If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options
|
Posted by rickpon on August 18, 2008, 12:59 am
What's holding back robots is computer vision - you have machines that
can physically do just about anything, but what's lacking is object
recognition. And the problem for that is really just a matter of
marketing current technology (machine learning techniques such as
neural networks) so that more people use them.
I'd like to see a marketplace for perception tasks created.
Basic Premise
**************
Small companies/individuals to start producing small fragments of
functionality and offering it in a per for use basis. (as in a cat
recognizer in an image, or a recognizer for the word "hello" in an
audiofile).
To create the above recognizer would require gathering data (such as
hundreds/thousands of pictures of cats) and feeding it to a supervised
learning algorithm like svm, boosting etc.
Thousands (perhaps millions) of people creating their own
"classifiers" and charging for them (perhaps 1000 uses for 1 dollar)
over the web might lead rapidly to seeing/thinking machines.
The Surveillance/Video Analytics Industry (as an initial example)
******************************************
Person detectors already exist, used in surveillance, but it's mostly
out of the reach of consumers, analogous to the situation that exists
between enterprise software like SAP/Oracle and consumer/small
business software such that you find on the web. Currently only large/
midsize companies and governments employ the technology because it's
still too expensive - teams of consultants coming in to set up
multimillion dollar installations with equipment from only a handful
of manufacturers.
To get into the industry today (as an entrepreneur) you need to not
only develop all the software, usually integrate it into a camera as
an embedded application, but also find sales reps/distributors willing
to sell your product (who would go around shaking hands to get it
sold).
Instead it could be the following
Imagine that you have webcam, and you want to monitor whether someone
comes to your front door, automatically. You can set up the wifi
webcam to look form the front window or fit it outside and your video
feed would go to someone's software out in the "cloud", where a
"packaged" set of detectors might work. The person's age/sex/clothing
(wearing a jacket or not etc). would be detected. You would pay for
this by use. For example a person detector might continously run, you
might end up paying say 10 dollars a month for it (accumulated over
micropayments of .0001 cent per detection). Every time a person is
detected, this data would be sent to someone else's age detector and
you might pay 1 cent for every determination of a person's age, so you
might end up only paying 1 dollar on average accumulated over the
month for it (100 people might come to your door in a month).
You might want this type of surveillance for nighbourhood watch (a
community of homeowners, condo association), get together to have
cameras fitted throughout a street and person recognizers (that
actually identify people from face, gait, clothing combination) might
to improve security.
Another use could be for elderly monitoring, for classroom monitoring,
or for monitoring the babysitter, or for monitoring yourself
(automatically have a log of activities you do throughout the day).
Now, hook this up to robots.
How It Applies To Robots
**************************
Roomba cannot see anything so it blindly bounces around. Imagine a
network of small cameras that you put in each room (similar to how you
might hook up speakers throughout a room) monitor and guide the
roomba. All the furniture, people, pets, obstacles are detected out in
the cloud and you pay for use. It might require 10 computers working
simultaneously to do this task, consumers won't pay for 10 computers
just so that they roomba can vacuum a few times a week, but they would
be willing to pay, let's say 2 dollars for one hour of automated
vacuuming (amazon currently charges 10 cents per cpu hour, so 10
computers working for an hour - 1 dollar, and then add bandwith
charges and profit to make it 2).
If you look at Anybots, their plan is that people will buy their
robots and have people from india remotely operate them to do
household tasks (and in restaurants, offices, factories), people in
the cloud if you will. There will an economic imperative for
increasing amounts of automation to be added (as in anything), and so
"classifiers in the cloud" with different companies specializing in
different tasks will result, until eventually no human operaters are
involved.
(ie. a way to keep the momentum in the market going would be to have
remote human operators in the mix).
Payments is a nonissue, amazon web services already can do metered
charging (to you and your customer), and it's technically a pretty
simple matter to set up a prepay system with paypal (your customer
prepays you, say 50 dollars, and you keep a usage log).
Democratization Of Machine Vision
************************************
My point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I
personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a
startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there
were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted
somewhere I could participate in this.
It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating
content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and
hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the
creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people
didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based
applications.
What I'm suggesting is that a "gold rush" type situation form around
the building of classifiers, such as that occurred with website
creation. There are millions trying to get an income onlne creating
content for adsense and affilate programs (and for free with wikipedia
and open source). Most will fail at generating full time income but in
the process a large amount of wealth has been created. The same could
be done for classifiers/artifical intelligence. It would require just
collecting a thousand or two pieces of data (image/sudio/text) to
create a classifier, an effort similar to creating a small website.
Robot Hardware Creators
**************************
In the above analogy, robot hardware creators would be like computer/
cellphone manufacturers. However, unlike what occurred with personal
computers, there will be much more opportunity to innovate (and hence
much more opportunity for entrepreneurs):
- no standardization (monopoly) around operating system need occur,
since the almost all the software (perception/cognition) is out on the
web created by many different producers and so much open source
software exists today for low level tasks (linux).
- the design space is larger, you don't standardize around keyboard/
mouse/monitor/cpu/motherboard and just compete on cost/visual design,
but instead can compete on a huge number of functional aspects
(2/4/6/10 legs, 1/2/10 eyes, end effector designs, and so on) as well
as visual design (of which there is also a much greater variation -
different types of skins, faces, shapes of animals).
|
|
Posted by John Nagle on August 18, 2008, 12:59 pm
rickpon wrote:
> What's holding back robots is computer vision - you have machines that
> can physically do just about anything, but what's lacking is object
> recognition. And the problem for that is really just a matter of
> marketing current technology (machine learning techniques such as
> neural networks) so that more people use them.
What's holding back robots is cheap labor. We used to have
automatic car washes. Now we have "100% hand car wash".
John Nagle
|
|
Posted by RMDumse on August 18, 2008, 2:10 pm
> What's holding back robots is cheap labor.
Remarkably asute observation, John.
--
Randy M. Dumse
Objects in mirror are more confused then they appear.
|
|
Posted by Gordon McComb on August 18, 2008, 3:12 pm
RMDumse wrote:
>
> > What's holding back robots is cheap labor.
>
> Remarkably asute observation, John.
In addition to cheap human labor there's:
1. Mechaanisms that are no where near robust enough to survive
real-world applications. The failure rate from damage would be
astronomical, and so would the costs.
2. Liability insurance even for robots teleoperated. A service robot
falling over onto Grandma will set your insurer back a few cool million.
After that you won't be able to get insurance, and therefore you won't
be able to remain in business.
3. Single-function solutions will continue to be far, far cheaper than
generic robotic appliances, in terms of product development cycles and
cost-of-goods.
...and a bunch of others we've been through before.
OTOH, robots are still great for all the things people seem to ignore,
like manufacuring and certain military applications.
-- Gordon
|
Related Posts
Latest Posts
|
|
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML site map
> can physically do just about anything, but what's lacking is object
> recognition. And the problem for that is really just a matter of
> marketing current technology (machine learning techniques such as
> neural networks) so that more people use them.