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Asimov & Heinlein would be proud at baby steps in robotics

If you watched today's 60 Minutes, you've seen Boston Dynamics' robots dancing the mashed potato and the twist. (The link to 60 Minutes leads to a page with a further link to tonight's show - a 13.5-minute video.)

For those who didn't catch the program, a 3-minute video is embedded, below. Sheer fun! BTW: The quadruped, Spot, is for sale for about 75K USD per copy. 

 

Next is a video with demos of gymnastics & useful work sequences.

 

 

Just to show that I don't play favorites, below is a 12-minute video that demonstrates capabilities of robots made by various companies.

 

 

Then, there's an update from News for Nerds.

Boston Dynamics' New Robot Doesn't Dance. It Has a Warehouse Job (wired.com)51

Posted by msmash on Monday March 29, 2021 @04:41PM from the closer-look dept.

It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired:Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions."

Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.

What has happened this week?

Safety Deposit Box Project:

The big thing that happened was that Dudette met Hunky Husband and me at the credit union so that we could get her onto our safety deposit box as a co-owner. Yay! She and Bogie will need to be able to access the stuff in that box, eventually. Unfortunately, despite what I had been told, they would not issue another key for Dudette.

In order to have Dudette put on as a co-owner, she had to provide a photo ID (her driver's license did nicely) and her Social Security card. As happened, Dudette could not find her Social Security card. She, instead, brought her birth certificate and her marriage license (to show her name change), knowing that her original Social Security card is among the papers that we do keep in the safety deposit box. That worked nicely, too. Why we still have Dudette's and Bogie's original Social Security cards is beyond me; but, there they are - and Dudette chose to place hers back into our safety deposit box when the paperwork was all done.

Come to think of it, Dudette also used the opportunity to return the Half-Pint microwave oven that we had loaned the girls. I need to retrieve it from HH's car trunk. [I got it, only to find that Dudette or Wonderful GrandDaughter had slipped a pint container of home made cookies into it. It's a wonder that I opened the door of the microwave. Otherwise, who knows how many years the cookies would have stayed there?]

Similarly, I used the opportunity to take a twig, that is to become an oak tree, that I had potted up a year or two ago - for Dudette & Wichidude or for the girls (Wonderful GrandDaughter and Rachie).

Yard Work:

Slowly, maybe not so surely, I am making progress on yard work. A week ago yesterday, I mowed the good grass. I had actually been checking the status of the mower battery; but, when it proved to be alive and well, I went ahead and used the mower - thinking that Jim's Tire & Auto would be picking it up that day for its 1st annual servicing. As it turned out, Jim's was swamped. They will call us when they have time to do the servicing - in about three or four weeks, they thought.

 

 

Trees:

Our crabapple tree that was planted last May is showing some color. The tiny leaves are unfurled.

The weather has provided so much moisture in March (yes, we're supposed to have rain in April) that the nursery has been unable to get their trees out of the ground on their tree farm; thus, the two trees that I bought last fall will not be planted in March - maybe April. The first photo shows, in the foreground, a yellow flag marking the spot in which the new cherry tree is to be planted, eventually replacing the North Star Cherry tree that is enveloped in yellow, in the background. The second photo shows the location at which the new Oklahoma Redbud tree is to be planted, replacing the redbud that had been encroaching on the neighbor's fence.

And then there are narcissi:

 

Spring is nearly here & I'm spring cleaning

First bouquet of the (almost spring) season

Although most of our bouquets are placed where Hunky Husband can enjoy them from "the master's chair", this particular bouquet should be dedicated to Elder Brother (EB) whose 85th birthday is today. Nineteen thirty-six was a banner year. Not only was EB born in 1936, but each of us three siblings (who survived infancy) married a spouse who was born in 1936. I'm remembering, though, that EB's wife succumbed to pancreatic cancer eight years ago. We miss her. She would have turned 85 in mid-February.

My birthday present to EB was foregoing singing "Happy Birthday" to him when we called him. He had two feet of snow on the ground. We had received heavy blobs of snow for several hours, yesterday; but, only a smattering had stuck (to bare ground areas) when we retired last night and nothing was left this morning. We have received about 2.2" of liquid moisture in the past 48 hours.

Spring cleaning our safety deposit box

About a week ago, I removed nearly everything from the safety deposit box that we keep at a local financial institution, bringing it home to sort out and update our inventory listing. Oh, my! We are pretty good about stuffing papers & items into the box; but, we're not good at shredding old papers and keeping the inventory listing updated. The biggest mess was our accordion file labeled "Isurance" (well...Hunky Husband was having a bad day with the labeler, I guess.) That file contained insurance papers dating back to 2007. I culled out more than half of the papers before throwing the rest into a bag to take to our agent's office. Our agent, Ron, wasn't in the office; but, in response to my crying and begging, his right hand assistant Monica replied, "You know we love you!" She would sort through to see if she agreed with me that most of the papers could be shredded.

