Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This weekend I attended the annual "Robogames" competition, which took place here in the Bay Area. Robogames is mostly a robot battle competition, with a focus on heavily armed radio-controlled robots fighting in a protected arena. For several years robot fighting was big enough to rate some cable TV shows dedicated to it. The fighting is a lot of fun, but almost entirely devoid of automation -- in fact efforts to use automation in battle robots have mostly been a failure.

The RC battles are fierce and violent, and today one of the weapons of choice is something heavy that spins at very high speed so that it builds up a lot of angular momentum and kinetic energy, to transfer into the enemy. People like to see robots flying through the air and losing parts to flying sparks. (I suspect this need to make robots very robust against attack makes putting sensors on the robots for automation difficult, as many weapons would quickly destroy a lot of popular sensors types.) The games also featured a limited amount of automated robot competition. This included some lightweight (3lb and 1lb) automated battles which I did not get to watch, and some some hobby robot competitions for maze-running, line following, ribbon climbing and LEGO mindstorms. There was also semi-autonomous robot battle called "kung fu" where humanoid robots who take high level commands (like punch, and step) try to push one another over. There is also sumo, a game where robots must push the other robot out of the ring.

I had hoped the highlight would be the Robo-magellan contest. This is a hobbyist robot car competition, usually done with small robots 1 to 2 feet in length. Because it is hobbyists, and often students, the budgets are very small, and the contest is very simple. Robots must make it through a simple outdoor course to touch an orange cone about 100 yards away. They want to do this in the shortest time, but for extra points they can touch bonus cones along the way. Contestants are given GPS coordinates for the target cones. They get three tries. In this particular contest, to make it even easier, contestants were allowed to walk the course and create some extra GPS waypoints for their robots.

These extra waypoints should have made it possible to do the job with just a GPS and camera, but the hobbyists in this competition were mostly novices, and no robot reached the final cone. The winner got within 40 feet on their last run, but no performance was even remotely impressive. This was unlike past years, where I was told that 6 or more robots would reach the target and there would be real competition. This year's poor showing was blamed on budgets, and the fact that old teams who had done well had moved on from the sport. Only 5 teams showed up.

The robots were poor for sensors. While all would have a GPS, in 1 or 2 cases the GPS systems failed and the robots quickly wandered into things. A few had sonar or touch-bars for obstacle detection, but others did not, and none of them did their obstacle detection well at all. For most, if they ran into something, that was it for that race. Some used a compass or accelerometers to help judge when to turn and where to aim, since a GPS is not very good as a compass.

Last night, YouTube posted a note on the official YouTube Blog concerning the recent firestorm over Content-ID takedowns like the one I wrote about earlier in the week regarding my Downfall DMCA Parody.

In the post, they are kind enough to link to my video (now back up on YouTube thanks to my disputing the Content-ID takedown) as an example of a fair use parody, and to a talk by (former) fellow EFF director Larry Lessig which incorporated some copyrighted music.

However, some of the statements in the post deserve a response. Let me start first that I hope I do understand a bit of YouTube's motivations in creating the Content-ID system. YouTube certainly has a lot of copyright violations on it, and it's staring down the barrel of a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom and other legal burdens. I can understand why it wants to show the content owners that it wants to help them and wants to be their partner. It is a business and is free to host what it wants. However, it is also part of Google, whose mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and of course to not "be evil" in the process of doing so. On the same blog, YouTube declares its dedication to free speech very eloquently.

One of the greatest things that can give a region a sense of identity is the presence of a regional cuisine. In addition to identity it brings in tourists, so every region probably really wishes it had one.

In a bizarre twist of life imitating art that may be too "meta" for your brain, Constantin Films, the producer of the war movie "Downfall" has caused the takedown of my video which was put up to criticise their excessive use of takedowns.

Update: YouTube makes an official statement and I respond.

A brief history:

Starting a few years ago, people started taking a clip from Downfall where Hitler goes on a rampage, and adding fake English subtitles to produce parodies on various subjects. Some were very funny and hundreds of different ones were made. Some were even made about how many parodies there were. The German studio, Constantin, did some DCMA takedowns on many of these videos.

So I made, with considerable effort, my own video, which depicted Hitler as a producer at Constantin Films. He hears about all the videos and orders DMCA takdowns. His lawyers (generals) have to explain why you can't just do that, and he gets angry. I have a blog post about the video, including a description of all the work I had to do to make sure my base video was obtained legally.

Later, when the video showed up on the EFF web site, Apple decided to block an RSS reader from the iPhone app store because it pointed to the video and Hitler says a bad word that shocked the Apple reviewers.

