This is a collaborative website where visitors arrive by invitation and work together to field the proper website that will occupy this domain name and several associated with it.
If a robot can replace an individual human function, a synergistic team of robots may be best to replace a human team function.
This robotics initiative evolved from conversations with Karan Kamdar, who recently earned a master's degree through the Arts, Computation, Engineering (ACE) Program in the field of cooperating robots from UCI's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, and Peter Shikli, who graduated with an engineering degree from UCLA back in 1972 and spent a few years with robotics and artificial intelligence before becoming the CEO of Bizware Online Applications, Inc. Karan and Peter discussed the possibility of demonstrating concepts of cooperating robots via a robotic chess game using giant chess pieces from MegaChess, Bizware's subsidiary. Although that did not end up as Karan's final master's thesis project, he and Peter decided to pursue it now.
Whereas the literature is full of robots doing amazing things, robots have so far operated as single entities, replacing a single human when the work is dangerous, tedious, or more expensive. More than one robot, cooperating to accomplish this has so far not been done to our knowledge, at least not to where such robotic cooperation was the focus of the technology.
Such cooperation, which in many ways may seem innate to humans, is actually a complex interaction of parallel processing, communication, arbitration, consensus building, and resource allocation. Technology to apply such concepts to autonomous robots is in its infancy, even less the derivative subjects of robotic sociology and management.
Our first step was to build a robotic chess set using resin chess pieces with a 2-ft tall king, with the possibility that we may upgrade to fiberglass chess pieces with a 6-ft tall king in the future. Besides their size, the key difference is that each of these chess pieces has its own independent processor calculating the next game move. Karan developed a robotic synergy language to support a communication and arbitration system that decides on the best game move in the majority of cases where the chess pieces differ in their move recommendations.
In July, we reached the milestone of a succesful test game of an actual human vs. robots chess game in a laboratory setting.
We are currently planning what we expect will be a rather newsworthy proof-of-concept game where the robotic chess pieces will take on a group of humans in an actual chess game. Make no mistake, these robots will be autonomous from human control and autonomous from each other. This will not be a computer-controlled chess game (a la Boris, Deep Blue, etc). This will be a team of robots, working within the structured boundaries of chess game rules to try to achieve their collective objective. They will make their moves and advise the humans to make theirs. Play will be on a giant chess board with 2-ft wide squares instrumented to sense the movement of the humans.
To make life interesting, the humans facing them will be operating by the same rules, by a similar need to cooperate to make their move. They will not be controlled by a chess master in a chair overlooking the game. They will have to communicate, arbitrate, and come up with the human team's move before their clock runs out.
The humans may be college students, members of a chess club, models controled by individual chess masters across the internet (communicating and twittering as needed). The humans will be wearing hats and/or tunics to represent each chess piece. We expect some surprises as the humans attempt synergy and cooperation.
With the humans vs. robots chess game behind us, we intend to leverage that into a testbed suitable for experiments involving robotic synergy, and possibly as a testbed for comparing that to human synergy.
We plan to develop this website and a few like it to serve what we hope will be a community of engineers focused on synergistic robotics. This may include a portal storing a knowledge base and a commercial website promoting hardware, software, and services to empower synergistic robotics.
We expect growth in this area as individual robots reach their potential. A team of Roomba robots, for example, could determine among themselves the most effective way to vacuum a large facility based on real-time individual performance feedback and what they each learn about their environment. Likewise, a cooperating team of robots may be more effective and faster searching an entire airport for a bomb. We have many other examples in mind, including for military applications.
Following are some of the specific decisions facing us as we implement the plans above. These are the forks in the road where we could use input from our associates and those interested in the success of our initiative:
- Website Name - We need to decide what to call this
website. RoboTeam X is just one of the names available. We have the following
domain names also at our disposal:
- C3robots.com - Leveraging the military's fascination with command, control and communication
- ChessRobots.com - Referring to the first technology demonstration, the robots vs. humans chess game
- ComRobots.com - Short for communicating robots
- CooperatingRobots.com
- RoboSynergy.com
- RoboTeamX.com - Media friendly terminology
- Synerbots.com - Short for synergistic robots
- Game Location - We have yet to select the location of
the humans vs. robots chess game. This can be a shopping mall or TV studio if
we want to leverage public exposure, but we are leaning toward a forum
addressing the robotocs community instead. We are therefore thinking more of a
technology center such as a university, technology museum, the corporate
offices of a leader in robotics, or the conference room of a government agency
setting the pace in robotics.
- Collaborators - We are unsure which membership or trade
organizations within robotics should participate in this humans vs. robots
chess game, but we would like a prominent one to do so. We would provide
exposure and they would provide relevance, as well as guidance to maximize the
benefit of this to the robotics community.