Robots that 'Teach' - ESRA Motivates- (Kids relate to it as a funny friend)

Science and Engineering students at Manalapan High School take a full year of Electronics in their Junior year. The electronics class introduces students to electronics as a practical art, a way of using electronics for scientific applications. The 140 hour course teaches students the theory and application of electronics, (Ohms and Kirkoffs laws, Thevinin's theorem,) the practical and safe use of meters, oscilloscopes, and power supplies, and how to design and breadboard circuits. Finally, students learn to design and produce printed circuit boards in the lab.

After covering the basics, electronics classes are presented with a problem that is unique and challenging. Last year, they were asked to create digital pheromones using transmitters and sensors, so that robots could recognize and interact with each other. Four ESRA Robots were provided by Robodyssey and introduced to the students. ESRA is a robot that is clearly not human. It is non-threatening - how could you be afraid of something with a scrunchy for a mouth and soft, floppy eyelids? It is unpretentious -- it is its self. Yet, it is recognizable at all levels of human interaction as a face - familiar, intentionally comical, but friendly. It is manipulated by four hobby servos and can be controlled with many commercially available products.

For this project, we chose to control the servos with a Netmedia BX-24 controller mounted in a Robodyssey Advanced Motherboard. The BX-24 programming language is a variation of Visual basic, so the syntax is familiar to many, and will be useful in the future. The Robodyssey Motherboard allows servos and sensors to plug directly into the BX-24.

To model a communication scheme for transmitters and receivers, the students first thought of cockroaches, ants, and wasps when they heard the word 'pheromones.' They concluded that humans also have the ability to communicate with these signals, but real pheromones would be too complex for the amount of time they had for the project. Humans learn to recognize what facial expressions mean at a very early stage in their development. However, this would mean that the robots would have to recognize facial expressions.

Although the students agreed that humans get many cues from facial expressions, there are other communications being exchanged that are less obvious, including pheromones. Robots could communicate at this simple, invisible level without actually seeing the expression on the other robot, while the robot users could observe the expressions.

There was little time for students to learn to design complex sensors in such a basic course, so students decided to use simple IR LEDs and receivers to transmit and receive each unique frequency for each age/gender robot. Because students had more experience in programming, the solution was primarily a software one. (Science and Engineering students take 1/2 year of computer programming in 9th grade, and AP Computer Science in Junior year including C++ and Java.)

With a communications scheme agreed on, students decided to assign a familiar role to each robot, and assign an emotional reaction, characterized by a series of facial expressions, for each interaction. Students assigned an age and gender to each - an 'Old Male,' a 'Young Male,' an 'Old Female' and a 'Young Female.' The class discussed what facial expressions they might observe in each of the 16 possible interactions. How do members of a specific age group react to each other and to members of a different age group? For example, how do old men act toward young women and young women toward old men?

With sixteen stereo-typical responses agreed upon, students redefined the problem as 'how to make ESRA mimic those expressions so that an outside observer could recognize to which age and gender group each ESRA belonged.' In any classroom, when students ask their teacher to teach them, education becomes a partnership between the teacher and the students - a learning environment, not a teaching situation. Students asked questions like, 'How do you control the facial expressions of this robot?', 'What are servos?', 'How does one robot sense another robot?', and 'How will we store a series of behaviors and recall them when confronted with another robot?'

After learning how to control the servos on the robots to produce the desired expressions, students wrote code that would cause the desired reaction when each robot was face to face with another robot. Student code examples can be found at www.robodyssey.com/students/esra/codeexamples and on SERVO Magazine website, www.servomagazine.com.

In a completely different situation, ESRA was introduced to high school student Kylan Turner. Her growing interest in computer programming and her desire to help children with autism has lead to a trial use of ESRA in a school for children with learning differences. Kylan's infectious enthusiasm has also led to interest in robotics through out her school.

What's Next?

This year, students will be given mobile robots and encouraged to make only simple, discrete transmitters and receivers and perhaps only simple analog controls, modified by the presence of pheromones. Each robot will have a specific task and, with the help of other like-minded robots, perform more complex tasks. Simple individual rules, complex adaptive behavior -- in short, a swarm!