Not to spoil things too much, but the video also makes reference to an alternate way you can get something pulled off YouTube. Studios are able to submit audio and video clips to YouTube which are "fingerprinted." YouTube then checks all uploaded videos to see if they match the audio or video of some allegedly copyrighted work. When they match, YouTube removes the video. That's what I have Hitler decide to do instead of more DMCA takedowns, and lo, Constantin actually ordered this, and most, though not all of the Downfall parodies are now gone from YouTube. Including mine.

Now I am sure people will debate the extent to which some of the parodies count as "fair use" under the law. But in my view, my video is about as good an example of a parody fair use as you're going to see. It uses the clip to criticise the very producers of the clip and the takedown process. The fair use exemption to copyright infringement claims was created, in large part, to assure that copyright holders didn't use copyright law to censor free speech. If you want to criticise content or a content creator -- an important free speech right -- often the best way to do that will make use of the content in question. But the lawmakers knew you would rarely get permission to use copyrighted works to make fun of them, and wanted to make sure critical views were not stifled.

I've been predicting a great deal of innovation in cars with the arrival of robocars and other automatic driving technologies. But there's a lot of other computerization and new electronics that will be making its way into cars, and to make that happen, we need to make the car into a platform for innovation, rather than something bought as a walled garden from the car vendor.

In the old days, it was fairly common to get a car without a radio, and to buy the radio of your choice. This happened even in higher end cars. However, the advantages in sound quality and dash integration from a factory-installed radio started to win out, especially with horizontal market Japanese companies who were both good at cars and good at radios.

For real innovation, you want a platform, where aftermarket companies come in and compete. And you want early adopters to be able to replace what they buy whenever they get the whim. We replace our computers and phones far more frequently than our cars and the radios inside them.

To facilitate this, I think the car's radio and "occupant computer" should be merged, but split into three parts:

1. The speakers and power amplifier, which will probably last the life of the car, and be driven with some standard interface such as 7.1 digital audio over optical fiber.
2. The "guts" which probably live in the trunk or somewhere else not space constrained, and connect to the other parts
3. The "interface" which consists of the dashboard panel and screen, with controls, and any other controls and screens, all wired with a network to the guts.

Ideally the hookup between the interface and the guts is a standardized protocol. I think USB 3.0 can handle it and has the bandwidth to display screens on the dashboard, and on the back of the headrests for rear passenger video. Though if you want to imagine an HDTV for the passengers, its possible that we would add a video protocol (like HDMI) to the USB. But otherwise USB is general enough for everything else that will connect to the guts. USB's main flaw is its master-slave approach, which means the guts needs to be both a master, for control of various things in the car, and a slave, for when you want to plug your laptop into the car and control elements in the car -- and the radio itself.

Of course there should be USB jacks scattered around the car to plug in devices like phones and memory sticks and music players, as well as to power devices up on the dash, down in the armrests, in the trunk, under the hood, at the mirror and right behind the grille.

Finally there need to be some antenna wires. That's harder to standardize but you can be we need antennas for AM/FM/TV, satellite radio, GPS, cellular bands, and various 802.11 protocols including the new 802.11p. In some cases, however, the right solution is just to run USB 3.0 to places an antenna might go, and then have a receiver or tranceiver with integrated antenna which mounts there. A more general solution is best.

This architecture lets us replace things with the newest and latest stuff, and lets us support new radio protocols which appear. It lets us replace the guts if we have to, and replace the interface panels, or customize them readily to particular cars.

I recently stayed at the home of a friend up in Vancouver. She had some electrical wiring problems, and since I know wiring, I helped her with them as well as some computer networking issues. Very kindly she said that made me a houseguest from heaven (as opposed to the houseguests from hell we have all heard about.) I was able to leave her place better than I found it. Well, mostly.

This immediately triggered a business idea in my mind which seems like it would be cool but is, alas, probably illegal. The idea would be a service where people with guestrooms, or even temporarily vacant homes, would provide free room (and board) to qualified tradespeople who want to have a cheap vacation. Electricians, handypeople, plumbers, computer wizards, housepainters, au pairs, gardeners and even housecleaners and organizers, would stay in your house, and leave it having done some reapirs or cleanup. In some cases, like cleanup, pool maintenance and yard sweeping, the people need not be skilled professionals, they could be just about anybody.

Obviously there would need to be a lot of logistics to work out. A reliable reputation system would be needed if you're going to trust your house to such strangers, particularly if trusting the watching of your children. You would need to know both that they are able to do the work and not about to rob you. You would want to know if they will keep the relationship a business one or expect a more friendly experience, like couch surfing.

