Day: June 19, 2018

I stand in front of a lanky two-legged robot stomping along a treadmill. I watch, all impressed, until the researcher next to me tells me to trip it. The thing looks expensive, so I hesitate. Really, he tells me, it’s OK. And he probably knows better than I do, so I drag my boot along its shin like a good soccer trip.

The robot stammers, yet recovers. And then again, and again. No matter how much I pester it, the thing just keeps stomping. I keep feeling guilty.

Here in the Amber Lab at Caltech, they call this “disturbance testing,” not “assault,” which makes me feel a bit better. There’s a point to it, by the way: These researchers are doing everything they can to not just master robotic walking, but to prepare these machines for life in the real world.

But why robots with legs? What’s wrong with wheels? Nothing, except that truly useful robots will have to be able to tackle everything humans can. “That means we have to have walking robots that go on grass, on gravel, on snow, on ice,” says roboticist Aaron Ames, who runs Amber Lab—that stands for Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics. “So how do we make that extension? How do we get robots to work in these very unstructured unknown environments?”

At its core, the work here is about developing the mathematics of bipedal locomotion. “Mathematically understand walking, and at a fundamental level you’re going to be able to not only walk, but walk efficiently, walk dynamically, and walk in a way that’s human-like in its simplicity and beauty,” says Ames.

The bipedal robots that walk this world are governed by the same basic mathematical functions. The robot that I tried to trip, it’s relatively simple—it’s attached to scaffolding, so it only has to worry about going forwards and backwards, not tipping side to side. What Ames and his team can do is test out some new algorithms here, optimize them, and then port them to a more complex robot. “We’re going to ultimately find that we’re missing something, so we go back to the simpler robot and we iterate,” says Ames.

Take jumping, for instance. Up against a wall in the Amber Lab is a robot that bounces up and down a scaffolding like a piston. “We start simple and we get it to hop,” says Ames. “And then when we understand that we can do things like graduate it to Cassie and make Cassie jump.”

Cassie, if you’re wondering, is a pair of robotic ostrich-looking legs that’ll set you back several hundred thousand dollars. It’s a research platform, so it’s relatively easy for scientists like Ames to fiddle with its code and pull new tricks. Over at the University of Michigan, for instance, they’ve been making Cassie walk through fire and ride a Segway, because why the hell not.

The Amber Lab, though, has figured out how to make Cassie jump. Which is way more difficult than it sounds. “You have to crouch down, you have to compress all those springs, you have to jump off,” says Ames. “You have this air time where you can’t interact with the world at all, and you have to land and then stick that landing.” The result is a robot with some serious velociraptor vibes, even if for our visit Cassie was having trouble sticking the landing. (See video at top.)

So, robots in this lab are jumping and stomping and surviving disturbance testing. Great for the robots—but also great for humans. Because Ames and his team are taking what they’re learning and applying it to a one-of-a-kind robotic prosthesis: Ampro. “All the things we’re shooting for in walking robots, we’re trying to achieve on prosthetics,” says Ames. “So we want efficient walking, efficient for the user as well as the device.”

Ampro’s efficiency comes from its clever interfacing with the user. The battery-powered prosthetic has a motor in the knee and in the ankle, which are paired with springs. It also uses a sensor that detects where the user is in their gait, and reacts accordingly, powering the motors to move the prosthesis in sync with the wearer.

Not only does that make for a more efficient movement, but a more dynamic, natural one as well. “You don’t want to have somebody that might be an amputee only walking around, right,” says Ames. “They should be able to restore more life function, like running, playing soccer, or jumping—all the things we’re working on here.” As they achieve a new behavior on a robot, they then translate that advance over to the prosthetic to improve the mobility of the user.

Developing biped robots isn’t just about developing biped robots, at least not in this lab. It’s about taking insights into locomotion and applying them to robotic mobility and human-robotic mobility. So what begins as a simple trip or a bounce or a leap, ends up as an algorithm that spreads across the robotic spectrum.

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I stand in front of a lanky two-legged robot stomping along a treadmill. I watch, all impressed, until the researcher next to me tells me to trip it. The thing looks expensive, so I hesitate. Really, he tells me, it’s OK. And he probably knows better than I do, so I drag my boot along its shin like a good soccer trip.

The robot stammers, yet recovers. And then again, and again. No matter how much I pester it, the thing just keeps stomping. I keep feeling guilty.

Here in the Amber Lab at Caltech, they call this “disturbance testing,” not “assault,” which makes me feel a bit better. There’s a point to it, by the way: These researchers are doing everything they can to not just master robotic walking, but to prepare these machines for life in the real world.

But why robots with legs? What’s wrong with wheels? Nothing, except that truly useful robots will have to be able to tackle everything humans can. “That means we have to have walking robots that go on grass, on gravel, on snow, on ice,” says roboticist Aaron Ames, who runs Amber Lab—that stands for Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics. “So how do we make that extension? How do we get robots to work in these very unstructured unknown environments?”

