CPU is basically the chip that powers,
in this case, the mind of the robot.
Pull.
Robot vision is based on cameras.
The same kind of cameras you have in your smartphone
are the same kind of cameras
that you have in robot platforms.
A lot of computer vision algorithms use methods
in deep learning to identify objects, identify people,
even identify facial expressions of people.
The red tint was for
entertainment purposes only.
Rebooting is a thing, it's a reality.
Rebooting includes refreshing your computer.
You can do that with a robotic system.
It wipes out all its programming.
Robots like Sophia are not as emotive as a human face.
And the reason is, is that the muscles
that we have in our face
and the kind of nuances that we can exhibit
in terms of cheeks, in our nose, in our eyes,
we just don't have the technology yet at that level.
I would rate the first part as a 1.
I would rate the second part closer to a 5.
There's a lot of hurdles, even creating a transformer robot.
There is research in robotics called origami robotics.
So they can fold themselves up.
They can change their locomotion style.
They're typically very, very small.
My lab actually created a transformer robot,
but it was really, really small.
Some of the issues,
it really is about stability and control.
The fact is, is the larger you create the form factor,
the more you have to think about things like gravity.
You have to think about weight.
How do you ensure that they don't fall over?
We do not have sufficient actuation
to lift the weight that would be required
to create a transformer robot.
I would rate this as a 2.5.
I probably would rate it as a 1,
but I have an affinity for transformer robots.
What I really need is a droid who understands
the binary language of moisture evaporators.
Evaporators!
Sir, my first job was programming binary load lifters.
I always loved how they showcase robots in "Star Wars,"
because they had all of the types of interactions
we expect between human and human,
and they encode it in a robot form factor.
[R2-D2 whines]
[R2-D2 beeps]
There is actually a number of studies
that have looked at the form factor of robotics.
Do you have to have a humanoid shape
in order to enhance the interaction with people?
Most studies show that you don't.
It just has to be able to function
and behave and move in our human environment.
R2-D2, if you think about the form factor and the shape,
that is not what evokes our human response,
or our human compassion or empathy for the robot.
What makes R2-D2 so endearing
is a combination of the movement,
so the movements that go on in terms of doing little dances,
for example, turning in place;
the other is the sounds that are used.
They're very intentional.
If you notice, they're typically high-pitched.
We associate high-pitched sounds with certain demographics,
like birds chirping, babies laughing.
And so what's going on is that it's evoking
that response of the cuteness of the sounds
coupled with the movement.
It's not the form factor, it's the movements
and the language that really taps into our human emotions.
So I would actually put this at a 6.
So, there is a field in robotics
called multiagent collaboration
as well as this area of collaborative robotics.
And in that case,
there is research that has shown on the order of hundreds
of robots that collaborate together.
There's different approaches.
Some of it is a centralized approach.
So there might be a leader that kind of gives commands
and communicates with all of the team.
And then there's also
what's called distributed collaboration
or distributed control, where every agent,
every robot has its own objective function
and kind of communicates as in a team.
As an example, there are robot soccer teams.
That's collaborative.
They play together, they interact together.
Small robots like this are possible.
In fact, there are robots about this size that can fly.
You know, the size of a bird,
of a butterfly, things like that.
Of course, they don't have as much functionality
as these robots or as much intelligence as these robots.
There's even a field of robotics
where the robots are even smaller. Nanorobotics.
For example, there's a robot
that is a pill that you swallow
that can actually do some of the imaging in your intestines.
That's a whole field that requires
different types of tools, different types of materials.
And in that space,
you are actually doing things at the microscope level.
You're actually using things
like tweezers to put things together.
I would rate this probably at a 3.
This movie actually defies physics.
Just [laughs] some fundamental things about the interface
and the interaction of bodies and water
that just didn't correlate in this movie.
Cooper: Come on!
So, versatility is a desired objective,
but we typically do not focus on it,
because the more versatile you are,
the more likely you'll have failures.
Safety and minimizing failures to zero
is much more important than having versatility.
So for space robotics, a lot of the things
that have to be thought about are about survivability.
They have to be able to withstand the radiation of space,
the environmental constraints,
the extreme temperatures from basically cold.
A lot of our space robotics,
in terms of the processing power,
is not even as advanced as, say,
things on the latest smartphone,
because they cannot withstand the severity
of the environment in which they're going into.
I would rate this a 1.
There are elements of this that exist,
not at the human level,
but at the animal-trial mice level.
Looking at the spine and tapping into the electric signals
and trying to use that to control something.
The closest that exists in the domain
are really two areas of robotics research.
So, one is basically using muscle activation.