In addition, the homeowners would need reputations of their own. Because, for a skilled tradesperson, a night of room and board is only worth a modest amount of work. You can't give somebody a room and expect them to work the whole day on your project -- or even much more than an hour. Perhaps if a whole house is given over, with rooms for the person and a whole family, more work could be expected. The homeowner may not be good at estimating the amount of work needed, and come away disappointed when told that the guest spent 2 hours on the problem and decided it was a much bigger problem.

Trading lodging for services is an ancient tradition, particularly on farms. In childcare, the "au pair" concept has institutionalized it and made it legal.

But alas, legality is the rub. The tax man will insist that both parties are making income and want to tax it, as barter is taxable. The local contractor licencing agency will insist that work be done only by locally licenced contractors, to local codes, possibly with permits and inspections. And immigration officials will insist that foreign tourists are illegally working. And there would be the odd civil disputes. An unions might tell members not to take work even from remote members of cousin unions.

The civil disputes could be kept to a minimum by making the jobs short and a good deal for the guests, since for the homeowners, the guest room was typically doing nothing anyway -- thus the success of couch surfing -- and making slightly more food is no big deal. But the other legal risks would probably make it illegal for a company to get in the middle of all this. At least in the company's home country. A company based in some small nation might not be subject to remote laws.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the need for a good robocar driving simulator. Others have been on the track even earlier and are arranging a pair of robotic driving contests in simulator for some upcoming AI conferences.

I love online check-in, and printing your boarding pass at home to avoid doing anything but going to the gate at the airport. Airlines are even starting to do something I asked for many years ago and sending a boarding pass to the cell phone that can be held up to a screen for check-in.

But if they can't do that, I want them to let me to print my boarding pass long before my flight. In particular, to print my return boarding pass when I print my outgoing one. That's because I have a printer at home but often don't have one on the road.

It is no coincidence that two friends of mine have both founded companies recently to build telepresence robots. These are easy to drive remote control robots which have a camera and screen at head height. You can inhabit the robot, and drive it around a flat area and talk to people by videoconferencing. You can join meetings, go visit people or inspect a factory. Companies building these robots, initially at high prices, intend to sell them both to executives who want to remotely tour remote offices and to companies who want to give cheaper remote employees a more physical presence back at HQ.

There are also a few super-cheap telepresence robots, such as the Spykee, which runs Skype video conferencing and can be had for as low as $150. It's not very good, and the camera is very low down, and there's no screen, but it shows just how cheap such a product can get.

"Anybots" QA telepresence robot

When they get down to a price like that, it seems inevitable to me that we will see an emergency services robot on every block, primarily for use by the police. When there is a police, fire or ambulance call to an address, an officer could immediately connect to the robot on that block and drive it to the scene, to be telepresent. The robot would live in a small, powered protective closet either paid for by the city, but more likely just donated by some neighbour on the block who wants the fastest possible emergency response. Called into action, the robot's garage door would open and the robot would drive out, and probably be at the location of the emergency within 60 to 120 seconds, depending on how densely they are placed. In the meantime actual first responders might also be on the way.

What could such a robot do?

Back in 2008 I wrote a controversial article about whether green transit was a myth in the USA. Today I updated the main chart in that article based on new releases of the Department of Energy Transportation Energy Fact Book 2009 edition. The car and SUV numbers have stayed roughly the same (at about 3500 BTUs/passenger-mile for the average car under average passenger load.)

What's new?

In my article two weeks ago about the odds of knowing a cousin I puzzled over the question of how many 3rd cousins a person might have. This is hard to answer, because it depends on figuring out how many successful offspring per generation the various levels of your family (and related families) have. Successful means that they also create a tree of descendants. This number varies a lot among families, it varies a lot among regions and it has varied a great deal over time.

Today an interesting paper (written with the assistance of the EFF) was released. The authors have found evidence that governments are compromising trusted "certificate authorities" by issuing warrants to them, compelling them to create a false certificate for a site whose encrypted traffic they want to snoop on.

Watching and managing children is one of the major occupations of the human race. A true robot babysitter is still some time in the future, and getting robocars to the level that we will trust them as safe to carry children is also somewhat in the future, but it will still happen much sooner.

Today I want to explore the implications of a robocar that is ready to safely carry children of certain age ranges. This may be far away because people are of course highly protective of their children. They might trust a friend to drive a child, even though human driving records are poor, because the driver is putting her life on the line just as much as the child's, while the robot is just programmed to be safe, with no specific self-interest.

A child's robocar can be designed to higher safety standards than an adult's, with airbags in all directions, crumple zones designed for a single occupant in the center and the child in a 5-point seatbelt. As you know, with today's modern safety systems, racecar drivers routinely walk away from crashes at 150mph. Making a car that won't hurt the child in a 40mph crash is certainly doable, though not without expense. A robocar's ability to anticipate an accident might even allow it to swivel the seat around so that the child's back is to the accident, something even better than an airbag.