At its core, the work here is about developing the mathematics of bipedal locomotion. “Mathematically understand walking, and at a fundamental level you’re going to be able to not only walk, but walk efficiently, walk dynamically, and walk in a way that’s human-like in its simplicity and beauty,” says Ames.

The bipedal robots that walk this world are governed by the same basic mathematical functions. The robot that I tried to trip, it’s relatively simple—it’s attached to scaffolding, so it only has to worry about going forwards and backwards, not tipping side to side. What Ames and his team can do is test out some new algorithms here, optimize them, and then port them to a more complex robot. “We’re going to ultimately find that we’re missing something, so we go back to the simpler robot and we iterate,” says Ames.

Take jumping, for instance. Up against a wall in the Amber Lab is a robot that bounces up and down a scaffolding like a piston. “We start simple and we get it to hop,” says Ames. “And then when we understand that we can do things like graduate it to Cassie and make Cassie jump.”

Cassie, if you’re wondering, is a pair of robotic ostrich-looking legs that’ll set you back several hundred thousand dollars. It’s a research platform, so it’s relatively easy for scientists like Ames to fiddle with its code and pull new tricks. Over at the University of Michigan, for instance, they’ve been making Cassie walk through fire and ride a Segway, because why the hell not.

The Amber Lab, though, has figured out how to make Cassie jump. Which is way more difficult than it sounds. “You have to crouch down, you have to compress all those springs, you have to jump off,” says Ames. “You have this air time where you can’t interact with the world at all, and you have to land and then stick that landing.” The result is a robot with some serious velociraptor vibes, even if for our visit Cassie was having trouble sticking the landing. (See video at top.)

So, robots in this lab are jumping and stomping and surviving disturbance testing. Great for the robots—but also great for humans. Because Ames and his team are taking what they’re learning and applying it to a one-of-a-kind robotic prosthesis: Ampro. “All the things we’re shooting for in walking robots, we’re trying to achieve on prosthetics,” says Ames. “So we want efficient walking, efficient for the user as well as the device.”

Ampro’s efficiency comes from its clever interfacing with the user. The battery-powered prosthetic has a motor in the knee and in the ankle, which are paired with springs. It also uses a sensor that detects where the user is in their gait, and reacts accordingly, powering the motors to move the prosthesis in sync with the wearer.

Not only does that make for a more efficient movement, but a more dynamic, natural one as well. “You don’t want to have somebody that might be an amputee only walking around, right,” says Ames. “They should be able to restore more life function, like running, playing soccer, or jumping—all the things we’re working on here.” As they achieve a new behavior on a robot, they then translate that advance over to the prosthetic to improve the mobility of the user.

Developing biped robots isn’t just about developing biped robots, at least not in this lab. It’s about taking insights into locomotion and applying them to robotic mobility and human-robotic mobility. So what begins as a simple trip or a bounce or a leap, ends up as an algorithm that spreads across the robotic spectrum.

More Great WIRED Stories

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 when she was 19 years old. At its height, the company reached a valuation of over $9 billion on the strength of its promise that it had revolutionized the blood-testing industry. Friday, an unraveling that began in October 2015 with a series of Wall Street Journal articles accelerated, as Holmes and her colleague Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on multiple counts of fraud. Holmes has also stepped down as CEO.

The indictment, which comprises 11 counts, alleges that Theranos misled both investors—one of whom sent Theranos nearly $100 million in a single wire transfer October 31, 2014—and doctors and patients with its promises of a blood test that delivered quick results with a single finger-prick, rather than the more demanding requirements of conventional methods.

“Holmes and Balwani devised a scheme to defraud doctors and patients, through advertisements and marketing materials, through explicit and implicit claims concerning Theranos’s ability to provide accurate, fast, reliable, and cheap blood tests and test results, and through omissions concerning the limits of and problems with Theranos’s technologies,” the indictment reads.

This is not the first legal trouble Theranos has found itself in. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit in March. Holmes and the company quickly settled those charges, though. Holmes paid a $500,000 fine, returned 18.9 million Theranos shares, and was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for the next decade.

These latest charges may not be so easily brushed aside. Both Holmes and Balwani, the company’s former president, reportedly face a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted, as well as additional fines. The Department of Justice has also framed the case as a fight for the heart and soul of Silicon Valley.

“This district, led by Silicon Valley, is at the center of modern technological innovation and entrepreneurial spirit; capital investment makes that possible,” said FBI agent John F. Bennett, who led the investigation. “This office, along with our other law enforcement partners in the Bay Area, will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who do not play by the rules that make Silicon Valley work.”

The indictment itself also serves as a sort of CliffsNotes companion to the work of WSJ reporter John Carreyrou, who has spent the last several years reporting on Theranos, along the way unearthing its many alleged misdeeds. It traces Theranos’s pitch to investors and the medical community that it could get results in hours instead of days, as well as the fact that the proprietary device central to those claims “had accuracy and reliability issues, was slower than some competing devices, and could not compete with larger, conventional machines in high-throughput, or the simultaneous testing of blood from many patients.” To make up for those shortcomings, Theranos instead used the same commercial devices it had decried as obsolete to complete its testing.

