Team Member Critiques

Brad White

The long range social implications that are most prevalent to this project are the Power Concerns and help for the Elderly & Disabled. These concerns are most prevalent for many reasons. First, having personally dealt with elderly people and observing nursing home care, the idea of robots helping elderly people safely get exercise is exciting and very positive. Having seen the positive effects of 15 minutes of exercise three times a week on an octogenarian, the increased health and mental activity of more elderly exercise makes the use of robots a very positive tool for the aged.

Second, last year's California power crisis has shown that electric power is difficult and expensive to generate, and has environmental concerns to its creation (i.e. nuclear waste, smoke stacks from coal fired plants). This begs the question if we can really afford more electric and electronic devices when desktop computers and servers consume such a large percentage of our generated power. If we need these robots, we must also find a way to power them.

J.D. Pohlman

As far as the implications of our specific project go, I think that a broader programming experience to UNIX would have helped out. We had one member who actually knows UNIX, and he was indispensable to our project. He helped to reduce the learning curve for the new programming environment. If he was not in our group, we would have had to taken the time to learn the UNIX environment, which could have taken an enormous amount of time. If we have a question to this day about how something works in UNIX, we can simply ask him how to do it, as opposed to researching the topic for hours on end.

With robotics in general, I think robots could help out the economy. They could help people with disabilities to get around. A good example of this would be the mailman robot. Robots were developed that a mailman can stand in, and drive around. This makes it easier for him or her to get around, without getting tired and not being able to finish the routes. Robots can have a bad effect on the economy as well. Automations of robots can lead to ease of life for people. This could lead to society becoming lazy, relying on robots to do the dirty work while the people just sit.

Artificial Intelligence can have a major role on the state of robotics. If a robot can be programmed to “think,” where does it end? What if a way is developed to get the robot to feel emotion? An example of this would be the movie, “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” In the movie, the boy is given feelings, and he can love people. This had a major psychological effect on his “mother,” or the person who adopted him. What could happen to our society if robots were given the ability to love? Sound like a long way off? Did people ever think robots would be able to run by themselves, without any interference from people? Now they are. Time will only tell what else can be done in the field of robotics.

Peter Motykowski

My concerns focus more on the questionable aspects of the robotics discipline. While I appreciate SIUE investing in quality robotics equipment, I would like to see funds more fairly distributed to obtain other types of Computer Science related equipment. Since robotics courses are electives and users are a focused interested community at SIUE, I find the 3 robot fleet to be a bit excessive.

Robotics and automation is something that scares me when evaluating the status of the world economy. Any technological advance that threatens the position of the semi-skilled laborer is something that needs to be considered. These technological advances usually stem from the financial resources of those whom will benefit most. For example, large corporations lead research in techniques to automate elements of production, therefore making labor costs cheaper. The motives for this development are questionable. Are we seeking safer alternatives for risky labor, or are we seeking options to maximize profits by putting semi-skilled laborers out of work. It depends on the context of the automation, however much automation has been selfishly motivated with the intentions of cutting labor cots. I do realize that not all robotics research has malicious intentions. However, participating in the discipline inevitably provides fuel to the fire in the form of research and development.

I am very happy about the operating system we worked in on this project. Not only did we further our UNIX skills, we were able to get more familiar with the Linux implementation of UNIX. While the entire team did not gain the skills I did as the robot administrator, we still managed to gain a fair amount of exposure to this gem of the open source community.

Matt Allen

SIUE's CS department covers many topics in computer science; however, most of these involve work in the MS Studio C++ development environment. Having been plunged into a robotics project that is largely developed in the Linux environment has proved to be quite a challenge. Fortunately, we had one team member that was proficient in this programming environment. Our curriculum definitely could use a course to develop fundamental UNIX/Linux skills. Some other languages could also stand to be incorporated into our curriculum. Topics classes are offered that occasional will cover other languages such as Java, but there need to be more frequent availability to such courses. A Broader programming curriculum would better prepare students for a career in computer science.

RTP is an issue in robotics. RTP brings about many issues that are not countered in non-RTP development projects. Time is of the essence. In most development, time is important, but in most RTP projects timing is crucial. In our project, the robot must get and interpret data as it is moving. If it doesn't process the data in a certain amount of time, it will end up hitting every obstacle in its path. Our project incorporates a "main" function for each module which fires through repeatedly getting information from the robots sensory devices and reacting in the appropriate manner. While testing, we found that this structure of reactive programming has made us re-structure our code and think in a different way when writing code.

Economic concerns are the one of the most discussed topics when robots (automation) come into a discussion. Yes, robots could take away some working class jobs; however, what few jobs this would threaten would be replaced by new jobs. Factory assemblers for example would be replaced by a robotics maintenance crew, development teams, and safety testers. People could potentially lose their jobs, but this change from a manual labor force to a technologically skilled work force has been coming about for some time now.