Will blurring the video feed recorded by a cleaning robot be enough for us to let strangers on the internet operate them remotely in our homes?

Robo room service (Image: Max Aguilera-Hellweg)

IN 2012, researchers at Silicon Valley robotics start-up Willow Garage thought they had the ideal solution for tidying their messy office. They would pay online workers to control humanoid PR2 robots remotely, cleaning up empty mugs and dirty dishes at the end of each day.

Willow Garage’s experiment, however, lasted less than a month. Instead of welcoming their cybernetic cleaners, employees were creeped out. “The robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on the other side,” recalls Maya Cakmak, then an intern at the company. “People got really uncomfortable.”

The robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on the other side. People got uncomfortable


Now an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Cakmak is trying again. By obscuring personal items in the video feed seen by the cleaning robot’s operator, she may have found a way to keep everyone happy.

Domestic robots are set to be a big deal. Industry analysts WinterGreen Research, based in Lexington, Massachusetts, predict that home cleaning robots will become a market worth $2.6 billion by 2020. But Willow Garage found human-controlled robots to be much more effective than the fully automatic vacuuming robots available at the time. And at just $6 an hour through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service, they were also a bargain.

But what is it like for those on the other side of the camera? “Workers on a platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk have very limited rights,” says Niloufar Salehi, who studies digital labour at Stanford University. “They’re not subject to minimum wage, can get their account deactivated at any time or not get paid without any legal ramifications. They’re on their own.” For many, though, the risks will be worth it.

Willow Garage’s team made plans to spin out the technology as a business – connecting domestic robots to “digital immigrant” workers around the world. The creepiness factor put those plans on hold.

Cakmak’s fix, though, makes the idea viable again. This autumn, she deployed a PR2 robot in a private home in Arizona. To address the creepiness, Cakmak used digital filters in the video feed from the robot’s camera to hide certain things in the robot’s field of view from its operator.

To design a filter, she presented a panel of people with images of everyday objects, from the relatively innocuous, such as keys and an unmade bed, to the personal, such as credit cards and pregnancy test kits. The panel rated how comfortable they would be with digitally treated version of those images being shown to online workers.

The most privacy-preserving filter was an algorithm that pixelated parts of an image and added false colours to obscure brands and logos. Cakmak then put her filter to the test. She applied it to the video feed of a PR2 robot and tasked teleoperators to tidy up a table. The operators were then asked whether they could identify objects like political literature or medication.

Users seeing the filtered view tidied the same number of objects as those with untreated video, but were much less likely to recognise the objects they had moved. “It makes everything more abstract,” says Cakmak. “Your house doesn’t seem like your house anymore, it seems like any house.”

The filter also works for autonomous robots with cameras. If images are later accessed, it could be just as intrusive as real-time human snoopers.

Bill Smart at Oregon State University in Corvallis is also looking at telerobotic privacy. Smart has built a system for unskilled remote operators to change bed sheets using a PR2. But rather than blurring the entire image, Smart lets homeowners specify 3D areas to censor, say a bedside table, where operators will simply see a black space. He has also developed physical privacy markers: a mat that automatically erases anything placed on it, and a hat that renders its wearer invisible in the robot’s video feed.

And Savioke, a robotics company headed by Steve Cousins, formerly CEO of Willow Garage, has launched SaviOne, a robotic butler that delivers room service items to hotel guests. “Privacy is an issue,” says Cousins. “SaviOne doesn’t go into people’s private hotel rooms. It stays in the hallway, a public space where you can’t really have an expectation of a lot of privacy.”

When it comes to our homes, though, we have to get privacy right, says Smart. “Otherwise it’s going to be a train wreck.”

Leader: “Will remote-controlled robots clean you out of a job?“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Are you looking at me?”