softrobotcritics

[softrobotcritics]

Charles Babbage dabbling in entertainment devices

*In which Charles Babbage makes a half-hearted effort to build some popular-entertainment kinetic-art computational contraptions.

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/babbages-dancer-by-simon-schaffer/

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Calculator or Dancer?

‘They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job’ (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784)

In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, the sickly Keats runs a cinema, Disraeli is a gossip journalist unwillingly converted to using a keyboard, and fashionable geologists visit the Burlington Arcade to buy pricey mechanical trinkets, ‘outstanding pieces of British precision craftsmanship’. Above them looms Lord Babbage, his original calculating engines already outdated, his scheme for life peerages on merit become part of everyday politics. Babbage’s dreams doubtless deserve this treatment from the apostles of cyberfiction – he touted his schemes in pamphlets and exhibitions all over early nineteenth century London. It was a city apparently obsessed by displays of cunning engines, enthusiastic in its desire to be knowingly deceived by the outward appearance of machine intelligence, and Babbage heroically exploited the obsession in his lifelong campaign for the rationalisation of the world.

The enterprise of the calculating engines was certainly dependent on the city’s workshops, stocked with lathes, clamps and ingenious apprentices, and on government offices, stocked with ledgers, blue books and officious clerks – a heady mixture of Bleeding Heart Yard and the Circumlocution Office. But, as Gibson and Sterling see so acutely, it was also tangled up with the culture of the West End, of brightly lit shops and showrooms, of front-of-house hucksters and backroom impresarios. Put the Difference Engine in its proper place, perched uneasily between Babbage’s drawing room in wealthy Marylebone, the Treasury chambers in Whitehall, and the machine shops over the river in Lambeth, but at least as familiar in the arcades round Piccadilly and the squares of Mayfair, where automata and clockwork, new electromagnetic machines and exotic beasts were all put on show.

It was in the plush of the arcades that Babbage, barely eight years old, first saw an automaton. Some time around 1800 his mother took him to visit the Mechanical Museum run by the master designer John Merlin in Prince’s Street, just between Hanover Square and Oxford Street. A Liègeois in his mid-sixties, working in London for four decades, Merlin was one of the best-known metropolitan mechanics, deviser of new harpsichords and clocks, entrepreneur of mathematical instruments and wondrous machines. His reputation even rivalled that of Vaucanson, the pre-eminent eighteenth century designer of courtly automata. As he rose through fashionable society, Merlin hung out with the musical Burney family, figured largely as an amusing and eccentric table-companion, and ‘a very ingenious mechanic’, in Fanny Burney’s voluminous diaries, sat for Gainsborough, and used his mechanical skills to devise increasingly remarkable costumes for the innumerable masquerades then charming London’s pleasure-seekers. To help publicise his inventions, Merlin appeared at the Pantheon or at Ranelagh dressed as the Goddess Fortune, equipped with a specially designed wheel or his own newfangled roller-skates, as a barmaid with her own drink-stall, or even as an electrotherapeutic physician, shocking the dancers as he moved among them.

Merlin ingeniously prowled the borderlands of showmanship and engineering. He won prestigious finance from the backers of Boulton and Watt’s new steam engines. He opened his Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square in the 1780s. For a couple of shillings visitors could see a model Turk chewing artificial stones, they might play with a gambling machine, see perpetual motion clocks and mobile bird cages, listen to music boxes and try the virtues of Merlin’s chair for sufferers from gout. After unsuccessfully launching a plan for a ‘Necromancic Cave’, featuring infernal mobiles and a fully mechanized concert in the Cave of Apollo, he began opening in the evenings, charged his visitors a shilling a time for tea and coffee, and tried to pull in ‘young amateurs of mechanism’.

