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Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End
mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."
This is impressive bit of tech. Robotic vision has historically been a tough field.
Anyone knowledgeable enough on the subject to speculate on the implications or interesting uses of this technology?
September 26, 2008
That's impressive, but are my retinas really the limiting factor preventing me from balancing a pencil on its end? I'd think my coordination and reaction time may also play a role.
... that balancing such an object requires the use of several fancy algorithms:
This is proof that, just exactly as I asserted, all you need is relatively simple feedback as long as it's fast enough.
My friends and I used to do that back in middle school to pass the time. Not build artificial retinas; balance pencils on our fingers (on eraser or tip).
Just to get one thing straight: A robot balancing a pencil is not a breakthrough. Similar tasks are standard textbook material, often implemented using fuzzy logic.
But the way they have done it may or may not be cool. Hard to tell.
The human (me) turns the pencil on it's side, and balances it in the middle.
Call me back when you have a robot that's smart enough to actually solve the problem, and I'll be impressed.
Unless I'm mistaken, from looking at the picture the camera's "eyes" are placed orthogonally, instead of side by side like a human's. That's an advantage, since we know the machine then has real 3D position info, as opposed to a human's stereoscopic 3D vision. Try it yourself: when you balance a pencil, do you fail more often sideways or towards and away from yourself?
This is an impressive bit of controls engineering, but let's not compare apples to oranges: the machine is designed for this task, and the human is not. It's in a way impressive that humans are as good as we are at this task despite not having been constructed to do it.
...And the Japanese are doing wonders with robots walking and being creepy just-a-smidge-off-lifelike.
Now, someone figure out cyberbrains and thermoptic camo and we'll be set.
Similar: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
It uses high speed visual servoing to dribble a ping-pong ball and to toss and catch a cell phone.
Ironcially, I am listening to President Obama's speech as I write this, and his advisors (and speech) seem clueless about the changing nature of economics given robotics and other automation, AI, better design, and voluntary social networks (even as I think he means well and it is good for the US that he his helping create some jobs by increasing some exports):
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/01/obama-visits-ge-wind-turbine-plant/
Pres. Obama can talk all he wants about "winning a global competition", but the average human worker anywhere is not going to win a competition with advanced robots... Humans need to learn to "cooperate", not "compete".
Economic solutions (my comments):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
From a comment I posted yesterday in relation to an (purported) demo of a cold fusion device:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
In brief, a combination of robotics (and other automation, all made possible by cheaper computing), better design (whether from cold fusion devices or thin-film solar panels), and voluntary social networks (especially with volunteers cooperating through the internet on free and open source digital public works), are decreasing the value of most paid human labor by the law of supply and demand. Cheaper energy will only accelerate this trend, since often you can substitute energy for labor and thought.
At the same time, demand for goods and services is limited for a variety of reasons. These reasons include some classical ones, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (with that concentration aided by automation, intellectual monopolies, and the rich getting richer and buying up more and more resources like land for rent seeking). The reasons also including some heterodox alternative economics ones, like people moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as they get a lot of "stuff" and move on to other pursuits than materialism (including spiritual aspirations, self-actualization, and social connections in communities), and as people embrace a growing environmental consciousness of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to protect the biosphere.
In general, mainstream economists ignore these issues or have very unexamined beliefs about them. Imaginative innovation, like economist Julian Simon talks about in "The Ultimate Resource", makes possible many wonderful potentialities if we think them through. Please don't let your inventiveness or cold fusion get blamed for any issues caused by unimaginative scarcity-based economic models held onto with almost a religious fervor by so many (see "The Market as God" by theologian Harvey Cox in the Atlantic). Mainstream economist have long used such scarcity-based models to apologize for an overly hierarchical social order that we probably did not even need in the past -- search on "The Mythology of Wealth". Still, some degree of centralization can be a good thing; see Manuel De Landa on "meshworks and hierarchies", and how they keep turning into each other and how all real systems are mixtures of both. So, we need to think and experiment regarding ways to allow our 21st century society to function in a healthy way given all the 21st century technology people like yourself are busy creating in all sorts of areas.
A New York Times article called: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Don't they already do this sort of thing using broomsticks and artificial neural networks? Its basically the same thing isn't it?
Can those fancy algorithms make a pencil disappear?
#DeleteChrome
It never seems to be able to damp down the movement. It should be able to reduce amplitude to less then a centimetre or so.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you think it's an easy task, try it!
Balance a pencil on my retina? I'd rather let the robots win.
a) He should lot the pencil DROP after killing the power. b) Why is he holding the pencil from a top push down position ?
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
This is silly. It is very easy to do.
Although I realize it's a long way, hopefully this can and will develop into artificial retinas for people. There are many eye diseases affecting the retina and leading to blindness. Giving people vision back would be really impressive.
