Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - WALL*E and the Future of Robots in Space

Episode Date: July 7, 2008

WALL*E and the Future of Robots in SpaceLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A space-faring robot named WALL-E and his present-day ancestors, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Pixar and Disney's cute little trash compactor is number one in American movie theaters. But what, if anything, does WALL-E have to say about the future of robotic exploration in space? It's not quite the stretch you may think it is. We'll hear from Caltech physicist and roboticist Wolfgang Fink, along with a word or two from WALL-E's creator, Andrew Stanton. Bill Nye has an explosive new commentary about the first-ever observation of a supernova just getting started.

And we'll check on the night sky with Bruce Betts, who has a pretty cool prize for the winner of this week's space trivia contest. It's a WALL-E video game for the Nintendo Wii. Emily Lochtewall is on vacation. Water on Mercury? Well, at least we can say there is water above Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft team, led by Sean Solomon, announced astounding results from the probe's first flyby

of that hot little world last January. What's surprising is the amount of water in Mercury's atmosphere. Could it be coming from pockets of ice in permanently shaded polar craters? You can catch the full story at planetary.org, where there is also another great status report on the Mars exploration rovers. Is the Planetary Society going to lose the race to put a solar sail in space? Not really, though a so-called nanosail from the Marshall Space Flight Center may soon be launched. Actually, the Society has cooperated with Marshall on this experiment, but the nanosail

will primarily test atmospheric drag. It won't attempt a controlled flight pushed along by the solar wind. Planetary.org has the details. I'll be right back with... Hey, Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. Now, if you are an astrophysicist, let me say you are probably a bit of an odd duck. And by that, I mean, of course, you are involved in the specialized study of remarkable things. And these things are remarkable because you can never hold them in your hand. These are stars, fantastically far away, enormous objects. All you can do as an astrophysicist

is try to figure out how they work. You can theorize. And so for years and years, astrophysicists have been theorizing about what happens to stars when they collapse and they become new gigantic objects, which we call supernova. Oh, get this. In January of this year, for the first time in human history,

people stopped just theorizing about supernovae. We saw one. We used a spacecraft called the SWIFT. It's not an acronym. It doesn't stand for super wide. No, it's named after a bird that can turn really quickly in flight. This spacecraft detected a supernova and within 50 seconds, less than a minute, it was pointed toward it. And we found, we observed a pattern of x-rays that is exactly like the pattern of X-rays predicted by astrophysicists when a star collapses and becomes a supernova. My friends, this is astonishing.

You talk about using technology to learn about the universe. My friends, you are part of something literally huge. And you're part of all of planetary exploration because you're listening to planetary radio. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. Can an animated robot character not designed to explore a space help get young people excited about the final frontier? NASA thinks so. Go to the edge of the galaxy? Your mission

to learn what it takes to become the next great space explorer. You are now free to move about the cabin. To continue your journey and discover the wonders of space, visit www.nasa.gov where inspiration, innovation, discovery, and the future meet. Brought to you by Disney Pixar's WALL-E, in collaboration with NASA.

Have you seen the movie? We don't often provide film reviews, but I can safely say WALL-E is another triumph for Pixar, the company that doesn't seem capable of making a flop. The little tramp of a trash compactor with the big heart has won the hearts of millions of moviegoers. His close personal friend Eve sports technologies that are considerably beyond our capabilities. But WALL-E doesn't seem all that far removed from spirit and opportunity. I recently asked the movie's creator, Andrew Stanton, what he thought But WALL-E doesn't seem all that far removed from Spirit and Opportunity. I recently asked the movie's creator, Andrew Stanton,

what he thought about the partnership between Disney-Pixar and NASA based on his plucky star. It caught him somewhat by surprise. I know. Well, I grew up in the late 60s, 70s. I mean, I took it for granted that you'd be able to watch a man land on the moon like, you know, every once in a while. And it was still, it was, you know, I was a little young, but it was still sexy. The whole idea of space exploration and these big white clean ships and where the future was going to go. And I was promised jetpacks and flying cars like the rest of us. And I still want that, you know? Your lovely art history and credits. Yes.

