Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Yesterday we had a meeting using some videoconferencing. In a situation I find fairly common, the setup was a meeting room with many people, and then a small number of people calling in remotely. In spite of this being a fairly common situation, I have had trouble finding conferencing systems that do this particular task very well. I have not been looking in the high-priced end but I believe the more modestly priced tools should be able to focus on this and make it work. Yesterday we used Oovoo, one of the few multi-part conference systems to support PC and Mac, with some good but many bad results.

The common answer, namely a speakerphone on the meeting room table and a conference bridge system, is pretty unsatisfactory, though the technology is stable enough that it is easy to get going. The remote people are never really part of the meeting. It's harder for them to engage in random banter, and the call fidelity is usually low and never better than PSTN phone quality. They usually have trouble hearing some of the people in the meeting room, though fancier systems with remote microphones help a bit with that.

The audio level

The next step up is a higher quality audio call. For this Skype is an excellent and free solution. The additional audio quality offers a closer sense of being in the room, and better hearing in both directions. It comes with a downside in that tools like Skype often pick up ambient noise in the room (mostly with remote callers) including clacking of keyboards, random background noises and bleeps and bloops of software using the speakers of the computer. While Skype has very good echo cancellation for those who wish to use it in speakerphone mode, I still strongly recommend the use of headsets by those calling in remotely, and even the judicious use of muting. There's a lot more Skype and others could do in this department, but a headset is a real winner, and they are cheap.

Most of these notes also apply to video calling which of course includes audio.

Here's an idea that seems a bit wild and scary at first, but it's doable today and has broad benefits: Small aircraft that don't have landing gear, but instead land and take off from robotic "can't miss" platforms pulled by cables on short airfields.

UPDATE: Some updated ideas and a link to a funded research project looking at similar ideas.

For every small aircraft purchaser, a big decision is whether to get retractable landing gear. They are very expensive, and create a risk of failure, but your plane will fly a lot faster and be more fuel efficient if you get them. What if we could leave the landing gear on the ground?

Imagine a wheeled platform on the runway with robotic control and a variety of systems to perfectly track an approaching aircraft. Pulled by cables, it can accelerate at several "g"s forward and back and left and right. As the aircraft approaches it tracks it and the cockpit display indicates positive lock. If the plane veers left, it veers left. If the plane speeds up it speeds up. Pretty much no matter what the pilot or winds do (other than missing the runway entirely) the plane can't miss landing on it. It's spring loaded so even if the landing is a bit hard the shock is cushioned. Done right, it's just like having fancy shock absorbing landing gear.

This story from the Register about a test at the Stanford VAIL Lab reports an interesting result. They created a fake robocar, with a human driver hidden in the back. The test subjects then were told they could push the autopilot button and use the car. And they did, immediately picking up their newspapers to read as they would in a taxi (which is what they really were in.)

Just back from some time on the road, which always prompts me to think of ways to improve travel.

First, and most simply: Every hotel room comes with a small foldable stand on which to put your suitcase. The problem is they all come with exactly one of these. In some rooms there is space on the tables or dresser for another bag, but often there is not. Doing solo business travel I have just one bag, but all couples, and many solo wanderers have more than one, and so you end up putting bags on the floor. It's quite annoying, since these stands can hardly be very expensive -- folding cloth and metal chairs can be had for $10 in most stores. I've only tried once or twice to ask housekeeping for another, and been surprised to learn they don't keep spares. Frankly, I think it would be cheaper to just put 2 in every room than waste staff time delivering extras, but either would work. And the hotel often knows if a room is booked for 2 rather than one in advance. If you have a bellman take up your bags, not only does the bellman see how many bags you have but it's a sure thing you have several. Every bell station should have some extra racks and throw what is needed on the luggage cart.

Next, I think it would be interesting to see car rental companies develop cars just for road trips. They are the largest buyers of cars (and often owned by car companies) so custom cars are not out of the question. SUVs and some minivans contain many of the features of a road trip car, but they are often 3 times as expensive when reserved in advance, and 1.5x to 2x more expensive in gasoline usage. What features might a road trip car have?

