The Gundersons get us ready for Basil, the robot of our dreams

Comments (0) By Joel Warner Thursday, Dec 18 2008

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Then, with the work finished this past June, they wheeled a chair in front of Basil and asked him what he saw. Using the chipper dialogue they'd programmed, he announced, "Ooh, I see a wooden chair."

The regulars that night at the Denver Press Club, the Gundersons' favorite bar, didn't know what to make of the two scientists throwing down beers and dancing around chanting, "The robot saw a wooden chair!" But that's because they had no idea what this development meant: Reification worked. And with that, this tiny robotics lab started making waves.

Basilâ€™s debut at the Wynkoop.

Ken Byles and Bill Llewellin watch the Gundersons in their lab.

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"The reification work they have done is unique. There hasn't been a book on the subject anywhere else, and I consider them leaders in their field," says Raj Madhavan, a researcher at the Intelligent Systems Division at the National Institute of Standards & Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "And some of the things they have been doing, the reification work, hadn't been implemented on a robot, per se. They have what looks like a toy robot, but it has a cybernetic brain design."

Soon Basil wasn't just identifying wooden chairs, but other types of chairs — followed by tables and even people. Now when the Gundersons show him a chair he's never seen before, he's can figure out that it's probably a chair and definitely not, say, a person or a table. Once the couple repairs Basil's little mobility problem, they expect him to be able to approach an unknown object, mosey around, scrutinize it for a bit, then place a basic mental model of the object in its memory for later use.

Basil, in other words, will be able to learn on his own.

The members of the Friends of Basil can hardly contain their enthusiasm. It's T-minus four days until Cafe Sci, and the excited crew hovers around Basil, screwing in components and cracking Star Wars jokes. When they step back, the robot's dressed head to theoretical toe in gleaming, marbleized aluminum.

"Ta da!" says professional jeweler Guyotte Williams, whom, as the designer of Basil's outfit, the Gundersons call the world's first robot aesthetician.

"Damn, he scrubs up nice," says John Morse, a machine shop owner who runs the Grand National Critter Crunch Tournament, a local robotics competition.

"This is a momentous occasion," adds Louise as the team imagines other dress styles, such as a black-velvet Basil for Elvis lovers.

The robot still has a few programming kinks, but as Christian Brown, a maintenance supervisor at the University of Colorado Denver who's the team's so-called chief roboticist puts it, "Even if he doesn't deliver the beer, people will say he looks good."

Basil has to look good; it's part of the Gundersons' marketing plan. The couple's nest egg isn't going to subsidize their research forever, and, as Louise says, "We gotta find a way to fund this. We're addicted to this stuff." So sometime next year, they'll start advertising Basil construction kits in publications like Robot magazine and Make magazine so that tinkerers the world over can build their very own reifying robot. Then, a few months later, Gamma Two will hit the cocktail-party industry with the unveiling of hors d'oeuvre-serving Basils. And no one's going to want a canape from an ugly bot.

Hence Basil's glossy, stylish and, most important, completely non-humanoid look. "There's something about robots, a certain creepy factor," explains Morse. "If they're humanoid but not quite human, people stand off from them."

He's referring to the phenomenon of human facsimiles, such as robots and animated figures, becoming more disturbing as they become more lifelike. It's why a roaming tabletop like Basil seems cute, while the hyper-realistic human animations in the computer-animated film Polar Express, for example, are downright disturbing.

It's also in the spirit of positive human-robot relations that the Gundersons refer to Basil as a guy. They're not in danger of mistaking him for a friend — they promise they'll have no problem killing him if he stops working right — but they do believe that slapping a gender on him will help him fit in with those who care about such things.

"He is designed to function in a world that is shared with humans," explains Jim. "People are going to build human models of what he is doing."

And there was no question about Basil's sex. The way he aggressively zooms up to people without regard to personal space, he has to be a man. A pretentious European man, to be exact, considering how his stiff mannerisms suggest he likes to haughtily turn on his heel and huff away. That's why he has a snooty name like Basil.

When the Friends of Basil finally quit fawning over the robot's new clothes, it's on to the next order of business: planning the upcoming Gamma Two online marketing video, "Basil Nabs a Burglar." The Gundersons have discovered their creation may have another application. Since Basil's sonar allows him to see perfectly in the dark and because he knows when objects around him are removed, he'd make a great security bot. To promote this concept, Friends of Basil member Ken Byles, the robot's videographer, will film a sketch in which Basil discovers a bandit in the lab, remotely calls the cops, and then, when the scofflaw attempts to flee, warns him, "Don't make me tase you."