I have seen this demo in person and chatted at length with its creator. It uses a custom sensor chip that does some analog temporal filtering and thresholding of light intensity at each pixel, sending events when the threshold is crossed. The intent of the authors seems to be to mimic the human visual system in silicon, even if it makes no engineering sense whatsoever. The demo was extremely sensitive to fluorescent lighting; the author had to run out and buy an incandescent desk lamp to get it to work at all. The event-based image representation makes it incompatible with everything that has been learned in computer vision over the last decade.
... already does that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
We need to move beyond the irony of militarizing the tools of abundance from scarcity fears:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is has nothing to do with AI. It's hardware. Balancing the pencil is basic control theory. You can do it with a regular video camera.
but the eyes are at right angles to each other and so far apart :)
I tried balancing a pencil on my eyeball, and now I need a new retina. Perhaps these guys can sell me one...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
a) He should lot the pencil DROP after killing the power.
b) Why is he holding the pencil from a top push down position ?
Yeah, that kind of bugged me - especially when he removed the pencil at the end. It almost looked like the pencil point was embedded in a bit of rubber.
I realize that wouldn't be enough to completely keep the pencil upright on its own during the test, but it would certainly make it significantly easier for the algorithm to be successful.
#DeleteChrome
>If you think it's an easy task, try it!
Well, we did this in AI/Dynamic Systems class more than a decade ago. It was heavy stuff then, not sure nowadays..
Stop playing with that pencil. It's all fun and games until someone loses a silicon retina.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I wonder if the constants are optimally tuned?
At the end of the video, when the tech removes the pencil, it looks like he's pulling it up out of some sort of indent. If that "indent" was a rubber aperture, this might not be as impressive as it first looked. Was the pencil being "balanced" on end or with the first 1/4 inch inserted into something?
I would love for this to be as cool as it looks, so someone please explain where I'm making a mistake.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, that kind of bugged me - especially when he removed the pencil at the end. It almost looked like the pencil point was embedded in a bit of rubber.
Yeah, they didn't fool you with those fake moon landing vids, they're not gonna fool you this time either, right? :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
It's cool that this is using artificial retinas instead of cameras, but I still don't think it is a good show of what the retinas can do. When we think of any kind of artificial biological part, it is really only good if it is used in a way that it would be if it were a real biological part. In this case we have two artificial retinas, but the way in which they are positioned relative to each other is not representative of what you would have in a real biological scenario. My eyes are 2 inches apart from each other and they see in stereo. These two retinas also see in stereo, but they have 90 degrees of separation and that would make it much easier to balance a pencil. I would very much like to see this same exercise done if the retinas were two inches apart from each other - just like my eyes. After all, what is really the point of all of this if it doesn't demonstrate how effective the artificial parts are at replacing real biological parts?
It's MIT, that gang of losers are going to try to justify their bloated tuitions and lack of real-world experience with, "But I graduated from MIT!"
MIT alumni sure can't teach for shit(my professor was one of them, he explained what should've been a 2-step physics problem in 10 steps, congrats brainiac, ever hear of the square root of two?), and the ones who were accepted at age 18 or 19 aren't going to be of any use to the world right off the bat, unless they continue to swim in their own little ponds of acadeima's comfort).
Now to perfect drinking beer from all our girlfriends' vaginas !!
Wait, like filling it up with beer or using it like a coozie? The former is obvious. Just use a straw. But be sure to only do it with pasteurized American swill because a good microbrew is much more likely to give her a yeast infection. YMMV.
I was thinking the same thing myself. The video starts with a hand on the pencil, so you don't get to see the pencil actually placed. At the end, it's like the platform is pulled to the corner while the pencil is removed. It should be fairly easy to snag the pencil while the device is operating, but instead it's a drawn out drag to the corner. And what's the left hand doing off camera at the very end of the video?
Real, fake? I can't say. The way the video is shown makes me suspect it's fake.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Analog tilt sensors and a few op amps might do the job better than silicon retinas and computers. But I take it the idea wasn't to get the job done but rather to explore the technology since there isn't that much of a real world demand for pencil balancers.
Check out this youtube video for video of Conradt's embedded balancer, which uses only NXP microcontrollers rather than USB + PC.
Also the technical paper about this system is here.
The page out the silicon retina technology is down right now but will eventually be here.
From the article... "The response time needed goes down as the pole gets bigger" Not so. In fact the reverse is true... If the pole gets bigger, the response time needed goes up. I can balance a broom handle quite easily because the response time needed is so large I have plenty of time to respond, but I can't balance a pencil (and even less so a needle) because I am required to respond in such a tiny amount of time to keep it upright. The response time needed goes down as the pole gets *smaller*.
