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AUGUST 2, 2002 NEWS ANALYSIS Grace, the Mother of Robot Breakthroughs She (er, it) can take an elevator, schmooze with people, and deliver a lecture. Just don't try to shake hands
Without human guidance or a preprogrammed map, Grace was to find her way to the registration counter of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's 2002 conference, sign in, navigate to the elevators leading to the conference rooms, "schmooze" with people in the elevator and hallways, take her place behind the podium, and deliver a lecture about herself. Even on the eve of the AAAI event, Grace's chief creator, Reid Simmons of Carnegie Mellon University, was hesitant about the robot's upcoming performance. He said he'd be happy if Grace accomplished even half of its mission. "If we just had another month or two to prepare, I'd feel more confident," he said before leaving Pittsburgh for Edmonton. 10-YEAR CHALLENGE. Simmons needn't have worried. Grace came through with flying colors, although she took five minutes longer than he expected -- a total of 50 minutes from when she was dropped off outside the conference center to the time she reached her speaker's podium. "Everything was still a little ragged," admits Simmons, a senior researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "The most frustrating thing was her speech-recognition program," especially when she tried to engage in small talk during the schmoozing procedure. The tasks that Grace carried out autonomously were first laid down in the 1999 Mobile Robot Challenge, issued by the AAAI to raise the bar for intelligent robot behavior by creating "social robots." In what was envisioned as a 10-year effort, such machines would be capable of interacting with people on human terms, not only engaging in conversations but also knowing how to conform to social etiquette, like standing patiently in a line at a registration desk.
But one aspect of the robot challenge may take a few more years to achieve: responding to technical questions from the audience at the end of the two-minute lecture. After the AAAI issued its robot challenge, recalls Simmons, "We decided to take a stab at it. But we knew we couldn't do it alone," so he enlisted four other outfits to help. Grace's historic performance is the result of an on-going collaboration among the Naval Research Lab (NRL), Metrica Inc. in San Antonio, Swarthmore College, and Northwestern University. The NRL is in charge of speech recognition. Metrica handles vision-based chores such as recognizing gestures and tracking people. Swarthmore heads the work on reading signs and name tags so Grace could find her way around the conference center. And Northwestern enabled Grace to give the talk about herself. "It's very unusual to cross institutional boundaries in robotics research," Simmons notes, "but the results speak for themselves." JUST LIKE BLANCHE. For now, one thing Grace lacks is an arm. Simmons hasn't yet enlisted any mechanical engineering experts, and the group decided that as AI researchers, it would be best to dispense with appendages. When it comes to opening doors or pushing elevator buttons, Grace, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, depends on the kindness of strangers. "Could you pin the badge to me?" Grace asked the person behind the registration desk. "I'm afraid I'm all out of hands."  By Otis Port in New York Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | AUGUST |
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