In that case, what they do
is that they pair up your muscles,
usually in your chest,
and they pair it up with electronics to control the arm.
And so that's one example.
The other is, is that there's research
where they do direct implants into the brain
so that they can extract signals
from the brain to control robotic arms.
I will tell you, both of them are invasive.
They aren't as simple as just strapping on something
and automatically you can control robotics.
Both of these kinds of research paths
require intense surgery.
Doc Ock: These smart arms are controlled
by my brain through a neural link.
Nanowires feed directly into my cerebellum,
allowing me to use these arms.
The closest of controlling robots with your thoughts
is looking at some research
that uses EEG devices, or even EMG.
So actually looking at muscle activation.
The reality is the resolution that we can extract
in terms of bits of information is still very limited.
It means that if you're trying to control a robot arm,
the most you can kind of think about is, like, a joystick.
I can go up, I can go down, left, and right,
but it's very difficult to do that intentionally
over and over and over again
with the resolution that you would need
to fully control a robot arm, especially multiple arms.
I would actually rate this as a 4.
This case, they did design it based on an actual platform
with the way that it moves, the way that it navigates.
The sensor that was shown, which was most likely a lidar,
does exist in a small platform.
So lidars, for example,
are in some of the self-driving cars.
They are on a number of mobility platforms
in the warehouse environment.
And so what they do is that they create
a 3D point cloud of the environment,
and they are fairly robust to things like lighting issues
and convex and concave objects.
And they are now at a small enough footprint
that they can fit into the torso of the robot that we saw.
Having a robot plug into an electronic device
and magically be able to hack the code
and override any passwords
and encryption scheme is really not feasible.
The energy requirements for a robotic system
to continuously activate, or actuate,
to do the processing in terms of the computation,
to do the sensing, solar power would not provide
the longevity that's required
to actually function for more than a couple of minutes.
Traditionally, you wouldn't use solar power,
at least for this application.
I would probably rate this at about a 3.
Detective, what are you doing?
Well, you said they've all been programmed
with the three laws.
So that means we have 1,000 robots
that will not try to protect themselves
if it violates a direct order from a human.
Isaac Asimov created these three laws of robotics.
One was thou shall not harm a human.
Two was thou shall obey a human,
as long as it doesn't harm a human.
Basically, the concept is that robots are here to help us,
and therefore they should never be
in a situation where they're not.
But the fact is that's never going to happen.
If you think about a very simple device,
such as a self-driving car,
which is a robot if it's autonomous,
what do you do if you have your driver
and you are about to crash into something?
Either you might harm your driver,
you might harm the other, what are you supposed to do?
And so really you can't actually follow any of these rules
if you are in the human world.
It is not possible to hurl a human
exactly the way that the robot hurled Will Smith.
But the reason why robots in industrial settings
typically do not work with humans,
if a robot is moving and a human is in the way,
the human will be hurled.
We are soft bodies that don't do well
when we interact with metal that's moving that fast.
What am I?
Robots: Can I help you, sir?
Let's take away the intelligence.
If you look at the actuation and the mobility,
we do have something.
Boston Dynamics with Petman actually does parkour,
does flips, does turns in midair, gymnastics.
That platform does exist.
Now, of course, power requirements.
It doesn't last that long.
It won't survive in the real world
for hours like we would need,
but the actuation does exist.
The intelligence part, though,
is not coupled with the movement part.
I would rate it as a 3.
Why don't we start with you telling me
something about yourself?
Well, you already know my name,
and you can see that I'm a machine.
The Turing test was a test that was created
to really try to figure out,
how do you know when a computer is intelligent?
And so the concept is that
if you had an individual that asked questions
of a computer and of a person,
if the person who was asking the questions
could not tell the difference
between computer and person, i.e., mislabeled,
then the computer had passed the Turing test.
The problem, of course, is that it's the observer
who is saying, "Oh, I can't tell the difference."
So the Turing test has been,
quote, unquote, "beaten" all of the time,
because it's based on the observer point of view
and is based on the questions that you ask.
When did you learn how to speak, Ava?
I always knew how to speak.
And that's strange, isn't it?
You know, a lot of times we're thinking
about a language model.
It takes hours and hours, and sometimes days, depending,
in order to come up with the ability to have a conversation.
And so the fact that she very easily
on the order of milliseconds could acquire new knowledge,
could actually understand new nuances
to the questions that were asked,
is actually not a realistic aspect
of our current state of art.
I would rate this as a 2.5.
Both my favorite and the best depiction, I would say,
is the "Iron Man" video clip.
If you enjoyed this video, click the link above.