There's been a tremendous amount written about the Google-Verizon joint proposal for network neutrality regulation. Our commentary at the EFF offers some legal analysis of the good and bad in this proposal. A lot of commentary has put a big focus on the exemption for wireless networks, since many feel wireless is the real "where it's gonna be," if not the "where it's at" for the internet.

You may recall that earlier I wrote about support for the principles of a neutral network, but fear of FCC regulation and decided that the real issue here is monopoly regulation, not network regulation. My feelings remain the same. In wireless we don't have the broadband duopoly, but it is a space with huge barriers to entry, the biggest one being the need to purchase a monopoly on spectrum from the government. I don't believe anybody should get a monopoly on spectrum (either at auction or as a gift) and each spectrum auction is another monopoly bound to hurt the free network. Most defenders of the exemption for wireless think it's obvious. Bandwidth in wireless is much more limited, so you need to manage it a lot more. Today, that's arguably true. I have certainly been on wireless networks that were saturated, and I would like on those networks to have the big heavy users discouraged so that I can get better service.

As I said, on those networks. Those networks were designed, inherently, with older more expensive technology. But we know that each year technology gets cheaper, and wireless technology is getting cheaper really fast, with spectrum monopolies being the main barrier to innovation. We would be fools to design and regulate our networks based on the assumptions of the year 2000 or even on the rules of 2010. We need to plan a regime for what we expect in 2015, and one which adapts and changes as wireless technology improves and gets cheaper. Planning for linear improvement is sure to be an error, even if nobody can tell you exactly what will be for sale in 2015. I just know it won't be only marginally better or cheaper than what we have now.

The reality is, there is tons of wireless bandwidth -- in fact, it's effectively limitless. Last week I got to have dinner with Marty Cooper, who built the first mobile phone, and he has noticed that the total bandwidth we put into the ether has been on an exponential doubling curve for some time, with no signs of stopping. We were in violent agreement that the FCC's policies are way out of date and really should not exist. (You'll notice that he's holding a Droid X while I have the replica Dyna-Tac. He found it refreshing to not be the one holding the Dyna-Tac.)

A number of people have been hiring "virtual" assistants in lower-wage countries to do all the tasks in their life that don't require a personal presence. Such assistants are found starting at a few bucks an hour. I have not done it myself, since for some reason most of the things I feel I could pass on to such an assistant are things that involve some personal presence. (Though I suppose I could just ship off all the papers I need scanned and filed every few weeks to get that out of my life, but I want to have a scanner here too.)

Anyway, last weekend I was talking to an acquaintance about his use of such services. He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date. (Perhaps he also does a quick vet before arranging a date to be sure the assistant has chosen well, but I did not confirm that.)

Everybody knows about the Jet Blue attendant who flew off the handle when he got hit in the head by a bag and had fights with passengers over stored carry-ons. And we know airlines are starting to charge higher fees for checked bags (and even carry-ons) which netted them over $700 million last year. This pushes more people to want to use carry-on bags, which we already wanted to save time, and that means more waits at security and more waits getting on and off flights.

I admit to being a heavy user of carry-on bags. For one thing I usually have lots of camera equipment with me which is too fragile to check unless I have bulky foam cases. Which they then might lose, and which means getting to the airport around 20 to 30 minutes earlier and leaving it 15 minutes later with several more bags. (And perversely, paying more on some airlines.)

The system is getting stretched. I've often thought about one useful solution, which would be standardized carry-on bag racks with rails. The standard sized bags would quickly slick in and click-lock in place. No doors even (except for aesthetics) and no fussing with overhead bags, or rearranging. Perhaps some small unstructured place on top or between for coats and purses and laptop bags but mostly they would go under the seat, or in the seat pocket. (Currently they are not permitted in the seat pockets but these could be strengthened and given a closure so the computer can't fly out in a crash.)

