by Marc Goodman
The UAVs were actually remote-controlled aircraft, perfect model replicas of the navy’s F-4 Phantom fighters, built to precise one-tenth scale, and available on the Internet from drone hobbyist Web sites. The planes were capable of carrying up to a forty-pound payload and could travel at speeds of 160 miles per hour powered by the onboard jet engines. They could be directed remotely by an operator on the ground using a handheld radio transmitter or, as Ferdaus envisioned, flown autonomously along a predetermined flight path using onboard GPS sensors that would crash each UAV precisely into its intended target. The plan had other advantages as well: the robotic aircraft could take off and land almost anywhere, and the small low-flying planes would be nearly impossible to detect on radar. Ferdaus shared his plans with his al-Qaeda affiliates, who offered enthusiastic support and funding for his efforts.
Using a fake name and cover story, Ferdaus ordered three of the model airplanes costing $3,000 each from different online sources. He paid for them with a PayPal account he had created under an alias and had the drones shipped to a storage facility in nearby Framingham that he had rented, paying cash. There Ferdaus began covertly assembling the devices before moving on to the second phase of his project, the acquisition of the explosives. For this goal, his new friends in al-Qaeda proved extremely helpful. They provided him with twenty-five pounds of C-4 explosives, numerous hand grenades, and six fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles, which he hid in his ten-by-ten storage locker.
Ferdaus traveled to Washington, D.C., to carefully scope out his targets, taking photographs and plotting attack points on a map. He decided to launch his drones from East Potomac Park, conveniently situated nearly equidistant from his two targets. First to be hit would be the Pentagon, with two drones approaching from opposite sides of the building, both aimed at the fourth floor. No need for Ferdaus to be on board this flight, though. He had constructed a high-torque robotic servo actuator for his self-guided UAVs, a device that would simultaneously pull the pins on the sixteen hand grenades that he would place on board each remotely controlled aircraft. The robotic assistant on the UAV would be programmed to act moments prior to impact and mechanically pull the pins for maximum effect.
Ferdaus’s plan called for a ground assault in addition to his drone attack that would use two teams of three people armed with AK-47s to shoot innocents as they frantically fled the explosions rocking their building. The next phase of the plot called for another robotic remotely controlled precision-guided miniature jet aircraft laden with C-4 explosives to fly into and destroy the dome of the U.S. Capitol, blowing it to smithereens.
Ferdaus returned to Boston and wrote up an incredibly detailed plan of his mission, which included aircraft specifications, software protocols, hardware configurations, maps, pictures, diagrams, payload limitations, and budget requirements. He provided the document on a USB thumb drive to his al-Qaeda handlers, who expressed great admiration for his proposal. They asked him how he had learned so much about robotics and drones, and he replied, “UAV technology is quite simple. Sure you need to have a certain aptitude, but I’ve been doing this type of stuff since I was a little kid.” All agreed the plot would move forward, and Ferdaus returned to Framingham to check on his cache of weapons and explosives. As he unlocked the storage unit, he was rushed by a bevy of special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who prevented the first-ever terrorist drone attack on U.S. soil.
As it turned out, the fellow Muslim whom Ferdaus had approached at his local mosque for an introduction to al-Qaeda was an upstanding citizen who contacted police upon hearing the request. The “brothers” he introduced to Ferdaus were in fact undercover FBI agents. In July 2012, Ferdaus pleaded guilty to charges of attempted destruction of a federal building with explosives and material support to a foreign terrorist organization and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Though we have seen the military employ drones to great effect around the world, criminals and terrorists are perfectly capable of building and using these devices as well. Multiple inbound UAVs launched from East Potomac Park and traveling at 160 miles per hour under the radar would strike their targets in mere minutes, leaving no time for evacuation or response. As the use of drones and other robotic technologies becomes more commonplace, we can expect them to be leveraged by all members of society, for both good and ill. While 9/11 1.0 was about human beings’ seizing aircraft and flying them into occupied buildings for terrorist effect, 9/11 2.0 makes it possible to disintermediate the humans and use robots in their stead.
We, Robot
In the future, I’m sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them.
RODNEY BROOKS
Throughout the history of film and television, we’ve seen robots presented in a variety of lights. Some were lovable and helpful such as WALL-E, Johnny Number 5 of Short Circuit, and C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars. Other robots were dangerous and out to destroy mankind, such as Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and the T-800s from The Terminator. Thanks to advances in Moore’s law, robots are leaving the silver screen and joining reality. Exponential progress in silicon chips, digital sensors, cloud computing, and high-bandwidth communications means that robots, just like computers and mobile phones before them, will soon become omnipresent in our lives.
Robots are increasingly outfitted with advanced features such as high-definition cameras, touch sensors, and laser range finders, all united and run by computer brains. Robots move through their actuators, electrical motors connected to gears that power and drive their wheels, legs, and arms, just as muscles move human beings. Vast improvements in robotics have been driven in no small part by the smart-phone revolution, because robots depend on many of the same computer chips, batteries, and sensors as does the increasingly powerful mobile phone in your pocket.
