With the recent developments that are happening in robotics and artificial intelligence, it’s becoming clear that automation won’t just revolutionize factories. It’s quite likely that these technologies will also disrupt highly skilled, white-collar industries like finance and medicine as well — leading to questions about what to do once the robot takeover happens and massive human job losses ensue — should governments enforce a robot tax? Or roll out some kind of universal basic income?
It’s not clear what will happen, but it’s also possible that there’s a middle way. Rather than outright replacement, humans could be incorporated into the equation, working alongside collaborative robots or operating robots through virtual reality.
Yet these virtual-reality-based, teleoperation systems are often specialized and therefore costly, which has put a bit of a crimp in their development and deployment. But they might be made more feasible by incorporating off-the-shelf commercial solutions, as researchers over at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are proposing with their Homunculus Model system, which employs an Oculus Rift VR set to allow a human to virtually “get inside the head” of a robot and control it. Even more notable is that the system can work over long distances, meaning blue-collar factory workers can potentially telecommute and control their robotic counterparts from home.
New Telerobotics Architecture
As the researchers describe in their paper, their system offers a new architecture for telerobotics that places the user into a “virtual reality control room” (VRCR), which is outfitted with various virtual sensor displays. This gives the user the impression that they are embedded in the robot’s head, seeing what it sees and telling it what to do. The research used a humanoid robot named Baxter, manufactured by Rethink Robotics, in addition to an Oculus Rift VR headset and hand-controllers that link up their movements with the robot’s movements.
“A system like this could eventually help humans supervise robots from a distance,” said CSAIL’s Jeffrey Lipton, the paper’s lead author. “By teleoperating robots from home, blue-collar workers would be able to telecommute and benefit from the IT revolution just as white-collar workers do now.”
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Source: The New Stack