Low-cost, human-friendly robot is designed for AI
The robot, called “Blue,” was designed to use recent advances in AI and deep reinforcement learning to master basic – but intricate – human tasks, something that robots typically still struggle with. At the same time, say the researchers, Blue was built to remain affordable and safe enough that every artificial intelligence researcher — and eventually every home — could have one.
“AI has done a lot for existing robots, but we wanted to design a robot that is right for AI,” says Pieter Abbeel, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. “Existing robots are too expensive, not safe around humans and similarly not safe around themselves – if they learn through trial and error, they will easily break themselves. We wanted to create a new robot that is right for the AI age rather than for the high-precision, sub-millimeter, factory automation age.”
As opposed to factory automation robots costing tens of thousands of dollars, Blue was built using durable, plastic parts and high-performance motors that had a total cost of less than $5,000 to manufacture and assemble. Its arms, though lacking some of the strength and precision of a typical robot, are each about the size of the average bodybuilder’s, and are sensitive to outside forces – like a hand pushing it away. Featuring rounded edges and minimal pinch points to avoid catching stray fingers, the arms can also be very stiff, like a human flexing, or very flexible, like a human relaxing, or anything in between.
“One of the things that’s really cool about the design of this robot is that we can make it force-sensitive, nice and reactive, or we can choose to have it be very strong and very rigid,” says graduate student David Gealy. “Researchers can adjust how stiff the robot is, and what kind of stiffness – do you want it to feel like molasses? Do you want it to feel like a spring? A combination of those? If we want robots to move toward the home and perform in these increasingly unstructured environments, they are going to need that capability.”
Blue is able to continually hold up 2 kilograms of weight with arms fully extended. But unlike traditional robot designs that are characterized by one consistent “force/current limit,” Blue is designed to be “thermally-limited,” say the researchers – i.e, similar to a human being.
It can exert a force well beyond 2 kilograms in a quick burst, until its thermal limits are reached and it needs time to rest or cool down. This, say the researchers, is just like how a human can pick up a laundry basket and easily carry it across a room, but might not be able to carry the same laundry basket over a mile without frequent breaks.
“Essentially, we can get more out of a weaker robot.” says Gealy. “And a weaker robot is just safer. The strongest robot is most dangerous. We wanted to design the weakest robot that could still do really useful stuff.”
Currently, the researchers are building ten arms in-house to distribute to select early adopters. They are continuing to investigate Blue’s durability and to tackle the formidable challenge of manufacturing the robot on a larger scale, which, they say, will happen through the UC Berkeley spin-off Berkeley Open Arms.
“With a lower-cost robot, every researcher could have their own robot,” says postdoctoral research fellow Stephen McKinley,” and that vision is one of the main driving forces behind this project – getting more research done by having more robots in the world.”
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