That show humans and robots working so well together. That's kind of where space exploration is. Oh, really? It's a balanced approach. I mean, did that even occur? It was more from an emotional standpoint we chose that because you've grown to like these characters. And whether they were metal or whether they were skin, you like them all for different levels and different amounts of investment. So it just made sense to make it mutual.

Disney Pixar's Andrew Stanton, director, screenwriter, and one of the stars of WALL-E. This being a Disney effort, you won't be surprised to learn there is a store full of WALL-E products waiting to be bought. And here's where you can see robotic technology trickling down to the toy shop level. John Barton, vice president of Thinkway Toys, put the $190 Ultimate WALL-E through his paces for me. He's got 11 different servo motors inside. He's got proximity sensors, meaning he will understand if somebody's around him. And he'll actually back up and move around.

I just got to turn back on for you. So he activates. Rechargeable, of course. Oh, definitely rechargeable. But no solar cells. No, but he does have, if you see this button down here. Oh, actually I hit the wrong button. But he's got all the sound effects that do this power-up sounding.

Yeah. He's got that in here. Including the Macintosh boot-up, I think. Maybe not. Maybe not. Matter of fact, that's proprietary to Apple, and I can tell you that that will never be in any product outside of an Apple product. We tried.

I bet you did. I bet you did. Probably lucky to have gotten it in the movie, even with Steve Jobs smiling on you. You can't really see this, but you can see the eyes go in and out, just like he does in the show. He's talking.

That's John Barton of Thinkway Toys, creators of all the WALL-E playthings your sons or daughters may already be nagging you about. When we return, we'll visit with Wolfgang Fink, a Caltech scientist who is taking one of the next steps toward making WALL-E a reality and using him to explore Mars and other worlds. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here.

I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into the show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the society's vice president. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe.

Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

We're talking robots this week, and we're about to move from the science fiction of WALL-E, many would say fantasy, to the hard yet promising reality. Dr. Wolfgang Fink is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and associate Mark Tarbell work in the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Lab at Caltech. The Wally animators

visited there and at the Jet Propulsion Lab as they were designing their computer-generated movie star. I recently visited Wolfgang's lab where he showed me a video of one of his three rover prototypes racing around the building. You see the rover running down the hallway, and it was just talking. So we have actually an interface where we can type in texts on our console and transmit it through the Internet to the rover

so it can actually locally talk while we type. And that was when he said, I want to meet Wally. Yes, I want to meet Wally. Yes. Kind of a role model, I guess. Yes, yes. Yeah, Wally. Yes. Kind of a role model, I guess. Yes, yes. Yeah, Wally is definitely the role model. Absolutely.

And it has actually about the same dimensions of Wally. Yeah. So it's about, what, 15 inches wide, you know, 18 inches tall. And you see the range of the rover and also how fast it goes. So it's a pretty good expedited walking speed. It's completely battery operated and operates wirelessly over the internet. So in other words, the commanding post could be somewhere in the world

wherever you have internet access and the rover can be at the other end of the world also having internet access and then you can command it and you can send back images from the rover to your control center. And someday the control might be coming from a very smart system on an airship somewhere over it on Mars or Titan.

That is correct. And that would be, for example, part of a tier-scalable reconnaissance system, as we see behind us, where we try to integrate space-borne assets, for example, orbiters with aerial components such as balloons or airships, if a planetary body sustains a dense enough atmosphere, with the ground. So, in other words, you have a multi-tiered approach, all working together to afford a global perspective, a regional perspective, and a local perspective.

