James McLurkin '94, SM '04
2003 Lemelson-MIT Award Winner Continues to Push Forward
James McLurkin '94, SM '04. Photo: Mark Ostow, courtesy of the Lemelson-MIT Program.
After 10 hours of watching more than 100 robots the size of milk cartons navigate their way through an empty building, two things were eminently clear: everyone was exhausted, and the experiment was a tremendous success. The senior lead research scientist for iRobot, James McLurkin '94, SM '04, his collection of swarm robots, and a team of engineers were taking part in the Software for Distributed Robots Experiment at Fort AP Hill in Virginia this past January, an event organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which conducts research and development for the Department of Defense.
"They got into the building very effectively, made maps, navigated, and directed themselves around extremely well," said McLurkin of his inventions. While the swarm robots finished the experiment in 10 hours, two other teams using much larger designs opted to complete the tasks over the course of a week. While the results were not immediately available, it was clear to McLurkin that his machines performed extremely well.
But to those familiar with the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Award winner’s work, this should come as no surprise. These days, thanks to projects like the DARPA experiment, McLurkin is looking for ways to make his software even smarter.
"The DARPA experiment was very exciting, and we got some great feedback," said McLurkin. "We let the robots find walls by running into them, but could they find all of the rooms in the building, and was there any way to guarantee that in the future? That’s what I’m working on right now."
McLurkin said that once results are in from the experiment, DARPA will most likely spin off the technology into new practices. The agency is looking to use robots to help save human lives in dangerous places like land-mine fields.
When he's not conducting experiments for the government or research for iRobot, McLurkin is studying for his PhD in computer science at MIT, while teaching classes at the Saturday Engineering Enrichment and Discovery Academy (SEED). His current work involves the development of frontier-guided exploration software, which would teach robots to lead each other into new, unexplored areas, spreading throughout a building in a controlled fashion and finding the closest rooms first. Once all options are exhausted, they would look for intruders and collect sensor data.
While he's working to improve the designs of future robots, McLurkin is reluctant to try to pinpoint the future of the industry. When asked what products consumers might be more apt to purchase, he quickly responds, "If I answered that question, I’d be working there."
Perhaps he already is. Recently, iRobot, the Burlington, MA-based mobile-robotics company, developed Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner the size of a Frisbee that cleans just about any home floor surface.
"Robots are so profoundly stupid that it’s difficult to get them to do anything of intelligence," said McLurkin. "The vacuum cleaner is a very sophisticated product. The biggest insight was to let it bounce around the room. That’s what we do."
The company also designed PackBot, an unmanned tactical robot used in Afghanistan and Iraq to search through tunnels and caves for enemy soldiers and to examine equipment left behind that was thought to have been booby trapped. The software for this robot allows it to constantly upgrade its performance capabilities so that arms, fiber-optic spoolers, heads, and sniper detection equipment, for example, can be added.
What's next for the swarm robots? McLurkin is still writing assembly language to further their exploration and navigation capabilities, research that is being funded by the federal government. He says this research should take him another year and a half to complete, but it’s a process that he hopes will give him some insight into writing more-complex software for his robots, so that exploration and navigation happen automatically.
He also hopes to mimic the centralized control mechanisms that can be seen in ants and bees and, in the process, create software to aid biologists like Cornell Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior Thomas Seeley, whose work with honey bees has been an inspiration to McLurkin.
"Robots are similar in design to insects. But bees don't draw maps like people do, and there’s no one in charge like in a military system," McLurkin said.
Robotics is still in its infancy, however, according to McLurkin. In the future, robots will be able to perform numerous tasks in virtually all settings. "As the technology becomes more sophisticated, it’s inevitable that the world will be more roboticized. People have already accepted robots without thinking about them. They exist in devices like cell phones, microwaves, and televisions."