Until now, robots have largely been used in manufacturing to handle repetitive tasks that are “dangerous, dirty, or dull”—such as those on an automotive assembly line. Robots today are becoming more sophisticated, endowed with advanced dexterity, senses, and intelligence, allowing them to handle significantly more complex tasks. They can walk, talk, dance, read our facial expressions, and respond to our verbal commands. There are robots that care for the elderly, detonate bombs, drive cars, work on the International Space Station (ISS), and kill terrorists around the world. In the years to come, they will increasingly fight fires, deliver our packages, respond to crimes, perform surgery, assist in disaster recovery, and provide companionship. The number of robotics start-up companies is exploding, and some estimate industrial robots alone could be a $37 billion market by 2018.
Robots are computers, automated systems that can reach beyond the purely two-dimensional digital plane of their ancestors in order to touch, influence, and interact with the corporeal world that surrounds them. Most can be remotely controlled over the Internet and via smart-phone apps, leading to legions of robots joining the Internet of Things. The implications are momentous. As Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has observed, we are living in a period of convergence, a time “where bits from the digital realm are fusing with atoms here in the physical world.”
Robots are entering our three-dimensional space—space that they will share with us. Like all objects connected to the IoT, robots are subject to hacking, though the consequences may be much more far-reaching. Throughout its short history, cyber crime has always been hidden behind computer screens—a two-dimensional problem that might affect your wallet or your bank account. No more. As a result of advances in robotics, cyber crime will finally escape its virtual confines and explode onto our physical space. And we are wholly unprepared for what is coming next.
The Military-Industrial (Robotic) Complex
For decades, industrial robots have toiled side by side with human workers in warehouses and on factory floors, but modern industrial robots are marvels of engineering,
capable of lifting hundreds of pounds and moving objects repeatedly to within 0.006 inch’s accuracy, a feat no human being could match. Initially, these machines were expensive, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and requiring months of highly customized computer programming before they could perform their assigned tasks. Despite the costs, no industry has benefited more from robotics than automobile manufacturers, which accounted for 40 percent of worldwide robotic sales in 2013. Robots make vehicle production faster, safer, cheaper, and more efficient, and all major manufacturers from Ford to BMW use them to automate production. In just one Hyundai factory in Alabama, five hundred robots work tirelessly welding, painting, bolting, and transporting auto parts in order to crank out more than a thousand cars a day. Not to be outdone, Amazon announced in 2014 that it employs ten thousand Kiva Systems robots that it uses to navigate its massive warehouses to fetch individual items and bring them to human employees who package them before turning them over to more robots for shipping. These robots work three shifts a day, 365 days a year, and never take a coffee break.
Industrial robots are growing exponentially cheaper, more efficient, and more user-friendly, and perhaps no other robot exemplifies this trend as much as Baxter, the cute low-cost industrial bot from Rethink Robotics. At $22,000, it is a tenth of the price of its predecessors. More impressive is the fact that it works right out of the box and can be up and running in just an hour, as opposed to the eighteen months it took to integrate the previous generations of industrial robots into a factory operation. Baxter can learn to do simple tasks, such as “pick and place” objects on an assembly line, in just five minutes. It has an adorable face on its head-mounted display screen and two highly dexterous arms, which can move in any direction required to get a task done. Baxter requires no special programming and learns by using its computer vision to watch an employee perform a task, which the bot can repeat ad infinitum. As costs drop even further, these robots will be competitively priced compared with cheap overseas labor, and many hope a rise in domestic robotics use may lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing.
Today robots are showing up everywhere from restaurants to hospitals. In more than 150 medical centers, Aethon’s TUG robots can be summoned by a smart-phone app to autonomously travel throughout the corridors to deliver medicines, patient meals, and laundry, replacing work previously done by orderlies. Other medical bots, such as Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robot, allow surgeons to operate on patients using robotic arms. Using a viewfinder screen and joystick controls, physicians can see a 3-D view inside a patient and manipulate small surgical instruments to carry out procedures ranging from hysterectomies to heart valve repairs. Absent the need to place large human hands inside the patient’s body, robotic surgery can be performed in a minimally invasive fashion, with 80 percent fewer complications and significant reductions in recovery times. Over 500,000 such operations are performed annually worldwide. Using similar technology, a surgeon can remotely operate on a patient over the Internet via tele-surgery, with the first such operation having taken place back in 2001, a case in which a surgeon in New York performed a cholecystectomy across the Atlantic on a women in Strasbourg, France.
Though the gains in industrial and medical robotics have been impressive, the growth of military robotics has been astounding. In 2003, the Pentagon had fewer than 50 UAVs in its arsenal. Today the United States has the greatest number of military bots of any country, “deploying some 11,000 UAVs and 12,000 ground robots around the world.” These machines are well armed and lethal and have killed thousands. In 2011, it was estimated that one in fifty troops in Afghanistan was a robot, and by 2023 there may be ten robots per human soldier in the U.S. military.