Babbage was one of them. Merlin took the young Devonshire schoolboy upstairs to his backstage workshop to show some more exotic delights. ‘There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high’. The first automaton was relatively banal, though ‘singularly graceful’, one of Merlin’s well-known stock of figures ‘in brass and clockwork, so as to perform almost every motion and inclination of the human body, viz. the head, the breasts, the neck, the arms, the fingers, the legs &co. even to the motion of the eyelids, and the lifting up of the hands and fingers to the face’. Babbage remembered that ‘she used an eye-glass occasionally and bowed frequently as if recognizing her acquaintances’. Good manners, it seemed, could easily be mechanized. But it was the other automaton which stayed in Babbage’s mind, ‘an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings and opened its beak’. Babbage was completely seduced. ‘The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’. ‘At Merlin’s you meet with delight’, ran a contemporary ballad, and this intriguing mixture of private delight and public ingenuity remained a powerful theme of the world of automata and thinking machines in which Babbage later plied his own trade.

Merlin died in 1803, and much of his Hanover Square stock was sold to Thomas Weeks, a rival ‘performer and machinist’ who had just opened his own museum on the corner of Tichborne and Great Windmill Streets near the Haymarket. The danseuse went too. The show cost half-a-crown, in a room over one hundred feet long, lined in blue satin, with ‘a variety of figures inert, active, separate, combined, emblematic and allegoric, on the principles of mechanism, being the most exact imitation of nature’. Like Merlin, Weeks also tried to attract invalids, emphasising his inventions of weighing-machines and bedsteads for the halt and the lame. There were musical clocks and self-opening umbrellas, and, especially, ‘a tarantula spider made of steel, that comes independently out of a box, and runs backwards and forwards on the table, stretches out and draws in its paws, as if at will. This singular automaton that has no other power of action than the mechanism contained in its body, must fix the attention of the curious’.

(…)

The obscure objects of desire embodied in the automata were never self-evidently distinct from any of Babbage’s projects. For example, like the automata of Cox, Merlin and Weeks, the Difference Engine apparently was also an object of fascination to the Chinese, and one visitor from China asked Babbage whether it could be reduced to pocket-size. Babbage replied that ‘he might safely assure his friends in the celestial empire that it was in every sense of the word an out-of-pocket machine’. Indeed, in the later 1840s, when all his engine schemes had run into the sand, he cast about for new ways of raising money to revive them, including writing novels, but was dissuaded because he was told he’d surely lose money on fiction. One such entirely abortive scheme involved designing an automaton ‘to play a game of purely intellectual skill successfully’. This was at least partly an attempt to assert the very possibility of building an automatic games-player. Babbage knew, at least at second-hand, of just how seductive gambling could be – his close friend Ada Lovelace, Gibson and Sterling’s dark lady of the Epsom motor-races, lost more than £3000 on the horses during the later 1840s. ‘Making a book seems to me to be living on the brink of a precipice’, she was told by her raffish gambling associate Richard Ford in early 1851.

The Games Machine

Babbage’s attention turned to the prospects of a games machine. In a brief memorandum, he demonstrated that if an automaton made the right first move in a game of pure skill with a finite number of possible moves at each stage, the machine could always win. Such a device, he reckoned, must possess just those faculties of memory and foresight which he always claimed were the distinctive features of his Analytical Engine, the features which made it intelligent. So Babbage began to design an automaton which could win at noughts-and-crosses, planning to dress it up ‘with such attractive circumstances that a very popular and profitable exhibition might be produced’. All his memories of Merlin, Weeks and the Regency world of mechanical wonders came into play. As he reminisced in his 1864 autobiography, ‘I imagined that the machine might consist of the figures of two children playing against each other, accompanied by a lamb and a cock. That the child who won the game might clap his hands whilst the cock was crowing, after which, that the child who was beaten might cry and wring his hands whilst the lamb began bleating’.