Author Bio - David Peins has taught every shop area from machine tool to graphic design. He has worked in many diverse industries as machinist, drafter/designer, machine shop supervisor and laborer. He currently teaches Electronics at the Science and Engineering Specialized Learning Center at Manalapan High School in Englishtown, NJ, and is President of Robodyssey Systems, LLC, Trenton, NJ. - www.robodyssey.com He can be reached at dpeins@ieee.org

ESRA Inventor Block - Brian Patton, creator of the ESRA mechanism, was inspired after seeing MIT's KISMET on a PBS special. Discouraged by his wife's rejection of the idea to spend $25,000 to build a robot just like KISMET, he set out to create a slightly more affordable design. Brian eventually joined Robodyssey Systems and ESRA became the fun and educational tool it is today.

"Adding Sexes to Robots"

The Challenge: Adding Sexes to Robots?!

To transform four ESRA robots into individual beings that can be be identified as a young male, old male, young female or old female by an outside observer. No visible modifications could be made to the robots that might hint as to which one is male or female, young or old.

The Solution: They Aren't that Easy!

This task was given to a group of high school students as a way to secretly lure them into learning a variety of practical skills. First, the students had to agree on how a robot would behave in proximity to another robot. In other words, how a young male responds to a young female vs. an old female. Secondly, the students had to learn how to manipulate the ESRA's servos to emulate human expressions. Thirdly, the students had to develop a software based communication system to allow robots to identify themselves to the other robots by simply being in the same area. (Something we call digital pheromones.) Lastly, the students had to tie this all together in code for every combination of associations for each of the four robots.

The Future: An Exciting World!

So, what happened? The students learned an enormous amount of material relating to computer science, electronics, and even a bit about social behaviors. On a deeper level, we realized we were opening a door to an exciting and unexplored world of developing sexually dimorphic robots. We began to realize that some day, as robots become more and more integral to our daily lives, robots will be able to identify who we are. Robots may exhibit different personalities depending on the situation they are in. Perhaps a robot mixed in a crowd will show emotions not only relating to the task at hand but even the personal space it shares with its human counterparts.

Ethics in Robotics?

Now, we want to increase the challenges and potentially deepen the plot. An increase in variables will add to the complexity of the response. What if the young male is in the presence of his "father"? Should a robot have a favorite color? Should a robot have "personal space" depending on its gender? All these variables can be addressed simply by adding more sensors. The question and the challenge is, how do we treat the data? The answers will be both interesting and stimulating. It might even give a glimpse into something besides our computer, we might even be peering into ourselves.

What's a Pheromone?

Biologists describe a pheromone as any substance produced by an organism that serves to induce a physiological or behavioral response in another individual of the same species.' When given the task of creating pheromones, students thought of insects and sex attractants, alarm substances, trail markers leading to food sources, -- you remember, like Sim-Ant! So pheromones are simple substances excreted, not generated by higher levels of thought, and not necessarily left behind, that can induce a complex response in another organism of the same species.

Allomones effect members of a different species and are favorable to the emitter, like a flower's smell attracting pollinating insects. Kairomones effect members of a different species and benefit the recipient, rather than the emitter, like the scent of prey to the predator.

What's a Digital Pheromone?

It's an electronic device that sends out a simple, coded message over and over and is little burden on a robots higher level logic processor. The medium could be infrared light, radio frequency, ultrasound, or something else, and it would not effect or be effected by, other systems in the environment. Students working with ESRA started with individual emitters for each age/gender robot but ran out of time, (the entire project only lasted five weeks), and elected to use the processor to code as well as decode their infrared emitters. Receivers could also be discrete devices that only turn on when in the presence of a pre-programmed digital pheromone, relieving the processor of that task.

What are they good for?

Complex adaptive behaviors can arise from the reception of simple digital pheromones or combinations of simple digital pheromones. In the case of the students working with ESRA, the behaviors that students decided on for each encounter of a specific age/gender robot, were coded into a BX-24 microcontroller and caused the robot receiving the pheromone to exhibit a series of eye and mouth movements. These could be interpreted by observers (with no prior experience with the robots), as a specific age/gender clues.