Add to this a system of official gate-check racks. These racks would be there at the gate or in the jetway. If need be they would be mounted in a special elevator or forklift so that they can be quickly and reasonably gently inserted and removed in the cargo hold. These racks would include some rails for standardized bags (especially on puddle-jumper planes which can't have as many overhead rails) and some amorphous sections with strong cargo netting. They would have shock absorbers to reduce shocks when they are put on the plane or taken out. You would place your items in these racks yourself -- in parallel with other passengers, in a wide space where doing so is not blocking others -- and the goal would be that you could put semi-fragile items, including things like cameras and laptops into the racks with full confidence. To help with this, we could have a camera on the wing which feeds the seatback screens so that passengers could watch this module as it is loaded and unloaded. This would do a lot to ensure that it is treated with care in a way that checked luggage often is not.

Moraine Lake, in Banff National Park, is one of the world's most beautiful mountain scenes. I've returned to Banff, Moraine Lake and Lake Louise many times, and in June, I took my new robotic panorama mount to take some very high resolution photos of it and other scenes.

Looking at new electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, we see that to keep costs down, cars with a range of 100 miles are on offer. For certain city cars, particularly in 2-car families, this should be just fine. In my particular situation, being just under 50 miles from San Francisco, this won't work. It's much too close to the edge, and trips there would require a full charge, and visits to other stops during the trip or finding parking with charging. Other people are resisting the electrics for lesser reasons, since if you ever do exceed the range it's probably an 8 hour wait.

An alternative is a serial hybrid like the Chevy Volt. This has 40 miles range but a gasoline generator to provide the rest of the range and no "range anxiety." Good, but more expensive and harder to maintain because electric cars are much simpler than gasoline cars.

Here's an alternative: The electric car vendor should cut a deal with car rental services like ZipCar and Hertz. If you're ever on a round trip where there is range anxiety, tell the car. It will use its computer and internal data connection to locate a suitable rental location that is along your route and has a car for you. It will make all appropriate reservations. Upon arrival, your electric car would transmit a signal to the rental car so that it flashes its lights to guide you and unlocks its doors for you. (The hourly car rental companies all have systems already where a transmitter unlocks the car for you.)

In many cases you would then pause, pull the rental out of its spot and put your electric in that spot. With more advanced robocar technologies, the rental would actually pull out of its spot for you. Zipcar has reserved spots for its vehicles and normally it makes no sense for the renter to have just pulled up in a car and need the spot, but it should work just fine. At Hertz or similar companies another open spot may be available.

Then off you go in your gasoline car. To make things as easy as possible, the negotiated contract should include refill of gasoline at a fair market price rather than the insane inflated price that car rental houses charge. Later come back and swap again.

I got a chance to see my 5th eclipse on July 11 -- well sort of. In spite of many tools at our disposal, including a small cruise ship devoted to the eclipse, we saw only about 30 seconds of the possible 4 minutes due to clouds. But I still have a gallery of pictures.

Today marks the start of a remarkable robocar trek from Italy to China. The team from the Vislab International Autonomous Challenge start in Italy and will trek all the way to Shanghai in electric autonomous vehicles, crossing borders, handling rough terrain and going over roads for which there are no maps in areas where there is no high-accuracy GPS.

I've had a blogging hiatus of late because I was heavily involved last week with Singularity University a new teaching institution about the future created by Nasa, Google, Autodesk and various others. We've got 80 students, most from outside North America, here for the summer graduate program, and they are quite an interesting group.

I've written a bunch about my desire to be able to connect an untrusted input device to my computer or phone so that we could get hotels and other locations to offer both connections to the HDTVs in the rooms for monitors and a usable keyboard. This would let one travel with small devices like netbooks, tablet computers and smart phones yet still use them for serious typing and UI work while in the hotel or guest area.

I've proposed that the connection from device to the monitor be wireless. This would make it not very good for full screen video but it would be fine for web surfing, email and the like. This would allow us to use the phone as its own mouse, either by having a deliberate mouse style sensor on the back, or using the camera on the back of the phone as a reader of the surface. (A number of interesting experiments have shown this is quite doable if the camera can focus close and can get an LED to light up the surface.) This provides a mouse which is more inherently trustable, and buttons on the phone (or on its touchscreen) can be the mouse buttons. This doesn't work for tablets and netbooks -- for them you must bring your own mini-mouse or use the device as a touchpad. I am still a fan of the "trackpoint" nubbins and they can also make very small but usable mice.