But there was, of course, a hitch. One point of his games machine was to raise money for the more portentous Analytical Engine, and Babbage soon discovered that though ‘every mamma and some few pappas who heard of it would doubtless take their children to so singular and interesting a sight’, and though he could try putting three shows on at once, nevertheless the mid-Victorian public simply weren’t interested any more. ‘The most profitable exhibition which had occurred for many years’, Babbage moaned, ‘was that of the little dwarf, General Tom Thumb’, Phineas Barnum’s famous midget money-spinner, displayed in 1844 before gawping London audiences at the self-same Adelaide Gallery where a decade earlier the Difference Engine models, steam guns and electromagnetic engines had drawn large audiences. According to London journalists the Adelaide ‘with its chemical lectures and electrical machines’ had by the later 1840s ‘changed its guise, and in lieu of philosophical experiments we have the gay quadrille and the bewildering polka’. So however apparently distinct, the fate of the automata shows and the calculating engines was remarkably similar, as metropolitan fashion switched away from the machines that could simulate human motions and emotions to the high life where the genteel tried these activities out for themselves.

Ultimately, Babbage’s Difference Engine suffered more or less the same end as a whole range of Victorian automata, ending its days as a museum piece….

[softrobotcritics]

Photoresponsive Shape Morphing

Movement with light: Photoresponsive shape morphing of printed liquid crystal elastomers

Michael J. Ford1 ∙ Dominique H. Porcincula1 ∙ Rodrigo Telles3 ∙ … ∙ Shu Yang2 ∙ Elaine Lee1 lee1040@llnl.gov ∙ Caitlyn C. Cook1,5 krikorian3@llnl.gov … 

Progress and potential

Soft matter that can adapt in response to a stimulus like light holds immense promise for various applications, such as biomedical devices and soft robotics. One example of adaptive soft matter is liquid crystal elastomer composites, which incorporate a functional additive and change shape through a phase transition. The combination of the material composition, the printed geometry of the material, and the localization of the stimulus can enable novel movement and reaction to light, as we demonstrate in this paper. Our results mark a significant advancement toward creating complex, 3D-printed, intelligent materials that pave the way for developing next-generation adaptive machines and devices that can transform in response to specific stimuli.

Highlights

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Optimized inks for additive manufacturing of a liquid crystal elastomer composite

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Developed spatiotemporal control during printing for complex three-dimensional structures

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Demonstrated unique combinations of complex three-dimensional photoresponsive actuation

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Controlled novel modes of actuation with computer vision techniques

Summary

Soft machines will require soft materials that exhibit a rich diversity of functionality, including shape morphing and photoresponsivity. The combination of these functionalities enables useful behaviors in soft machines that can be further developed by synthesizing materials that exhibit localized responsivity.

Localized responsivity of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), which are soft materials that exhibit shape morphing, can be enabled by formulating composite inks for direct ink writing (DIW). Gold nanorods (AuNRs) can be added to LCEs to enable photothermal shape change upon absorption of light through a localized surface plasmon resonance.

We compared LCE formulations, focusing on their amenability for printing by DIW and the photoresponsivity of AuNRs. The local responsivity of different three-dimensional architectures enabled soft machines that could oscillate, crawl, roll, transport mass, and display other unique modes of actuation and motion in response to light, making these promising functional materials for advanced applications....

Soft machines could enable new breakthroughs in technologies related to human-machine interactions, remote exploration in difficult-to-reach spaces, and individually tailored health care. These machines will require soft materials that exhibit a diverse range of functionalities, including actuation for movement, conductivity for sensing and signal processing, stimuli-responsivity, self-healing, and reprocessability.1,2,3The demonstration of such a diverse range of functionalities results in a profound outcome where “the material is the machine.”4,5 That is, by taking advantage of behaviors like self-assembly and phase transitions, these materials as machines can replace traditional sensors, transducers, gears, levers, and electromagnetic motors to enable perception, responsivity, and motion without engineered complexity.2,4

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) that are pre-programmed to change shape in response to external stimuli are considered useful for soft machines.6,7 The shape morphing is induced by heat, electricity, and light.8,9Light may be useful to stimulate localized actuation and does not require physical contact with the shape-changing material, as wires that transmit electrical power might require.10,11 Localized actuation using light could also allow for unique modes of actuation.12 For example, asymmetric illumination of photoresponsive LCEs led to twisting and rolling motions.13 Peristaltic motion that resembles the movement of biological organisms has been demonstrated by using localized impingement of different patterns of light upon an LCE.14 To extend this work, the programmed order of the liquid crystal (LC) domains could be controlled and modified....