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), such as iRobot’s PackBot, routinely help with the detection and disposal of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Foster-Miller’s TALON is a “man-portable robot which operates on small treads” like a miniature tank. It can be outfitted with machine guns, .50-caliber rifles, grenade launchers, and antitank rockets, all while being remotely controlled via joystick. Boston Dynamics’ Sand Flea weighs only eleven pounds but can jump up to thirty feet high, landing on the roof of a building or precisely leaping through an open window, capturing all it sees with its HD camera. The company has also created BigDog, a four-legged robot that can carry up to four hundred pounds of gear and weapons, easily walking over rugged terrain and obediently following its soldier master. Other UGVs like RiSE, a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls, the Cheetah can run at nearly thirty miles per hour (faster than Usain Bolt), BEAR can lift and carry an injured soldier off the battlefield, and a briefcase-sized bot from iRobot can use facial recognition to identify a man in a crowd and follow him.
In the skies, pilotless aircraft, or UAVs, can perform imagery collection and communications interception and launch missiles against their targets. Remote pilots sitting halfway around the world can kill enemies (and sometimes innocents) with the click of a mouse. According to Peter Singer, a noted expert on military robotics, at least fifty-five other countries have military robotics programs. UAVs have become central to the military arsenal, and it is expected that “global spending on drones, military and civilian, could cumulatively reach $89 billion” by 2023. There are large drones, small drones, helicopter drones, handheld drones, and insect drones. Drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper cost about $12 million, one-tenth the price of an F-22 jet, with most of the same capabilities. Military officials note that drones such as the Reaper and the Predator are designed to carry out the full “kill chain” against their high-value targets—“find, fix, track, target, execute and assess.”
The leviathan of the drone fleet is the Global Hawk. With a wingspan of 130 feet and weighing thirty-two thousand pounds, it can stay airborne for nearly two days at an altitude of sixty thousand feet. The sensors on the UAV fleet are equally impressive and include tools such as the ARGUS-IS, the world’s highest-resolution camera, capable of taking 1.8-gigapixel photographs. The ARGUS comes equipped with a “persistent stare” capability equivalent to a hundred Predator drones, allowing it to track all ground movements across an entire medium-sized city. The images are of such high quality that the drones can generate one million terabytes of data daily, the equivalent of five thousand hours of HD footage, which record every single movement on the ground (car, bus, person, dog) and can be played back DVR-style at will.
Importantly, UAVs have long ago left the theater of war and can now be found flying domestic missions over the continental United States surveilling drug traffickers, organized criminals, and illegal border crossers. Traditional military contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin were early entrants into the world of robotics, followed by smaller specialized firms such as Boston Dynamics and iRobot (yes, the same people who make your Roomba vacuum make the IED-disposal PackBot). But now another deeply disruptive player has entered the world of robotics: Google.
The search giant is on a robo-buying binge and purchased or acquired eight separate robotics companies in a six-month period through 2014, including companies that specialize in humanoid walking robots, robotic arms, robotics software, and computer vision. Its largest and most surprising robotics acquisition, however, was the military robotics company Boston Dynamics, the same folks who make BigDog, Cheetah, Sand Flea, RiSE, and PETMAN (a biped humanoid robot that might well be the soldier of the future). Google also bested Facebook’s offer to buy Titan Aerospace, a maker of jet-sized solar-powered drones that can remain aloft for three years without landing. Why are two Web giants battling for air superiority? They claim the drones can be used to provide Internet access to parts of the world that are not yet online. Yet when one of the world’s largest data and artificial intelligence companies enters the robotics realm and becomes capable of launching its own drone armies, important questions must be asked about its intentions and capabilities.
A Robot in Every Home and Office
Your living room i
s the final frontier for robots.
CYNTHIA BREAZEAL, MIT MEDIA LAB
In a seminal article in Scientific American, Bill Gates compared industrial robots to mainframe computers and predicted that miniaturization, common technical standards, and better sensors would bring a robot into every home in the coming years. There are signs that he’s right. We already have domestic robots that clean our floors, water our plants, clean our BBQs, and feed our pets. iRobot has sold over ten million of its Roomba vacuums since its launch, and they are commonly available at the local Walmart. Children are enjoying growing numbers of robotics toys such as Lego’s Mindstorms, WowWee’s Robosapien X, and Sphero’s Robotic Ball. Even the homemaker extraordinaire Martha Stewart has purchased a DJI Phantom quadcopter drone with HD camera, which she enjoys flying around her expansive 153-acre New York estate. The market for consumer and office robots is skyrocketing, growing seven times faster than demand for industrial robots.
Until now, most home robots have been created to carry out a single task such as vacuuming. But in the future, we will have multifunctional bots capable of much more, such as clearing the table after meals, loading the dishwasher, ironing our shirts, and picking up toys after the kids, all easily controlled from the familiar screen of our smart phones. While such dream home assistants have yet to materialize and may be years in coming, progress is being made. An Indiegogo campaign led by MIT’s Dr. Cynthia Breazeal successfully crowdfunded a helpful and intelligent social robot named Jibo that can identify individual members of the household, snap family photographs, read e-mails, tell bedtime stories to the kids, and change its facial expressions to show emotions. Willow Garage’s PR2 can already fold clothes, grab a beer from the fridge, clean up after the dog, bake cookies, and cook a complete breakfast. From Japan to Europe and the United States, there are unprecedented amounts of research-and-development dollars flowing into robotics.