No hoax. There is a rubber cup (what we call the hand) that the tip sits in, but it only serves to let the balancer move the tip laterally. Without the balancer being active, the pencil falls right over. In fact we noticed recently that the performance dropped off (couldn't balance as long as before) and cleaning off all the nice accumulated graphene from the cup helps it hold onto the pencil better. Slow motion recordings with another retina showed that at least once when the pencil fell down it was because noise in the retina input or some other source of noise called for a very rapid movement of the cup that was so quick that the pencil just bounced up out of the cup.
Although I agree with you about MIT, this is not MIT. These teams are Swiss, and based in Zürich.
And as one guy explains below, the pencil really does fall right off when the rig is stopped. There is rubber, shaped like a cup, so lateral movements can be imparted. But try to balance a pencil in a cup, and you'll see it is just as hard as on your finger.
Thanks for your insightful reply. I'll have to read "The Gripping Hand" to see if I agree; I had not known there was a sequel: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand
"A crucial plot element of the book is the idiom "on the gripping hand", a three-armed variation of the idiom "On one hand X, on the other hand Y." The saying is native to the alien Moties, who have three arms, one of which is stronger but possesses less finesse. The idiom has also gained some use among fans of the book.[1]"
Actually, as an analogy to the blockaded of the Moties, are there intellectual blockades by some aspects of an elite trying to keep regular humans from expanding intellectually or economically? :-) Related:
"Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies"
http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/162
Nanotech may have been slow to develop for other reasons (see Amara's Law or Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns), but nanotech-related science is reshaping our economy, and 3D printing of plastic and other materials (like with MakerBot or RepRap) is shaping up to be the next big thing. So, as with Amara's law, it is easy to get the pace of an exponential trend wrong from a linear perspective. Also, there may be specific issues (thermal limitations, statistical issues) on why Drexler's original nanotech stuff may never play out as he outlined (biological cells may be as good as it gets for reliable mechanisms on that nanotech level, even if nanotech structures like blended materials or diamanoid may still be useful). From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
I'd agree that conflicts may well exist in the future over what are essentially issues of identity and aesthetics (or even religious/spiritual issues). I liked your Dyson sphere example. And, to an extent, those issues are with us even now, some people might prefer there was only a billion (or less) people on the Earth, and some others even might want the solar system left the way it is (no more disfiguring footprints on the Moon, etc.). The Negative Population Growth people come to mind, for example, and that NPG meme has grown all too common in the US environmental movement IMHO:
http://www.npg.org/
I'm more in the Jerry Pournelle/Julian Simon "Survival with Style" camp for now myself:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q2/view570.html
"Survival with Style said that Carter and the gloomsters were wrong, we were not headed for a nearly inevitable collapse, we would not have an enormous die-off of humanity, there would not be a billion people dead of starvation, and the US didn't need to join the poor nations: the best thing the US could do for the world would be to get rich. And there were ways to do it. Despair is not only a sin, it's a blunder. Back in those days I was one of the few who went to college campuses to say things like that. I was opposed by the faculty; most of the students wanted to hear that they were not headed for lives of poverty and gloom. But I sure felt alone for a while there."
However, with that said, because I believe were are entering an age of abundance, I think we can "survive with style" while still, for the most part, being respectful of the natural environment (especially regarding habitat loss and pollution) as well as working towards things like a basic income for all of humanity. My very belief in potential abundance suggest
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. It's been said: "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
On that theme of consciousness raising and helping work towards a new vision for a 21st century society, here is something I wrote in 2009:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/eff0aa5033106bb5
These are the ones I consider important and listed there and in a followup:
* limited demand invalidates classical macroeconomics relating to employment;
* the basic income guarantee and its history, as one of multiple ways to address the exponential increase in technological capacity and job loss;
* the issue of post-scarcity technology wielded to create artificial scarcities;
* the potential of 3D printing if it follows the growth of 2D printing and continues to improve; and
* how our social values may affect the nature of any Technological Singularity, and how the Singularity is a mirror.
* how the cost of computing dropping towards zero makes all prices drop towards zero.
I made a hokey short Youtube video myself, but obviously I'm not great artist/entertainer. :-)
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I put that under CC-BY-ND because my voice is on that (and I did feel comfortable thinking about my voice remixed), but people should feel free to use the text or images or storyline under CC-BY-SA (though I'm sure any experienced artist or scriptwriter would rapidly leave almost all of that behind and make something way better).
Here is another parable I wrote recently, about the USA's future:
"Burdened by Bags of Sand"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
And another item:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd
So, yes, I'd agree, some young entertainers could make a huge difference running with these sorts of ideas and making funny videos, songs, drawings, and so on about them.