The keyboard issue is still tough. While it would seem a wired connection is more secure, not all devices will be capable of such a connection, while almost all will do bluetooth. Wired USB connections can pretend to be all sorts of devices, including CD-Roms with autorun CDs in them. However, I propose the creation of a new bluetooth HID profile for untrusted keyboards.

When connecting to an untrusted keyboard, the system would need to identify any privileged or dangerous operations. If such operations (like software downloads, destructive commands etc.) come from the keyboard, the system would insist on confirmation from the main device's touchscreen or keyboard. So while you would be able to type on the keyboard to fill text boxes or write documents and emails, other things would be better done with the mouse or they would require a confirmation on the screen. Turns out this is how many people use computers these days anyway. We command line people would feel a bit burdened but could create shells that are good at spotting commands that might need confirmation.

Last week, on my trip to Berlin, I managed to drop my passport. I don't know where -- it might have been in the bathroom of Brussels airport trying to change clothes in a tiny room after a long red-eye, or it might have been when Brussels Air made me gate check a bag requiring a big rearrangement of items, or somewhere else. But two days later, arriving at a Pension in Berlin I discovered it was missing, and a lot of calling around revealed nobody had turned it in.

In today's document hungry world this can be a major calamity. I actually have a pretty pleasant story to report, though there were indeed lots of hassles. But it turned out I had prepared for this moment in a number of ways, and you may want to do the same.

The upshot was that I applied for a passport on Wednesday, got it on Thursday, flew on Friday and again on Monday and got my permanent passport that same Monday -- remarkable efficiency for a ministry with a reputation for long bureaucracy.

After concluding it was lost, I called the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. Once you declare the passport lost, it is immediately canceled, even if you find it again, so you want to be sure that it's gone. The Embassy was just a couple of U-bahn stops away, so I ventured there. I keep all my documents in my computer, and the security guy was shocked I had brought it. He put all that gear in a locker, and even confiscated my phone -- more on that later.

Since I'm on the road (Washington DC right now, then Berlin on Monday for a few days and then Toronto for the weekend of the 11th) I will lament on the problem I have noted before in travel power. We have to carry so many chargers. I have also found it's a pain to take them all out and put them back in again.

The lastest Facebook flap has caused me to write more about privacy of late, and that will continue has we head into the June 15 conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy where I will be speaking on privacy implications of robots.

Social networks want nice easy user interfaces, and complex privacy panels are hard to negotiate by users who don't want to spend the time learning all the nuances of a system. People usually end up using the defaults.

I don't often write about robots that don't go on roads, but last night I stopped by Willow Garage, the robot startup created by my old friend Scott Hassan. Scott is investing in building open robotics platforms, and giving much of it out free to the world, because he thinks progress in robotics has been far too slow.

As many expected would happen, Mark Zuckerberg did an op-ed column with a mild about face on Facebook's privacy changes. Coming soon, you will be able to opt out of having your basic information defined as "public" and exposed to outside web sites. Facebook has a long pattern of introducing a new feature with major privacy issues, being surprised by a storm of protest, and then offering a fix which helps somewhat, but often leaves things more exposed than they were before.

For a long time, the standard "solution" to privacy exposure problems has been to allow users to "opt out" and keep their data more private. Companies like to offer it, because the reality is that most people have never been exposed to a bad privacy invasion, and don't bother to opt out. Privacy advocates ask for it because compared to the alternative -- information exposure with no way around it -- it seems like a win. The companies get what they want and keep the privacy crowd from getting too upset.

Sometimes privacy advocates will say that disclosure should be "opt in" -- that systems should keep information private by default, and only let it out with the explicit approval of the user. Companies resist that for the same reason they like opt-out. Most people are lazy and stick with the defaults. They fear if they make something opt-in, they might as well not make it, unless they can make it so important that everybody will opt in. As indeed is the case with their service as a whole.