Holmes has been held up as the ultimate symbol of Silicon Valley’s “fake it til you make it” culture, and for good reason. But the reason the Theranos saga has resonated so deeply, and that Holmes and Balwani face such serious charges now, is that the scandal also transcends the typical tech hype cycle. Theranos wasn’t promising a better juicer, or a shift in the human resources paradigm. It had a direct effect on medical diagnoses: The indictment alleges that Holmes and Balwani knowingly passed along test results that were inaccurate and unreliable. You can’t move fast and break things when those things are human lives.

In that sense, look at the Theranos indictment not as an opportunity to avenge the spirit of Silicon Valley, but to expose it. Let whatever reckoning Holmes and Balwani receive serve as an object lesson in irresponsible growth.

Until then? In a brief press release Friday, the company said that Holmes will stay on as the chair of the Theranos board.

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With summer upon us, you’re no doubt tending your garden. Which hopefully means you’re composting too.

Using food waste to enrich your soil benefits the earth in a number of ways, including reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and decreasing methane emissions in landfills. And while it’s difficult to recycle things like cans and plastics yourself, composting is something you can do at home pretty easily. Collect food scraps, add some water, stir the mix to provide oxygen, let it all sit long enough to decompose, and voila: Your plants have never been happier.

But not everyone has space for keeping a compost heap, and not everyone’s got a green thumb. Some cities have mandated composting services that collect food scraps from residents and do all the dirty work at a central facility. But until composting is mandated everywhere, you might have to get creative and team up with neighbors to make and share compost.

That’s something the team behind ShareWaste wants to facilitate. Launched in 2016, the app uses a digital map to connect individuals with food scraps to nearby neighbors who have a compost system like a heap or a bin. Users accepting compost scraps can mark their compost site on the map for other users to find. Nearly 6,000 users are currently signed up for ShareWaste across the globe.

To become a user, ShareWaste asks for an email address and a first name. Next, you can add your compost station to the map. Specify if you’d like scraps for garden compost or for a chicken run (many chicken owners use the birds to help process food and yard waste), and whether your operation is for an individual household or a larger community. On the map, sites are represented by three different icons: The chicken icon means a site that uses scraps to feed animals; the flower icon stands for a larger community garden compost; and the most common icon looks like your average wooden compost bin, representing home-run composts.

Clicking an icon shows you a bit more information about that specific site, like the first name of its user, what kind of scraps it takes, and its location. To protect user privacy, the exact address of the host is hidden, so users must message hosts through the app to arrange meeting times and drop-offs.

Compost World

Whether or not you’re dealing with compost, browsing the map is pretty cool. It gives you a little insight into grassroots waste management infrastructure, and tech trends across the globe. In the United States, I counted over 100 compost sites, mostly planted on the East Coast. Some of them are lone dots, but most are clumped together around cities. In Texas, there’s one in Dallas and five others clumped in neighboring towns less than 40 miles away. There aren’t any in New York City, and only one in San Francisco—cities with municipal composting programs in place. (The user behind that San Francisco Bay area site is named Doug. He hasn’t had much luck on ShareWaste, but he does have half a million worms and is currently experimenting with rabbit droppings.)

Head south to Latin America and you’ll see a mere two sites; one in Ecuador and one in Costa Rica, two countries known for their environmental conservation policies. In Africa, you can count four. But scroll over to the UK or the Eastern coast of Australia, and you’ll find heaps of heaps.

Dirt Down Under

ShareWaste was started after founders Eliska Bramborova and Tomas Brambora relocated from Prague to Sydney. They didn’t know anyone, and it’s never easy to meet your neighbors in a new city. Unless, that is, you start bringing them your food scraps.

With a growing pile of scraps, the couple took to a community Facebook page to see if they could find any takers. Within half an hour, they had found a place to bring their waste. Better yet, they got to know their neighbors.

Now they have three compost hosts. One of them, an American guy, occasionally gives them homemade kimchi when they drop off their scraps. In return, they bring him homemade jam. “You know,” says Bramborova, “there’s like, a little economy growing.”

The meetups can be educational too. When users drop off their scraps, they see first-hand the ways a person can compost from home. After enough visits, they might want to start their own garden or their own compost site. And since chickens are frequently the recipients of collected food scraps, people get to learn about keeping those too.

“It’s sustainability,” Bramborova says, “from the people’s side. Connecting communities and encouraging them to take steps (toward) a more sustainable home.”

Speaking of sustainability, the couple is searching for ways to keep their app alive. Managing the online community—not to mention a baby—takes all of their spare time. But Bramborova is optimistic they’ll find a business partner to ease the weight of running ShareWaste. Hopefully, it’s one who shares their vision of turning compost into community, or as Bramborova says, “waste into treasure.”

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