Robots With Their Heads in the Clouds

The five elements of cloud robotics

Robots haven’t yet lived up to their potential, but they’re about to benefit enormously from the Cloud. In this talk I’ll describe how a new generation of robots can use wireless networking, big data, machine learning, open-source, and the Internet of Things to improve how they assist us in tasks from driving to housekeeping to surgery.

The roots of this trend go back to the early 1990s, when the World Wide Web was first introduced. I was a young professor at the University of Southern California directing my grad students in a robotics research lab. One afternoon they came to my office and showed me something that blew my mind. On my desktop computer, they launched Mosaic, the first web browser. We explored some of the first web sites, including one where anyone could view a live camera pointed at a coffee pot in a college student lounge. The camera was rigged up by Cambridge University grad students to check when there was a fresh pot available; what you might call “disruptive caffeination.”

That night, my students and I stayed up late in the lab brainstorming about how we could take that idea further. Instead of passively watching things with webcams, could we use the Web to let remote visitors actively move and change the environment in our lab using our robot?

Rather than having the robot do something boring like stacking blocks, what if it could tend a garden filled with living plants? We took an industrial robot arm and fitted it with a digital camera, an irrigation system, and a pneumatic nozzle to pick up seeds. We installed it at the center of a custom circular aluminum planter three meters across and filled it a half-meter deep with potting soil and some starter plants. We designed a graphical web interface that anyone could access to view, water, and plant seeds in the garden by moving the robot.

The Telegarden. (materials: Robot, Garden, Internet.) 1995–2004, Ars Electronica Museum, Linz Austria. Co-directors: Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, Project Team: George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley Ars, Electronica team: Erich Berger, Gerold Hofstadler.

The Telegarden went online in the summer of 1995. Word got around, and within weeks, thousands of people were visiting this community garden. Many came back regularly to water their plants. There was a chat room where people would post requests saying they were going on vacation and asking if someone could water their plants. Thousands of seedlings began to sprout, and tbe Telegarden quickly became overgrown. It turned into a study of the Tragedy of the Commons.

We were surprised; we’d been concerned that gardening might be the last thing people would want to do online (this was ten years before Farmville ;). After a year we were invited to install the Telegarden in a museum in Austria, where it remained online, 24 hours a day, for nine years.

To our knowledge, more people operated that robot than any robot in history.

The Telegarden was the first active device on the web, MIT Press published two books about it, and soon many other devices and systems were connected to the web.