An hour later, when we stopped by again, Ron showed us the large bunch of papers that were ready to shred and gave me the bag. It now contained four pristine envelopes - each labeled with the insurance policy and date in Monica's handwriting. Monica had also found an envelope containing the title to HH's car which I had noted as missing from the accordion file labeled "Car & Home Papers". Ron & Monica give service well above and beyond duty. Ron even offered to shred the unneeded papers for me.

Now, I need to take a fistful of EE bonds, that I had purchased through paycheck withholding before retirement, to the credit union for cashing in. According to the treasury website, the bonds haven't drawn interest in several years, despite my note that EEs didn't stop drawing interest until they were at least 30 years old and these had not yet reached that limit. Laws/policies must have changed in the meantime.

It's a good thing to get the excess paper out of the box to make room for the new. I am putting into the box the originals of the legal documents that our lawyer drew up for us in May 2020 - general and healthcare durable powers of attorney for each of us, plus a power of attorney for both of us on our house and lots - a total of about 80 sheets of 8.5"x11" paper.

Tidbits for another week - 3/12/2021

Electrical Problems (3/10/2021):

We have overkill in my kitchen: There are four ovens in it. Since I'm not much of a cook (I only cook to keep us from starving), you may not think that logical. However, the number of ovens in my kitchen is not the point of my sad tale. The point is that I had an electrical problem with the small toaster oven (to left of microwave on the counter in the photo, above) which proved to the world that I, who completed a minor in Electrical Engineering back in the late 1950s, am an idiot.

I wanted to toast a sandwich bun for our dinner, last night. I put the bun in the toaster oven, set the controls and started the oven, and left the room. Upon my return, I discovered that the oven was not hot, did not even have glowing digital control numbers showing. I unplugged the unit, re-plugged it. (That's the plug to the toaster oven at the right end of the toaster oven and above it. The other plug to the left of the toaster oven is actually the plug to the microwave.) Nothing. Exasperated, I used a skillet and the range top to toast the bun. As I went downstairs to bed, last night, I took the toaster oven down to our workshop where I intended to check it, later, to see if there is a fuse inside the casing.

This morning, as I came upstairs, I brought our standby toaster oven up from the basement. Later, I stuck a bagel into the standby toaster oven and set its simple mechanical controls. I listened to the hum of the spring-loaded timer as I walked away. When I returned, did I find a toasted bagel? Nope. The toaster oven was (electrically) dead as a doornail. Bah! Humbug! The poor thing had served me well in Albuquerque in the 1980s and had served me well for the first 10 years after my return to Derby KS; but, it hadn't been used since about 2000 - at which time it had been replaced by the newer unit.

A bit later, after working in the yard and kicking back thinking to take a short nap, my idle mind realized what was going on with the little ovens: I had been checking the wrong ground fault interrupter (GFI) unit. I had checked the GFI into which the microwave is plugged. That's logical since it is, physically, the nearest GFI unit to the outlet into which the toaster oven is plugged. However, the electrical outlet into which the toaster oven plugs is actually wired into the GFI unit of the outlet that is to the right of the microwave. Duh!

While everyone is looking at the photo of the ovens, please note that the little woodwork one can see is nice and clean. I started on spring cleaning, in the kitchen, the other day. It took me four days to finish scrubbing all of the cabinets in the kitchen, but they are clean!

Terminology Illuminated (3/12/2021):

The other day I asked that anyone who understood "Lie group" and/or "surfaces of ignorance" let me know so that I could share the Zoom login information to yesterday's Wichita State University Physics Seminar. I needed someone to watch and translate for me. The seminar featured Dr. Shannon Ray, National Research Council Fellow, Air Force Research Laboratory, speaking on“The Purification of 3-Level Quantum States and Surfaces of Ignorance”.

No one took me up on the challenge of translating for me, so I watched the presentation, alone. It turned out to be an interesting talk. Although I understood the math (heavy on tensor algebras), there was a lot of what turned out to be jargon - much of it invented by the presenter and his colleagues. One term that he used in a peripheral comment turned out to be less esoteric than I had perceived or considered: it was "The Bottom Turtle".

In exchanging emails with Ole Phat Stu, a few minutes ago, I was inspired to research "The Bottom Turtle". *Face Palm*  The term is from Yertle the Turtle by Dr Seuss.

Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) has been in the news, much, of late - at least, here in the States. Fortunately, Yertle the Turtle was not implicated in the loud complaints against some of the Seuss books. Who knew it would contain an allegory during a physics talk? Whoo boy.