[softrobotcritics]

Knitogami

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Dion, drawing from her experience as a textile researcher and garment designer, views this work as a crucial convergence of scientific theory and practical design applications. "Right now, fabric design relies on experience, experimentation, and intuition," she says. "If we can apply predictive models to textiles, we open the door to fabrics with precise, engineered properties -- whether it's self-folding medical materials, reconfigurable structures for soft robotics, or garments that adapt to the body in new ways."

Decoding knitting, one stitch at a time

To build their model, Niu borrowed mathematical techniques from an unexpected source: general relativity, the theory used to describe the warping of space and time. While relativity explains how gravity bends space-time, the researchers applied similar geometric principles to explain how the looping paths of yarn create curvature in knitted fabrics.

Niu explains that knitting, at its core, is a method of transforming a one-dimensional strand of yarn into a structured, flexible two-dimensional sheet, which can then fold itself into complex three-dimensional shapes. The researchers realized that this transformation could be described mathematically using the same principles that govern how surfaces curve in space.

Instead of seeing a knitted fabric as just a collection of interlocking loops, the team treated it as a continuous surface with an intrinsic curvature determined by the arrangement of stitches. By applying the formalism used to describe how materials bend and stretch -- known as elasticity theory -- they built an energetic model that simulates the forces acting on the loops of yarn and predicts how a piece of fabric will deform in space.

"The key insight was recognizing that knitting operates like a programmable material," Kamien says. "By controlling the stitch pattern -- just knits and purls -- you can essentially encode instructions for how the fabric will behave once it comes off the needles. That's why a scarf, a sock, and a sweater can all come from the same kind of yarn but behave so differently."

Their simulations revealed that the mechanical properties of knitted fabrics often depend more on stitch geometry than on the material itself. Whether the yarn was wool, cotton, or synthetic, the fabric's tendency to curl, pleat, or expand followed universal geometric rules. This suggests that knitting is governed by fundamental mathematical principles -- ones that could be harnessed to design materials with precise, tunable behaviors.

(…)

Dion coined a new term for this approach: knitogami™ -- a fusion of knitting and origami that captures the idea of self-folding textiles. "We call it knitogami because it extends the principles of origami into a soft, fabric-based medium," she explains. "Instead of relying on folds and creases in paper, we're using the inherent elasticity and structure of knitted loops to create dynamic, shape-shifting materials."

By mapping out these rules, the team developed a framework that could be used to create programmable textiles -- fabrics that shape themselves without requiring external forces like heat or manual pleating.

"If we can predict how a piece of fabric will shape itself just by changing the stitch pattern, we can start designing textiles with built-in functionality," Dion says. "This could lead to garments that adapt to movement, medical textiles that mold to the body, or even large-scale deployable structures that assemble themselves."...

[softrobotcritics]

[softrobotcritics]

Festo publicity concept-device borders on kinetic art.

[softrobotcritics]

Household robot in soft pyjamas.

[softrobotcritics]

Vision-Language Models

[softrobotcritics]

LLM robotic "general concept understanding"

In sci-fi tales, artificial intelligence often powers all sorts of clever, capable, and occasionally homicidal robots. A revealing limitation of today’s best AI is that, for now, it remains squarely trapped inside the chat window.

Google DeepMind signaled a plan to change that today—presumably minus the homicidal part—by announcing a new version of its AI model Gemini that fuses language, vision, and physical action together to power a range of more capable, adaptive, and potentially useful robots.

In a series of demonstration videos, the company showed several robots equipped with the new model, called Gemini Robotics, manipulating items in response to spoken commands: Robot arms fold paper, hand over vegetables, gently put a pair of glasses into a case, and complete other tasks. The robots rely on the new model to connect items that are visible with possible actions in order to do what they’re told. The model is trained in a way that allows behavior to be generalized across very different hardware.

