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With fat wheels for tracking through the sand, the beach-cleaning robot looks like a cross between a toy and the Mars rover.
The robot is made entirely by 3D printer, comes to about mid-shin and weighs as much as a bag of groceries. Three of these, all named “Bowie,” will be spending the summer on Westboro Beach, picking up little bits of trash along the shoreline with a scoop and dumping the offending debris in an onboard bin.
If all goes as planned, with the help of their human handlers, the robots will have “trained their data sets” to be able tell when something doesn’t belong on the beach and pick it up without human intervention by the end of the summer. They’re quiet, unobtrusive and easy to repair, says inventor Erin Kennedy, the founder of Robot Missions, who has been building robots since she was 13.
Kennedy and teammates Micah Black and Cailey Petrenko will use a purple-painted “mission control centre” on the beach as a base of operations for the next two months. We asked her about training a robot to clean a beach.
Q: So far, the robot is operated by remote control. Will Bowie ever be autonomous?
A: There are three stages. First, to make sure the robot works. We have to test all of the functionalities of the robot. We have to see what set of wheels worked best, what size of hopper bin to use. The second will be navigation and guidance systems. The third would be the artificial intelligence for visual recognition and sensory data. Right now, the robot doesn’t know the difference between a bottle cap and a piece of wood. People expect a robot to be perfect right away.
Q: Wouldn’t it be easier to get volunteers to clean up the beach or hire some summer students?
A: Sure, you can get volunteers to come out, but that effort can only be sustained for a few hours. With manual efforts, small fragments (of trash) go unnoticed. Volunteers only notice the bigger bits of trash, and the beach grooming equipment leaves smaller bits behind. The small things, like cigarette butts and bits of polystyrene, this is what marine life ingests.
Q: How is this project different from building a robot in a lab?
A: We’re developing it in the wild. We’re not hidden away in a research lab. People see the robot and see what it does. If I can help people brainstorm an idea in one moment of interaction, that’s amazing. Active citizen engagement is an important part of this project. There’s awareness. But just talking about it won’t sort out the problem. We’re here to develop tools for people to use.
Q: How do you teach a robot to tell the difference between a cigarette butt and a stick?
A: We’ll use visual recognition. There are already all kinds of tools out there. You could “scrape” Google for pictures of cigarette butts, so the robot knows what different cigarette butts look like. We’re also taking images as the robot is operating. We can use this as training data.
Q: You would like to make robots like this widely available. How much would it cost to produce a robot like Bowie?
A: I don’t like to give out the numbers. We’ve been producing them one at a time. We would be providing them in groups of 25 or 50.
Q: Why did you call the robots Bowie?
A: After David Bowie. If Bowie hadn’t died, he would have transformed himself into a beach-cleaning robot that could be replicated all over the world.
查看原文...
The robot is made entirely by 3D printer, comes to about mid-shin and weighs as much as a bag of groceries. Three of these, all named “Bowie,” will be spending the summer on Westboro Beach, picking up little bits of trash along the shoreline with a scoop and dumping the offending debris in an onboard bin.
If all goes as planned, with the help of their human handlers, the robots will have “trained their data sets” to be able tell when something doesn’t belong on the beach and pick it up without human intervention by the end of the summer. They’re quiet, unobtrusive and easy to repair, says inventor Erin Kennedy, the founder of Robot Missions, who has been building robots since she was 13.
Kennedy and teammates Micah Black and Cailey Petrenko will use a purple-painted “mission control centre” on the beach as a base of operations for the next two months. We asked her about training a robot to clean a beach.
Q: So far, the robot is operated by remote control. Will Bowie ever be autonomous?
A: There are three stages. First, to make sure the robot works. We have to test all of the functionalities of the robot. We have to see what set of wheels worked best, what size of hopper bin to use. The second will be navigation and guidance systems. The third would be the artificial intelligence for visual recognition and sensory data. Right now, the robot doesn’t know the difference between a bottle cap and a piece of wood. People expect a robot to be perfect right away.
Q: Wouldn’t it be easier to get volunteers to clean up the beach or hire some summer students?
A: Sure, you can get volunteers to come out, but that effort can only be sustained for a few hours. With manual efforts, small fragments (of trash) go unnoticed. Volunteers only notice the bigger bits of trash, and the beach grooming equipment leaves smaller bits behind. The small things, like cigarette butts and bits of polystyrene, this is what marine life ingests.
Q: How is this project different from building a robot in a lab?
A: We’re developing it in the wild. We’re not hidden away in a research lab. People see the robot and see what it does. If I can help people brainstorm an idea in one moment of interaction, that’s amazing. Active citizen engagement is an important part of this project. There’s awareness. But just talking about it won’t sort out the problem. We’re here to develop tools for people to use.
Q: How do you teach a robot to tell the difference between a cigarette butt and a stick?
A: We’ll use visual recognition. There are already all kinds of tools out there. You could “scrape” Google for pictures of cigarette butts, so the robot knows what different cigarette butts look like. We’re also taking images as the robot is operating. We can use this as training data.
Q: You would like to make robots like this widely available. How much would it cost to produce a robot like Bowie?
A: I don’t like to give out the numbers. We’ve been producing them one at a time. We would be providing them in groups of 25 or 50.
Q: Why did you call the robots Bowie?
A: After David Bowie. If Bowie hadn’t died, he would have transformed himself into a beach-cleaning robot that could be replicated all over the world.
查看原文...
