Robots, Motorbikes, DARPA and Che Guevara

a robot is for life, not just for christmas (lego version)

06Dec07

I grew up in a family dominated by the internal combustion engine. My father raced motorbikes as a young man and once lay for dead in a ditch for several hours after a crash. He was lucky. Eventually somebody spotted him and pulled him out, and his skull was patched up with some nifty metalwork. This fact alone is enough to remind everyone in the Knackered Family of the low probability of us being alive at all.

This 1951 Norton ES2 (courtesy of Michel 67 on Flickr) is identical to one owned by Knackered Père. By the way, Che Guevara set off across Latin America the following year with Alberto Granado on a 1939 model called ‘La Poderosa II’, or ‘The Mighty One’. See the 2004 film dramatization, The Motorcycle Diaries.

Though my childhood was spent in close proximity to the motor industry, I wasn’t always interested in it. And it is not entirely surprising that only a few days after my father passed away I missed the moment when a major milestone in automotive and robotic history was made: the completion of the first DARPA Urban Challenge on November 3rd. A GM-backed effort from Carnegie Mellon University successfully navigated the 60-mile urban course using a robot-controlled Chevy Tahoe snapping up the prize at an average speed of 14 miles a hour.

This does seem quite miraculous, because this was the first challenge in urban conditions, subject to driving laws and the hazards of human and other robot-controlled vehicles. The last successful competition was done across the desert and the time before that no vehicle completed the course. So, in the space of a few years robotics has come a long way.

I could never imagine my father (a truly dedicated driver) giving up control of the driving to artificial intelligence. And it’s ironic for me that GM and Caterpillar are emblazoned on such a vehicle, because Dad worked most of his life for Ford and JCB.

So what has this all got to do with Christmas and Lego, a company infamous as the principal cause of foot injuries and profanities in my household? Well, a child’s interest in robotics can be kindled with a simple and wonderful kit from the plastic brick manufacturer. It’s called Mindstorms, or the Robotic Invention System.

While this connection between children’s toy and the future-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is a wonderful one, it also turned out to be almost as fragile as the Knackered genetic trail, when it appeared that Lego might ditch the Mindstorms line amid corporate retrenchment.

It might not have been immediately obvious that the entire discipline of academic robotics rested on their own platform. A huge ecosystem of programmers (young, old, amateur and professional) depended on a continued supply of plastic parts, motors and sensors, not to mention the seminal RCX Brick: the most important brick the company had made — after the first one, that is. So last year, Lego brought out a new revitalised Mindstorms called NXT. It does a lot more than the classic variety. And it was designed in a model of open source collaboration with the user base.

As we (that’s the royal/editorial we) have not exhausted the functionality of the original, it is not yet on our shopping list this Christmas, but the more I read about it the more I’m tempted. At nearly £200, it is not cheap. But then this is a classy, scalable toy that will take your (inner) child from basic robot building through to object-oriented programming.

And if you don’t believe that Lego gets used in real science, the original RCX Mindstorms brick turned up in a slide presentation given by Dr Benedetto de Martino of University College London Institute of Neurology when he spoke at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar a few weeks ago on the subject of Frames, Biases and Values in the Human Brain.