Neither option seems to work. If there were some way to have an actual negotiation between the users and a service, something better in the middle would be found. But we have no way to make that negotiation happen. Even if companies were willing to have negotiation of their "I Agree" click contracts, there is no way they would have the time to do it.

I've been interested in videoconferencing for some time, both what it works well at, and what it doesn't do well. Of late, many have believed that quality makes a big difference, and HD systems, such as very expensive ones from Cisco, have been selling on that notion.

A couple of years ago Skype added what they call HQ calling -- 640 x 480 at up to 30fps. That's the resolution of standard broadcast TV, though due to heavy compression it never looks quite that good. But it is good and is well worth it, especially at Skype's price: free, though you are well advised to get a higher end webcam, which they initially insisted on.

So there was some excitement about the new round of 720p HD webcams that are coming out this year, with support for them in Skype, though only on the Windows version. This new generation of cams has video compression hardware in the webcam. Real time compression of 1280x720 video requires a lot of CPU, so this is a very good idea. In theory almost any PC can send HD from such a webcam with minimal CPU usage. Even the "HQ" 640x480 line video requires a fair bit of CPU, and initially Skype insisted on a dual core system if you wanted to send it. Receiving 720p takes far less CPU, but still enough that Skype refuses to do it on slower computers, such as a 1.6ghz Atom netbook. Such netbooks are able to play stored 720p videos, but Skype is judging them as unsuitable for playing this. On the other hand, modern video chips (Such as all Nvidia 8xxx and above) contain hardware for decoding H.264 video and can play this form of video readily, but Skype does not support that.

The other problem is bandwidth. 720p takes a lot of it, especially when it must be generated in real time. Skype says that you need 1.2 megabits for HD, and in fact you are much better off if you have 2 or more. On a LAN, it will use about 2.5 megabits. Unfortunately, most DSL customers don't have a megabit of upstream and can't get it. In the 90s, ISPs and telcos decided that most people would download far more than they uploaded, and designed DSL to have limited upload in order to get more download. The latest cable systems using DOCSIS 3 are also asymmetric but offer as much as 10 megabits if you pay for it, and 2 megabits upstream to the base customers. HD video calling may push more people into cable as their ISP.

Last week, I attended a talk by Marc Raibert the former MIT Professor who founded Boston Dynamics, the makers of the BigDog 4-legged walking robot. If you haven't seen the various videos of BigDog you should watch them immediately, as this is some of the most interesting work in robotics today.

Walking pack robots like BigDog have a number of obvious applications, but at present they are rather inefficient. BigDog is powered by a a 2 stroke compressor that drives hydraulics. That works well because the legs don't need engines but can exert a lot of force. However, its efficiency is in the range of 2 gallons per mile, though this is just a prototype level. It is more efficient on flat terrain and pavement, but of course wheels are vastly more efficient there. As efficient as animals are, wheeled vehicles are better if you don't make them heavy as tanks and SUVs.

BigDog walks autonomously but today is steered by a human, or in newer versions, can follow a human walking down a trail, walking where she walked. In the future they want to make an autonomous delivery robot that can be told to take supplies to troops in the field, or carry home a wounded soldier.

I wondered if BigDog isn't trying too hard to be a mule, carrying all the weight up high. This makes it harder for it to do its job. If it could just tow a sledge (perhaps a container with a round teflon bottom with some low profile or retractable wheels) it might be able to haul more weight. Particularly because it could pay out line while negotiating something particularly tricky and then once stable again, reel in the line. This would not work if you had to go through boulders that might catch the trailer but for many forms of terrain it would be fine. Indeed, Boston Dynamics wants to see if this can work. On the other hand, they did not accept my suggestion that they put red dye in the hydraulic fluid so that it spurts red blood if damaged or shot.

The hydraulic design of BigDog made me wonder about applications to robocars. In particular, it seems as though it will be possible to build a light robocar that has legs folded up under the chassis. When the robocar got to the edge of the road, it could put down the legs and be able to climb stairs, go over curbs, and even go down dirt paths and rough terrain. At least a lightweight single person robocar or deliverbot might do this.