He initially thought the parts were garbage.
Artist-in-residence Daniel Pillis stumbled over a pile of old robot parts tucked in a basement hallway at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. He considered taking them.
“I grew up in an environment where robotics were commonplace,” Mr. Pillis said, noting he spent much of his life assembling and disassembling parts at his father’s auto repair shop in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Besides, CMU had a sort of free-for-all policy. The nature of the university’s “open lab” system meant anything left out was fair game.
“Robots don’t have the same vocabulary [as] people,” Mr. Pillis said. “Often times, they’re taken apart and scavenged for parts. A robot is not always a fixed idea.”
Daniel Pillis is a graduate student and artist-in-residence at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and he is leading the effort to create a robot museum that would house prototypes and serve as a sort of history museum for a relatively new industry. (Lake Fong/Post-Gazette)
Naturally, students borrowed from prototypes that would one day be considered historical artifacts.
That was the fate of the first walking robot to support human weight — Ivan Sutherland’s “Trojan Cockroach,” the former pile of robot parts in the CMU hallway that day.
Mr. Pillis decided a robot museum was in order.
Right now, it’s a hodge-podge of parts — an idea more than a collection. There’s a decentralized assemblage of display cases in the otherwise bland hallways of the Robotics Institute in Oakland; a collection of robots at the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville; and some retired pieces in a warehouse facility in West Mifflin.
That, and an archive of robots in Mr. Pillis’s office in the basement of CMU’s Newell Simon Hall — which not only includes a tiny dog robot, old computer monitors and other gizmos, but also a blow-up palm tree to remind him that everything is moving from the natural to the artificial.
Daniel Pillis created the video above as part of his Trojan Cockroach exhibition in fall 2015. It includes a screen capture from an interactive Oculus-based video game made using diagrams from Ivan’s robot and diagrams of other related walking machines. The user controls the cockroach and can knock into and knock over other robots while touring the landscape. (Video by Daniel Pillis)
The Trojan Cockroach
Long before Mr. Pillis would stumble upon the remains of the Trojan Cockroach, Ivan Sutherland was a student at Carnegie Tech in the 1950s. He went on to create the first human-computer interface at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sketchpad was the first program to use graphical icons and visuals to communicate with electronics. Picture a computer screen with only code — no photos, cursor, tabs, windows — and that’s a world without graphical user interfaces.
That program earned Mr. Sutherland the title, “Father of Computer Graphics,” but in the 1980s he returned to Carnegie Mellon University to build another name for himself, as the Father of Walking Machines.
With a group of graduate students, Mr. Sutherland assembled the cockroach. It was about eight feet long and a gas-powered engine controlled its legs. To keep upright, the robot had to keep three of its six limbs on the ground at all times.
Pieces of the Trojan Cockroach on display at CMU’s Posner Center. (Image courtesy of Daniel Pillis)
By January 1983, it was on the cover of Scientific American.
Mr. Sutherland was Mr. Pillis’s adviser for an exhibition he built on the history and influence of the Trojan Cockroach in fall 2015.
“This field is built by people who are still alive. They don’t have notorious cult-like followings because the field is so new,” Mr. Pillis said.
Mr. Sutherland influenced Marc Raibert, who created the Leg Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon in 1980 before moving it to MIT. In 1992, he founded Boston Dynamics, the robotics company responsible for some creepy, but impressive, dog and humanoid robots.
Boston Dynamics built its most recent dog robot, SpotMini, after learning lessons while developing previous prototypes, including BigDog and Spot. But the company also built LittleDog, which is held at CMU.
“Some of these robots here in the collection are from that company ... because this is a small field, everything is really connected,” Mr. Pillis said, gesturing toward a black case in his office. Inside, there’s an early prototype of one of Boston Robotics’s projects called “LittleDog.”
The research model, “LittleDog,” transported materials, autonomously, in difficult terrain. It was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2005 to improve locomotion algorithms in walking robots.
Chris Atkeson, a professor and researcher at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute — and a self-described hoarder — shares an office with Mr. Pillis. The two are bonded over a shared desire to preserve robotics history.
Mr. Atkeson sometimes receives robots from Boston Dynamics for his own research, and LittleDog is one such specimen.
Just like Ivan Sutherland’s Trojan Cockroach, LittleDog is at risk of being pried apart and forgotten.
“Out of the trash”
It’s easy to miss, but six links down on Chris Atkeson’s staff page, there’s a quick line: “We are trying to found a robot museum.”
