Rise of the Machines

By Dan Cray; Carolina A. Miranda; Wilson Rothman

THE BIONIC ENGINEER DRIVING SCHOOL ON MARS

Television critics will tell you that The Bionic Woman was just another cheesy '70s sci-fi series, but for Ayanna Howard it was a springboard to a career. When she was 12 years old, she became so captivated by the show's cyborg premise that she started reading books that reaffirmed the concept of integrating machines with humans. A thousand reruns and an electrical-engineering Ph.D. later, she's creating robots that think like humans for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The Bionic Woman showed real, brilliant people giving life through bionics," says Howard, now 32. "I figured I could do it too." After detouring from artificial limbs to artificial intelligence, Howard is currently developing software that will enable J.P.L.'s forthcoming Mars probes to choose their landing sites and navigate the Martian surface by mimicking the way a human might handle the job. Her "neural network" reacts the same way humans do when facing rugged terrain, avoiding steep grades and accelerating through straightaways.

"People always look for the straightest, clearest path, so that's what we map to the robot," she says. The early result is SmartNav, a rover the size of a lawn mower that is controlled by a neural network capable of distinguishing sand, concrete and gravel. On Mars, such networks could keep rovers exploring rather than waiting for instructions.

Howard has always been clear about her own path. Her parents ran a company in Pasadena, Calif., that engineered railroad-signal components. Their work inspired her to learn to solder and familiarize herself with machine parts. Three years ago, hoping to encourage others to follow in her footsteps, Howard launched a math-and-science mentoring program for at-risk junior high school girls. Fighting cultural pressures takes time; one talented math student told Howard she planned to be a hair stylist. Still, Howard hopes the program will help steer more young women into robotics, a field she says that within a decade will produce robots that mimic human thought processes. "This isn't about mechanics," says Howard. "It's about creating something new, something like us but different--something that can live." --By Dan Cray

THE SWARM KEEPER Metal Insects On Wheels

When James McLurkin was a high school junior on Long Island, N.Y., he built his first robot: a toy car that he rigged with a keypad, an LED display and a squirt gun. Then he programmed the unit to travel to the next room and "engage the target." His parents--the target in question--got a good soaking.

McLurkin, 32, has come a long way since that first machine. Now a graduate student in computer science at M.I.T., the young scientist is on the forefront of developing "swarmbots"--packs of dozens of small robots that communicate with one another and work in harmony to complete an assignment. They have no centralized command system and can cover vast terrain; if one is destroyed, others fill in. His 112 titanium robots resemble small car batteries on wheels. McLurkin is working with a team at iRobot, a private Boston-based robotics firm, to find practical uses for his fleet of 4-in.-high units. McLurkin envisions that his swarm could map terrain on Mars or search for survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake. "If you want to know what's inside a cave, you can send in an Army Ranger--or an army of robots," he says of his fleet's lifesaving potential. Rodney Brooks, director of M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab, says the scope of McLurkin's work is remarkable. "A lot of us have worked on insect-robot things," he says, "but James has taken the technology farther than anyone else." Indeed, last year McLurkin won the prestigious Lemelson-M.I.T. prize for inventiveness and creativity.

McLurkin's machines were inspired by nature. As an undergraduate at M.I.T., he became interested in ants and kept a terrarium full of them on his desk. The decentralized nature of ant colonies gave him a model for his robots. "I worked on the notion of using virtual pheromones [the biochemical scents that some animals use to communicate]," he says. "As one robot gathers knowledge, it spreads it to its neighbors, and they spread it to their neighbors." Despite his success, McLurkin still gets a high-schoolish kick out of playing with his robots. Attendees at an iRobot holiday party two years ago were treated to the sounds of the first ever swarm orchestra. McLurkin had programmed the robots to arrange themselves into different instrument sections and play Christmas carols. What could be next? "A swarm marching band," he chuckles. "They'll play American standards." --By Carolina A. Miranda

RESCUER BY REMOTE NEED HELP? SEND IN THE ROBOT

Within 24 hours of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Robin Murphy was on the scene with a team of robots to help sort through the debris. It was the first real-world test of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue in Tampa, Fla., the only unit of its kind on the planet. Rescue workers at ground zero, accustomed to using trained dogs and cameras mounted on poles to look for survivors and human remains and test for structural weaknesses, soon saw the advantage of cyberhelpers. "Search cams typically penetrate only 18 ft., and the heat was melting the heads off some of them," says Murphy, 46, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida. "Our robots are able to go 60 ft. through rubble that's still on fire."

Murphy, who has a Ph.D. in robotics from Georgia Tech, saw an opportunity to focus her research when one of her students returned from working in the search-and-rescue operation at the Oklahoma City bombing site in 1995. "Everybody says robots can save lives and make the world a better place," she notes. "It was clear then that it was time to put up or shut up." Her work led to the first robots built specifically for the task, to be released in the next year by American Standard Robotics and the Northrop Grumman subsidiary Remotec. The robots are expected to be able to gather data by themselves so that operators can focus on the emergency at hand.

"It's one thing to develop these tools and another thing to integrate them into the world of fire and law enforcement," says Ellis Stanley, director of the Los Angeles emergency preparedness department. "Robin is working to establish a relationship with rescue workers so that when the technology arrives on the scene, they don't say, 'What is this?' They say, 'Let's get to work.'" --By Wilson Rothman

THE MIMIC MAKER The Android Who Learned To Dance

Mitsuo Kawato is fascinated with the brain--so he helped build one. The biophysics engineer and computer researcher led a team at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, that spent five years constructing a humanoid equipped with artificial intelligence. Completed in 2001, the 6-ft. 2-in., 175-lb. robot was named Dynamic Brain, or DB for short. Says Kawato: "We built an artificial brain hoping that it'll help us understand the real one." DB doesn't have the friendly exterior of its cute entertainment-robot cousins. Its face is composed of just "eyes," made of two telescopic, wide-angle lenses, and its body is a bundle of metal and cables, thinly veiled by a translucent armor. But what makes DB special is its ability to learn new skills by mimesis, or mimicry. To understand how the human brain integrates sensory information and motor control, Kawato gave DB a dexterous body with functioning eyes, neck, torso, arms and legs. DB can watch a dance demonstration, memorize the movement pattern and replicate it by moving its body. So far, the robot has acquired about 30 skills, including juggling, air hockey, yo-yoing, folk dancing and playing the drum. Kawato is calling for a 30-year national project that would combine government money, academic research and corporate know-how to build a humanoid with the intelligence and the physical ability of a 5-year-old. He calls the proposal the Atom Project--after the Japanese name for the comic-book robot superhero known in the U.S. as Astro Boy. "Atom was abandoned by its creator, who built it to replace his dead son, because it was incapable of growing," Kawato notes. "We know how to make our Atom learn." --By Toko Sekiguchi