The big issue is supervision of smaller children. It's hard to say what age ranges of children people might want to send via robocar. In some ways infants are easiest, as you just strap them in and they don't do much. All small children today are strapped in solidly, and younger ones are in a rear facing seat where they don't even see the parent. (This is now recommended as safest up to age 4 but few parents do that.) Children need some supervision, though real problems for a strapped in child are rare. Of course, beyond a certain age, the children will be fully capable of riding with minimal supervision, and by 10-12, no direct supervision (but ability to call upon an adult at any time.)

One of the things that's harder to predict about robocars is what they will mean for how cities are designed and how they evolve. We're notoriously bad at predicting such things, but it is still tempting.

Here's a suggestion that will surely rankle some in the free software/GPL community, but which might be of good benefit to the overall success of such systems.

What I propose is a GPL-like licence under which source code could be published, but which forbids effectively one thing: Work to make it run on proprietary operating systems, in particular Windows and MacOS.

The goal would be to allow the developers of popular programs for Windows, in particular, to release their code and allow the FOSS community to generate free versions which can run on Linux, *BSD and the like. Such companies would do this after deciding that there isn't enough market on those platforms to justify a commercial venture in the area. Rather than, as Richard Stallman would say, "hoarding" their code, they could release it in this fashion. However, they would not fear they were doing much damage to their market on Windows. They would have to accept that they were disclosing their source code to their competitors and customers, and some companies fear that and will never do this. But some would, and in fact some already have, even without extra licence protection.

An alternate step would be to release it specifically so the community and make sure the program runs under WINE, the Windows API platform for Linux and others. Many windows programs already run under WINE, but almost all of them have little quirks and problems. If the programs are really popular, the WINE team patches WINE to deal with them, but it would be much nicer if the real program just got better behaved. In this case, the licence would have some rather unusual terms, in that people would have to produce versions and EXEs that run only under WINE -- they would not run on native Windows. They could do this by inserting calls to check if they are running on WINE and aborting, or they could do something more complex like make use of some specific APIs added to WINE that are not found in Windows. Of course, coders could readily remove these changes and make binaries that run on Windows natively, but coders can also just pirate the raw Windows binaries -- both would be violations of copyright, and the latter is probably easier to do.

Here's a nice graphic showing traffic deaths around the world. Of course, all these numbers are going to drop over the next 10 years thanks to various collision avoidance and accident survival technologies in cars, and eventually, we hope, robocars.

I have some admiration for the PETA prize for vat-grown chicken. A winner of this prize would strongly promote PETA's ethical goals, as well as many environmental goals, for the livestock industry is hugely consumptive of land, as it takes far more grain to feed animals than it takes to feed us, per calorie.

I was recently approached by a programmer named Keith Curtis, formerly at Microsoft and now a FOSS devotee. He wants to develop a driving simulator for testing robocar systems. I think this is a very worthwhile idea -- sort of a "Second Life" for robots. We have a head start -- the world of racecar video games has already done a lot of the legwork to simulate driving, and there are two open source car racing systems.

A good simulator would bring some tremendous benefits to robocar development.

I received some criticism the other day over my own criticism of the use of haplogroups in genealogy -- the finding and tracing of relatives. My language was imprecise so I want to make a correction and explore the issue in a bit more detail.

One of the most basic facts of inheritance is that while most of your DNA is a mishmash of your parents (and all their ancestors before them) two pieces of DNA are passed down almost unchanged. One is the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the mother to all her children. The other is the Y chromosome, which is passed down directly from father to son. Girls don't get one. Most of the mother's X chromosome is passed down unchanged to her sons (but not her daughters) but of course they can't pass it unchanged to anybody.

This allow us to track the ancestry of two lines. The maternal line tracks your mother, her mother, her mother, her mother and so on. The paternal line tracks your father, his father and so on. The paternal line should, in theory, match the surname, but for various reasons it sometimes doesn't. Females don't have a Y, but they can often find out what Y their father had if they can sequence a sample from him, his sons, his brothers and other male relatives who share his surname.

The ability to do this got people very excited. DNA that can be tracked back arbitrarily far in time has become very useful for the study of human migrations and population genetics. The DNA is normally passed down completely but every so often there is a mutation. These mutations, if they don't kill you, are passed down. The various collections of mutations are formed into a tree, and the branches of the tree are known as haplogroups. For both kinds of DNA, there are around a couple of hundred haplogroups commonly identified. Many DNA testing companies will look at your DNA and tell you your MTDNA haplogroup, and if male, your Y haplogroup.