There, Mr. Atkeson has compiled what he calls “horror stories.”
Chris Atkeson, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. (Image courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)
Phrases like “cannibalized and destroyed” and “dumpstered during a purge” populate the page. Mr. Atkeson has dedicated a spot on the website for robot museum donations, hoping to raise money toward the goal of ending such madness.
For now, he’s storing some of his robots in his Oakland garage. “You know the people who have their houses filled?” he said with a laugh. “I have robots that date back to the 1980s.”
Mr. Atkeson estimates the would-be CMU robotics museum has collected at least 10 large vehicles, about 100 “tiny robot men,” and more prototypes.
“People donate them, but we grab some out of the trash,” he said.
In the early 2010s, Mr. Atkeson began thinking concretely about a robotics museum. He’s not naive to the reality that a physical museum would be immensely expensive to start.
Foundations, individuals, and wealthy benefactors are possible methods for funding, he said, but the researchers “haven’t really put the hammer down” on raising capital yet.
Instead, Mr. Atkeson and Mr. Pillis are focusing on creating a virtual museum — something that could allow anyone to look at a scanned copy of a robot and eventually take it apart and put it back together in a three-dimensional learning environment.
They hope to get something together by next summer, but for now, there’s a Facebook group.
“Before my time”
There are celebrities hidden inside the walls of the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville.
Wrapped in royal blue and black, emblazened with a huge General Motors trademark, Boss is probably the most immediately recognizable heavyweight.
Boss, an autonomous 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe which won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, at the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville. (Pam Panchak/Post-Gazette)
In 2007, the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe beat 11 other finalists during the DARPA Urban Challenge race at the former George Air Force Base in California.
“I would argue that a lot of things you have going on in Pittsburgh, especially self-driving cars, is because of CMU,” Mr. Atkeson said.
Boss has a lot of expensive parts, like a light detection and ranging (lidar) sensor. It’s not unreasonable to think researchers might borrow them.
Mr. Atkeson said Herman Herman, director of the National Robotics Engineering Center, is on board with the robot museum initaitive to preserve specimens like Boss. He may be too busy to dedicate much time to that effort for now. Despite efforts to reach Mr. Herman, he was unavailable for comment.
Another robot held inside NREC’s facilities, Crusher, is a six-wheeled autonomous ground combat vehicle. It was completed in 2006 after a previous $5.5 million DARPA project commissioned CMU to build a Humvee-sized combat vehicle in 2002 that could intelligently avoid obstacles and rollover.
A view of a warehouse in West Mifflin used by the National Robotics Engineering Center to store robots. (Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette)
That project led to Spinner, Crusher’s older sister. As her namesake suggests, the greenish robot could flip over obstacles to avoid rolling over. She’s held in a nondescript warehouse in West Mifflin.
A second Crusher robot sits across from an autonomous boat; a project that looks like a forklift; what appears to be a robotic golf cart; Spinner, and the earliest prototype for Crusher, which is nameless.
Bob Bittner, senior robotics test engineer at NREC, knew what most of the robots in the warehouse were used for, but it wasn’t uncommon to miss a name or who had worked on a project. “That was before my time,” he said, similar to what Mr. Pillis had heard from other researchers at the Robotics Institute.
Mr. Pillis thinks of the robot museum as not only an archive to save pieces of history, but as a way to appreciate the machines as art.
In a 2016 report, the Association of Science-Technology Centers — a global organization providing support to science centers, museums and related institutions — reported that 181 science centers and museums had total attendance of over 67 million visits in their most recent fiscal year. Sixty-seven percent of respondents noted an increase in attendance from the prior year.
Mr. Pillis’s target audience is not your casual visitor, though. He expects to gear the museum toward adults, with a focus on education and active research.
In other words, it’s not meant to be like the Robot Hall of Fame at the Carnegie Science Center that celebrates creations such as Roomba and R2-D2.
“You don’t want to fund a museum on the basis of hoping school kids will show up,” Mr. Atkeson said.
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Even inside the West Mifflin site, any of the robots in retirement could be pulled back out for reuse, or be ripped apart for a new project.
The warehouse, which feels a bit like an abandoned Home Depot store, has dozens of robots and spare parts lined up on bright orange shelves. They’re wrapped tightly in plastic and meticulously labelled for anyone who cares to find them.
“That’s the point of this museum,” said Mr. Pillis, “to get these robots out of here.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
First Published: November 27, 2017, 11:30 a.m.
