Cheaper Joints and Digits Bring the Robot Revolution Closer

Efforts to build robot hands and humanoids more cheaply could make them affordable enough for businesses and even homes. By Tom Simonite on April 4, 2014 WHY IT MATTERS Robots are of limited use because the most sophisticated remain expensive and power-hungry. electrostatic clutch Helping hand: A new kind of electrostatic clutch from SRI makes this design around 10 times cheaper than previous robotic hands, which could cost $35,000 or more. The Atlas humanoid robot, unveiled last year by Boston Dynamics, a company later acquired by Google, is a marvel. It can clamber over rubble and operate power tools. But these abilities don’t come cheap. Atlas has a price tag well above a million dollars, and it consumes around 15 kilowatts of electricity when in operation, meaning hefty power bills for its owner and limiting its practicality. “That’s enough to power a small city block,” says Alexander Kernbaum, research engineer at the nonprofit research agency SRI International. To be truly practical, he says, Atlas “needs to be many times more efficient.” Kernbaum is part of a team at SRI that recently began working on that problem under a contract with DARPA, the Pentagon research agency (Atlas itself was built with DARPA funding). The team aims to rethink the robot’s design to preserve its capabilities but slash its power usage by at least 20 times, putting it on par with a microwave oven. SRI won’t talk about how that will be done. But the general approach will be to replace the power-hungry hydraulics that move Atlas’s joints with a smaller number of lighter, more efficient, and cheaper electric components that can achieve the same thing. Rethinking the components used in advanced prototypes such as Atlas to reduce cost and power consumption has become a major focus in robotics research as engineers seek to finally have these machines escape the lab, says Rich Mahoney, SRI’s director of robotics. “We got things that are overdesigned because there’s not been impetus for low cost and good design,” he says. For a long time researchers have been focused on simply answering basic questions of whether functioning, agile humanoids could be built, says Mahoney. “We were in the domain of ‘Is this possible?’ ” He says this question has now been answered, so the time is right to drive down the costs of the components used in sophisticated robot legs, arms, and hands, making them affordable to small businesses and even consumers. “Manipulation is simply not available at that level now,” says Mahoney. “But it can be.” He says cheaper components would make it possible for humanoids like Atlas to become standard safety tools in places like oil rigs. “Instead of ‘In case of emergency break glass,’ and there’s a hatchet, there would be a humanoid.”