We then sat down under a huge poster that provides a vision of the autonomous robotic future Wolfgang Think foresees on worlds like Mars and Europa, where teams of dedicated robots might someday work at different tiers of capability and placement. Wolfgang, you just gave me the nicest tour here and showed me some of what you guys are up to with this tiered approach to robotic exploration. But I got to go back to where we started with this and what led me to you. And that was Hollywood, of all things, because of WALL-E. You had some involvement with helping the animators to create a cute little robot. Well, I wished I would have had that involvement,

but I wasn't involved particularly with Wall-E, but I'm involved with robotics and Caltech and exploration. But you have a Wall-E series of semi-autonomous robots? That is correct, yes. We have three rovers right now, which are approximately the size of Wall-E and by far not as smart as Wall-E or good-looking as Wall-E. But nevertheless, those are robots which you can control worldwide through the internet.

And the goal is to actually have them command themselves or be commanded by overhead perspectives such as an orbiter or an airship or a balloon. And in the ridiculously short amount of time we have here, we can hardly do this justice, but you have this terrific poster that actually shows an entire new paradigm for robotic exploration that takes place, as you said, at different tiers, working from rovers,

or in the case of someplace like Europa, perhaps a subsurface autonomous submarine, to airships, to orbiters. What gives this so much more potential than our current approach? Yes, the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm you're referring to has the advantage to mimic the geologic approach. In other words, how a geologist would go about exploring a planet or a field site. It affords you a global to regional to local perspective of things through orbiters, airships, and the ground explorers. And current missions so far have been very successful in their own right,

but orbiters have mostly been gathering global information, whereas rovers and landers have been gathering very local information. The missing part was sort of that you had this continuous transition from global to regional to local. And that is something which this paradigm can afford you. Now, we've got orbiters. We have rovers, not real fast, in fact, rather slow, but amazing performance from them. What's missing here is that middle tier, what you call the airborne tier. Yes, that is correct. Now, not every planet can sustain it. Obviously, only planets with a sufficiently dense atmosphere. Mars would barely qualify, but still it would be possible.

But for sure, Titan would be a perfect place to deploy such a balloon or airship. And actually, NASA and ESA are already thinking about deploying a balloon on Titan. Nice thick atmosphere. Nice thick atmosphere. That's what you want. And also since you mentioned that rovers have a fairly limited mobility capability, it takes them quite a while to get from A to B. The idea is that this concept allows you to deploy sensors and miniaturized rovers in the vicinity of where they need to be, where sort of the interesting parts are.

So therefore, the driving requirement is significantly reduced, and they don't need to drive as fast. They just need to find you in their position. And not just miniaturized rovers, very small rovers, but rovers that don't have to be very smart. I mean, where would they be on the scale of comparison with like Spirit and Opportunity? Well, I guess Spirit and Opportunity have quite a bit of smarts on board in terms of avoiding obstacles once they have a command to go from A to B. In terms of – I think in terms of comparison to Spirit and Opportunity, you would not have to need that much smarts as they have. So it could be much less.

However, what they still need, obviously, are all the sensors, because you want to gather data after all. Now, the airships or balloon or overhead perspective would take control over the navigation of these rovers. So the airship is where the smarts are. That's the smarts. But again, even there, the smarts are a result of the overall architecture of this mission.

So the orbiter in conjunction with the airborne tier, as a result of that, as a result of these different overhead perspectives, that's where the smarts basically arises, of these different overhead perspectives, that's where the smarts basically arises, but only in conjunction with a software package, which would do the analysis at these various vantage points. In a sense, the totality here, they're smarter together than they certainly are separately. Think of an anthill. That would be a perfect example to some extent.

Yeah, worker ants don't have to be very smart. Each ant may not be that smart, but they're pretty good when it comes down to getting your sugar somewhere. Well, they have sensors and they can communicate. They can communicate. That is exactly the part. You're absolutely right. As you mentioned before, orbiters have been proven in the field. In reality, landers and rovers have been proven. In the field, in reality, landers and rovers have been proven.