Google DeepMind also announced a version of its model called Gemini Robotics-ER (for embodied reasoning), which has just visual and spatial understanding. The idea is for other robot researchers to use this model to train their own models for controlling robots’ actions.

In a video demonstration, Google DeepMind’s researchers used the model to control a humanoid robot called Apollo, from the startup Apptronik. The robot converses with a human and moves letters around a tabletop when instructed to.

“We've been able to bring the world-understanding—the general-concept understanding—of Gemini 2.0 to robotics,” said Kanishka Rao, a robotics researcher at Google DeepMind who led the work, at a briefing ahead of today’s announcement.

Google DeepMind says the new model is able to control different robots successfully in hundreds of specific scenarios not previously included in their training. “Once the robot model has general-concept understanding, it becomes much more general and useful,” Rao said.

The breakthroughs that gave rise to powerful chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, have in recent years raised hope of a similar revolution in robotics, but big hurdles remain.

The large language models (LLMs) that power modern chatbots were created using more general learning algorithms, internet-scale training data, and vast amounts of computer power. While it is not yet possible to gather robot training data on that scale, LLMs can be used as a foundation for more capable robot models, because they contain a wealth of information about the physical world and can communicate so well. Robotics researchers are now combining LLMs with new approaches to learning through teleoperation or simulation that allow models to practice physical actions more efficiently.

In recent years, Google has revealed a number of robotics research projects that show the potential of these approaches. As WIRED detailed in a recent profile, several key researchers involved with this earlier work have left the company to found a startup called Physical Intelligence. As WIRED first reported, a lab run by the Toyota Research Institute is doing similar work.

Google DeepMind showed that it is keeping pace with these efforts in September 2024, revealing a robot that combines LLMs and new training methods to perform dexterous tasks like tying shoelaces and folding clothes on command.

Gemini Robotics - Spatial Reasoning.Courtesy of Google

Rao said that Google DeepMind’s new robot model has even broader abilities. Physical Intelligence and the Toyota Research Institute have released similar demonstration videos....

[softrobotcritics]

It's not "soft," but that's Google DeepMind AI robotics at work

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*Domestic limits of everyday weirdness; his beatnik sandals are a nice touch. This cartoon may be quite old, it has an air of 1950s modernism.

*A good guess on my part; Google image search reveals this: "WILLIAM (BILL) HEWISON). Hewison was art editor of Punch for 24 years and produced many color Punch covers. Punch October 3, 1951."

[softrobotcritics]

Karel Capek "robots" might be understood as theatrical "specialty props" that got way out of hand.

[softrobotcritics]

Hmm. nice bruise-proofed soft shell on the "safe humanoid" there

[softrobotcritics]

[softrobotcritics]

Benedict Evans describing humanoid robots in 2025

Humanoid robots

We’ve all seen the Boston Dynamics demo videos, but machine learning means that a bunch of people have humanoid robots actually kind of working. This week there were reports that both Meta and Apple have kicked off big projects to look at building something, while Apple filed a patent for non-humanoid robots with expression and has filed a bunch of other robotics patents lately. (Tesla showed some mock-ups at the same event it used to show a mock-up of a robotaxi.) 

There are two different things happening here, though. First, we can now make a machine that uses two legs (or four) instead of three or four wheels to move around. But second, the emergence of much more capable AI models means that an ‘old fashioned’ automated forklift truck might be able to find its way around a warehouse or factory and accomplish tasks without needing lines painted on the ground and bar codes everywhere. Combining those two, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to use bipedal robots instead of forklifts to move pallets around, and neither would you replace a washing machine with a humanoid robot (and a washing machine is a robot). But you might be able to bring automation into new fields and spaces that aren’t laid out for a forklift, and optimise for less single-purpose form factors. META, APPLE, PATENT