Personal Tidbits from Hunky Husband and me:

As of Wednesday (3/10/2021), Hunky Husband and I are considered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be "fully vaccinated". We may now meet with a few other people who are also "fully vaccinated", indoors, without masking and distancing. Unfortunately, in our family, being "fully vaccinated" has skipped the generation of our daughters. We are looking forward to their attaining the designation no later than the end of May.

On Friday (3/12/2021), HH & I met with our tax guy. Yikes! HH had, without my having noticed it, until we gathered our tax papers, chosen to skip the Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) from his Volunteer Investment Plan (VIP) with Boeing, for 2020. The problem that it presented for our 2020 taxes was that by not taking his RMD (not required in 2020 because of COVID-19), he did not contribute the taxes that he would have had withheld from the distribution.

For 2020, we had under-withheld (Fed & State) by an amount equal to my income from retirement benefits plus social security. (Of course, for 2019 we had over-withheld 1.2 times that much.) HH had left home without his checkbook, so the rest of our taxes will be automatically syphoned off of my checking account.  Fortunately, I am in the habit of carrying a blank check in my wallet and Robert was able to get the routing information off of it to give the Feds and the State Revenuers. (The minute we got home I transferred the funds from my savings. In the meantime, HH had received texts from H&R Block informing him that both sets of taxes had been accepted and would be deducted from the indicated account.)

 

Tidbits for the week - 2021Mar5

Bluebirds Getting Ready to Nest (2/25/2021):

One of the local male Eastern bluebirds is checking our nesting box while shopping around for places to build two or three nests, in hopes of enticing a female to join him in raising little bluebirds. We've been seeing bluebirds all winter, but now they are actively shopping around. I barely caught him during ingress.

Honey Bees Return (2/28/2021):

In Yellow jackets, galore - Correction - Honey bees, galore, posted on a month ago, I noted the presence of honey bees carrying off pieces of the inner material from corn kernels. IMHO, they should not have been out scavenging so early in the season and must have been desperate for sustenance. They have been absent since then, and that was to have been expected - especially with the really cold weather to which we were treated for a couple of weeks or so since they only come out when the temperatures reach into the 50s F. Well...today, they are back - busily attacking the cracked corn. Poor little girls are having a time. I'm happy that my low-grade bird food is helping them.

I consulted Elder Brother, who used to keep a hive of bees in Santa Fe NM, about the behavior of the bees. He said that I was doing well to keep the feeders replenished for them since they must be desperate. He had never seen bees carry off grain bits.

Old Photo of the week:

This (below) is one of the old photos that I've scanned in the past several days. These are my significant others as they appeared on 4/7/1962. One can tell that the photo was taken on a Saturday morning by the tee shirt, jeans, and facial stubble worn by Hunky Husband. Dudette is nearly three years old in the photo while Bogie is just shy of four days old - freshly home from the hospital.

It's too bad that more of the couch doesn't show. I was really proud of myself for having, in the previous year or two, re-upholstered a used couch and easy chair that we had purchased from Mavis Bishop, secretary in the Vibration & Instrumentation group at Boeing, in which I was working at the time (1960). The husband of one of my aunts was an upholsterer in Kansas City Mo. Since I had no idea where one bought upholstery materials, he was kind enough to sell me what I wanted (black nylon frieze for the couch, red nylon frieze for the chair) and help me figure out the yardage required. The couch (which made out into a double bed) and chair, a limed oak breakfast table (with 1 leaf) and four chairs were ours for $95. That would be about $850 in today's dollars.

More from News for Nerds - Digidog, Dragonfly drone, Bitcoin

The Digidog in the posting on News for Nerds, below, might have saved three police officers in Wichita KS a painful trip to the hospital last Saturday. An owner had called 9-1-1 to report apparent activity in a house that should have been vacant. Investigating, three officers were hailed by a shotgun blast - presumably accidently set off since there were no people in the house. Why three officers were within range of a single shotgun blast is beyond me; but, I'm not in law enforcement.

Boston Dynamics Is Selling its 70-Pound Robot Dog To Police Departments (yahoo.com) 114

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @07:34PM from the woof dept.

The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."

But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."

A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance."
The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.

The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

 

The idea of going to Titan is intriguing if one is into really long-distance travel.

The Dream of Sending a Submarine Through the Methane Seas of Saturn's Moon Titan (nytimes.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:34PM from the above-the-sixth-planet dept.

"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...

NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.

 

 

The following item reports the same information that I heard on BBC World Service via KMUW Radio a day or two ago.

 

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized (bbc.com) 300

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:34PM from the yours-and-miners dept.

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels....

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."

The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."
Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.

When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."

These made me laugh - 2

Oh, how true is the Dilbert comic by Scott Adams from Sunday's Wichita Eagle newspaper! Over the years, I've been tripped up, so often, by being too literal.

 

 

In the same edition of the above cited newspaper was the FoxTrot comic by Bill Amend. Corny, but funny.