There have been some balloons on the Vega missions on Venus, but they have to still be deployed more often. But the idea is that the software which makes these entities work together and communicate with each other and analyze the science content of an operational area, that's where the work needs to be done. And going back to the poster, you talked about, I mean, for example, these airships, and there are three of them in the picture, but one is not visible. But you can see a cone coming down from it, and you call that? I would call it an attention or authority cone. So that means whatever is within that cone can be controlled from the above airship. Because below, well, it looks like there are at least, what, one, two, I'm looking off in the distance, I shouldn't look in the distance,

one, two, three, four, I don't know how many rovers under control of each airship. That is correct. In fact, the overhead perspective allows you to use what we call a round-robin concurrent commanding scheme, which means you can command whole fleets of robots on the surface through the overhead perspective almost simultaneously, as opposed to trying to figure out where each rover is with respect to each other from a local horizontal perspective. That's done now by the airship. So therefore, commanding of multiple rovers becomes much more simplified.

Because it's got such a great vantage point, and there are no trees in the way, obviously. That's true. We wish we would have some trees, but so far we haven't found any. We'll settle for some primitive bacteria. I'd be perfectly happy, I think. What stands in the way of achieving this? I mean, I guess you're still in the early stages. I mean, you have these three rovers, but they're not autonomous, not yet anyway. That is correct. So there are several packages of software we're developing right now. One is called Agfa, which is the Automated Global Feature Analyzer. That is a software package which would analyze a field site, would analyze the images, and figure out where are anomalous areas or areas of interest.

And we should – before you leave that topic, you were telling me earlier how that's a key departure from earlier versions of how traditional artificial intelligence might have found, ooh, there's a really odd rock or something over there. That is true. Artificial intelligence, for most part, for example, refers to fuzzy logic systems or other similar systems which are rule-based for most parts. You have to have a rule in place to detect something. If, however, you encounter something for which you do not have a rule, you may not be able to pick up on it at all. That's why we departed from this paradigm and went to a complete feature-based approach, which is unbiased from scientist opinion. So in other words, we are not telling the rover to look for carbonate or something else. That can still be done through the AI-based systems. That is fine.

You need that. have created a capability which operates on the sensor data alone to try to determine what is anomalous within that sensor data, which makes a particular object stand out. And that is what we call an anomaly detection. And that is independent from a scientist opinion, which we think is very important. How soon might you be taking one or more of these little rovers out to the Mojave to give them a spin? Definitely within a year. So hopefully by this year. Excellent. Again, I wish we had more time. We're going to have to come back and I would love to make that trip out to the Mojave with you and bring along one of our microphones and see how they do. We'll definitely let you know and invite you to come with us.

Thank you very much, Wolfgang. Thank you very much. Wolfgang Fink is a physicist with the California Institute of Technology, better known to most of us as Caltech, right down the street, in fact, from the Planetary Society headquarters, which is exactly where we're going to head next for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts, but we are going to talk to him via Skype and get the lowdown on the up there,

the night sky in particular, and some other cool stuff, because he's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Things in the sky, we've got, of course, the Mars-Saturn conjunction close in the evening sky over in the west. If you start from lower right to upper left, there's Regulus, and then up to, which is the bright star of Leo, and to its upper left, depending on when you look, will either be Mars or Saturn. Early in July, it's Mars being lower, and then they get closest on July 10th, and then they switch places and Mars is up higher. But they'll be easy to distinguish because Mars has its characteristic reddish-orangish color,

Saturn looking kind of yellowish. And so kind of a pretty multicolor site would be cool in binoculars, certainly cool in the telescope. Later, even at that point, if you look over to the east in the early evening now, Jupiter, brightest star-like object up all night, and Jupiter is right about at opposition. So indeed, it is rising now around sunset and setting around sunrise opposition. So it's on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun. And then in the early pre-dawn sky, in addition to Jupiter, then over in the west, you might get a shot at Mercury. It's pretty low, but Mercury low in the east during the next few days.