Here is a one minute item that I found inspiring and relates to these themes:
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
More stuff like that that gets people thinking about a basic income and robotics might be useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Here are some videos linked there, but they are a bit dry:
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
Here is a video on a gift economy, but again, it could be more exciting:
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
Zeitgeist, profiling the Venus Project in sequels, is another example. But the Venus Project and resource-based planning is just one option (a basic income, a gift economy, and local subsistence with 3D printing and solar panels and organic gardening are others that can all interact with it). So, we could use catch things that are broader. But Zeitgeist was a good start. We need short, funny stuff. Maybe there are even grants for that kind of stuff for the right people?
http://www.casefoundation.org/topics/social-media-for-good/videos
Computer games are another line of approach.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks. Your next video should include a close-up of where the graphene meets the road.
Good work, friend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's MIT, that gang of losers are going to try to justify their bloated tuitions and lack of real-world experience with, "But I graduated from MIT!"
Actually having worked with MIT grads and growing up with some who went to and graduated, I have never known anyone from MIT who fits your description. I have known many individuals who were so intimate with the underpinnings of concepts that what passed as difficult for most smart people passed as trivial for them. But, there are always exceptions.
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
"I suggest you don't approach singularities."
Probably good advice in general. But, for good or bad, a combination of competition, greed, evolution, curiousity, promises about longevity, pleasure traps, capitalistic short-term profit motive, and other things seem to be driving us towards one or more of them.
Which one of those allegedly "killed the cat" again? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_killed_the_cat
Apparently though, according to the above link, the original useage was more "worries, cares, and sorrows killed the cat..."
My guess is that how we come out of any singularity may have something to do with the path we take going into one... Do we go into a singularity having alleviated global sorrows with a basic income, a gift economy, demosratic resource-based palnning, and local self-reliance/subsistence through shared open source advanced technology like RepRap 3D printing, organic gardens with heirloom seeds, and even solar panels/cold fusion, or do we go into a singularity with a world at military and economic war with itself using the tools of abundance as weapons to create artificial scarcity?
"Shared joy is doubled joy, shared sorrow is halved sorrow" from an old proverb.
So, if we are falling into a singularity, at least we can give some thought to whether we should be holding each other's hands rather than holding each other's throats as we fall into it... Related:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Some of these seem like mostly trumped-up plot devices to make stories to appeal to 20th century audiences, but I'd agree others may always be with us as possible conflicts.
* "rare natural resources" -- to the best of our knowledge, nothing is that rare in the universe that we need to support an unimaginable number of living beings in the galaxy and beyond (as in, millions of quadrillions of people and their biospheres). We have stars for power, we have lots of mass orbiting around to build space habitats, and with artifical retinas like in this story, there will be endless robotic labot to turn matter using solar energy into whatever humanity wants. Star Trek invented stuff that could not be replicated like "latinum", but in practice, who really needs it?
* "control of habitable planets (and the power they bring)" -- in the future, few in their right minds in an advanced space faring society would want to live on a planet, given so many ecological/political restrictions, so little energy flux, being so far from happening city habitats, being stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, beign so corwded, being so dirty, being so poor, being so full of strange diseases, being full of uneducated people who coudl not get into space, being so culturally backwards, and so on. See: http://space.mike-combs.com/ I'm not saying some tiny percent of the quadrillions of people (and other sentients/AIs) living in the solar system in advanced space habitats someday might not want to visit Earth on a pilgrimage, in the same way some very few people from the USA may go on a trip for a week or two to Africa to get a feel for where humanity is from and then go back home glad they don't live there, feeling sorry of the inhabitants, and sponsoring villages there. Actually, places in Africa may be way more advanced culturally than the USA in a lot of ways, so this analogy doesn't quite hold. :-) Also, the current woes of Africa have a lot to do with centuries of exploitation by Europeans and US Americans, so again, this analogy might not hold.
* "culture and politics" -- yes, I agree people will continue to have conflicts over these, which boil down to things like issues of status, impressing the opposite sex, aesthetics, and managing mental illness like a desire for "financial obesity".
* "Sometimes one race just hates another, and wants to fight over it" -- there are less reasons for hatred if there is less conflict over resources. I think some of this is just trumped up plot devices, especially given advanced social technology for mediation. One group related to conflict resolution:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
* "The Vulcans and Romulans are in conflict due to their historic dispute" -- yes, essentially, a war over philosophy/religion. I agree this may always be an issue, coming down to aesthetics and identity.
* "the Klingon culture is heavily militaristic and demands war as the only route to honor" -- yes, this may always be an issue, and it connects with trying to impress potential mates, too. See James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear for at least one alternative.
However, while I disputed planets having much value above, I could believe there might be broader conflicts about star systems, in the same way some Europeans committed genocide against the Native Americans to get the land they were living on and from. We could potentially see arguments over what aesthetic philosophy or genetic paradigm controlled a solar system, true, even if the planets themselves might not be of much interest (other than maybe as sources of raw materials).
So, a more believable Star Trek might have cultures fighting over control of a star's Oort cloud material a light year away from the star for use in building space habitats? But, such fights would also
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Please don't respond to any of my posts with racism. I have no tolerance for it.