And then it vanishes again as it has want to do. Can you see the water on Mercury that we'll talk about here in a week or two? Oh, yeah, definitely. The lakes. The lakes. There are no lakes on Mercury. There are water ice and permanently shadowed craters, which is pretty weird. Anyway, yes, good results coming out of just that first

flyby from Messenger. So that's exciting that they've got two more flybys and a whole orbiting thing. Think of what they'll discover then. Yeah, very, very cool. They may discover your lakes. We'll try and talk to Sean Solomon, the PI on that mission again real soon now. Excellent. On to Random Space Fact! Following up on our Tunguska 100th anniversary, I thought I'd mention the Random Space Fact Neo-Danger Scales. And of course, we have one, which is duck! But scientists have ones that are a little more discerning based upon the cities where the meetings were held, where they were decided upon. So the Torino scale goes from 0 to 10, and you only get integer values. Most everything out there is a 0. When it's first discovered, it might bump up a little.

Basically, if it's a 10, not only are you in serious trouble, but the entire Earth, all species are in serious trouble uh and something lower down it basically combines your impact risk with how big the object is bigger numbers bad but also for the scientists out there there is the palermo scale which usually ranges from low negative numbers to low positive numbers and the positive numbers are the bad ones or at least you better pay attention more because it means they have a higher probability than just some random object of striking Earth. It also includes a time frame, which the other does not. All you probably wanted to know, but there's lots more on the web if you want it, about Neo scales. Yeah, much of it on our web, planetary.org.

On to the trivia contest. We asked you one of those highly scientific trivia questions. Who is the only astronaut or cosmonaut to fly in space whose last name started with U? How'd we do, Matt? We got a huge number of entries. I was really surprised. I didn't think this would generate that many,

but I don't know, maybe the pool is bigger nowadays. So let's jump right into that pool and let you know, Chris Jones. Chris Jones of Lancashire, United Kingdom, said that it was Yuri Usachev, which is absolutely correct. Yay! We had some funny reactions, too. We have, as far as I know, only one listener who enters the contest periodically whose name starts with U, Steve Witte, who was hoping that it was him, but it was not. And then there's Amy in Omaha who says that Yuri has a funny mustache. Well, you know, that's her opinion, of course.

Which ironically also has a U name. That's true. And he did spend an awful lot of time in space, though. 670 days in space, four flights, visited two, count them, two space stations, both Mir and ISS. Very accomplished guy. Wow, that's more than I have. Yeah, yeah, sad to say, me too. Chris Jones, we're going to send you a t-shirt. What do you got for us brand new this week? Brand new this week? Tell me, and we'll make you work a little harder since each question would be simple. We'll combine two.

What was the longest space shuttle flight of a space shuttle that went to space? And what was the shortest space shuttle flight of one that made it to space? Go to planetary.org slash radio and tell us your answers. And hopefully you'll be randomly selected as our winner if you have the right answer. So by way of a hint, was there a space shuttle mission that was longer than this one that you're looking for and did not go to space? Like maybe they just, you know, went to Bermuda? Yes, that was exactly it. No, my obsession with space was to take care of the other end of the spectrum, which was Challenger. Thank you very much for bringing that up.

Well, he said... The Challenger disaster. Obviously, Challenger had several successful flights in space, which would all be eligible for the prize. Well, here you go, then. We've got a real nice prize for you, and it's in line with our sort of kind of theme this week. But first, let me tell you that you'll need to get your entry in to us by 2 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, July 14. 2 p.m. Pacific on Monday, July 14. You ready for this? We have a Wall-E, a Dixie, Dixie, Disney Pixar Wall-E game, video game for you happy Wii owners out there, people who own a Nintendo Wii. And that's what we're going to send you if you get the answer right and are the lucky one chosen by Random.org this week.

So, cool prize. That is a cool prize. Wall-E. Have you seen it now? I have. I have seen it. I've seen it twice. Oh, yes, me too.

Me too, because I saw the press showing and then went again just, what, night before last with my wife, who's not a big fan of robots or animation, but she thought he was very cute. And we had a good time. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about lip bomb. I used

to think it was lip bomb. You know, like, why would you want to blow up someone's lips? It's like something the CIA would try to do to Castro maybe. Get through the beard? Yeah. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Music Music Music Music