Power of incentive

The competitions inspired by DARPA to develop self-driving vehicles show how quickly these capabilities can come together when there is enough motivation. Cars that could barely drive in a straight line several years ago are now able to drive straight, around curves, through traffic, while maintaining safe distances and traveling at speed. These competitions show that initial failure leads to failure analysis, finding areas to strengthen, and areas that need new or completely different solutions. In particular, the ability to deal with unreliable input has improved substantially. The race showed that many areas, such as identifying when sensors fail, still need to improve. In one case, an acceleration sensor showed no acceleration, so the car just kept accelerating. Cases of memory leaks (allocating memory without ever freeing it) took out at least one robot during the competition. While these problems kept the some vehicles from completing the competition, one can be sure that the failures encountered will be fixed. In the formative years there will be failure after failure, often due to unexpected events, or unrecognized interactions between different parts of the system. But with each failure, there will be new solutions, and steps will be made towards greater robustness and generalization.

Cash prizes for robotics include DARPA’s automated vehicle challenges, and Google’s robotic lunar lander challenge. There are also various prizes designed to motivate students such as underwater, ground, and aerial competitions. Robot soccer is gaining serious momentum, with a challenge to beat humans by 2050. The robot soccer players even have their own federation. There is a competition to build robots to fight fires. There are likely many more incentive and academic challenges out there, and if you know of any please leave a comment.

Algorithm improvements

In computer science, algorithms such as sorting, searching, indexing, are very common. These are relatively simple algorithms compared to those required for balancing, walking, running, driving, and navigating. In the early days of computer science, very simple algorithms were replaced by faster versions, then specialized versions, and substantial analysis determined which algorithms were appropriate for which circumstances. That is strengths and weaknesses were formally defined. This same level of analysis is ongoing today for the algorithms, and heuristics required to make a robot successfully complete a task or sub-task. The challenge is always greatest the first time a particular problem is solved, but once one solution is known, gradual improvement and alternate solutions soon follow. Science and engineering continue to grow by building off of work which came before. Robotics is no different in this aspect.

Economic need

Another driving force that will push the development of robotics is economics. For the Japanese the cost of assisted care for the elderly is driving development. With a declining birth rate, and growing elderly population, there will not be enough professional care takers, which is driving the development of care taker robots. The need to cut costs and reduce exposing humans to dangers has also been pushing advances in robotics. The cost of safety is generally high, and robotics is seen as one way of bringing this cost down. Economic competition with low wage countries is also driving robot development to make higher wage countries more competitive.

Coolness factor

Another motivation for developing robots is the coolness factor. Many of us have grown up seeing robots in science fiction shows and stories. From ‘Danger Will Robinson‘ to Asimov’s three law bearing robots, to Star Trek’s Data, robots inspire the imagination. Working on robotics provides the sense that one is working on something new and exotic.

Finding your niche

Now that robot development kits are becoming more common with Lego’s Mindstorm and Microsoft’s Robotics Studio it is becoming easier to find frameworks for playing around with robot development. Just as computers benefited from small groups coming together to develop new computers and software programs, the same sense of discovery will appear for robots as well. While these kits do not seem to have captured as broad interest as the original Commodore 64, Apple II, or TRS-80, it is likely only a matter of time before the robotics hobbyists kick in to gear. Just as billionaires were born from the software industry, there are sure to be new billionaires born from the robotics industry.

Helping others

Another common motivator in robotics is the desire to help others. Research in health care oriented robots, car safety, keeping people away from bombs, and other dangerous situations have drawn many people to research and develop robots. Also, the desire to avoid monotonous tasks such as pool cleaning and floor vacuuming have already seen robots enter the market, and improvements in these cleaning robots show a gradual increase in robustness and capabilities.

Moving forward

Whether it is curiosity, novelty, altruism, national pride, money, or ego; there are many personal motivators to draw researchers and engineers toward the field of robotics. Just as the early days of computers produced many notable personalities and products, the field of robotics is a new frontier opening up to a larger group of developers out to make their mark. This will drive rapid and diverse experimentation into a variety of hardware and software architectures. The metric by which this advance will be measured is the growth in the set of capabilities a robot possesses. This growth will be displayed by a doubling in the number of capabilities over a period of time: Stephen’s Law of Robotics. This will lead to an ever greater range of tasks which can be accomplished, at a progressively lower cost.

Related Links

Moore’s Law of Robotics

As we proceed, we will also establish that the robotics equivalent of Moore’s Law should be that over a period of time, the number of capabilities a robot possesses doubles.

Exponential growth in the number of transistors

Moore’s law describes the doubling of transistors over a period of time. This period is often described as being somewhere between a year or two. We have been experiencing this phenomenon in our computer processors for the last several decades. The common method of adding more transistors is by shrinking their size. Unfortunately, this approach will likely hit physical limits within a decade. However, many alternate technologies are being examined to maintain the doubling trend. In the past, the doubling of transistors was also associated with a doubling of speed. However, the speed doubling ended a few years ago, and will only improve in fits and starts. While we may see up to a thousand fold increase in transistor speeds sometime in the future, it is unlikely that switching speeds will reach the petahertz (1 followed by 15 zeros) range.

As the number of transistors increases, the number of computations performed simultaneously also increases. This means that over time, a single “processor” has more transistors to calculate math, make decisions, model physical reality, process images, process sound, and so on. Future doubling will lead to processors that are larger in size. Or more likely they will start to grow, new tricks are discovered, they shrink again, grow again, shrink again, but always striving to double the number of transistors. From a user’s point of view whether the processor’s chip is a square or a cube does not matter. Also, whether there is one chip or hundreds of chips networked together is not of much concern. What matters is that computers and robots will be able to ride this trend of increased processing power for the foreseeable future. Besides, computational power is an enabling technology, not an end in itself.

One way that transistors are doubling is to increase the overall number of processing cores available. The more cores, the more tasks which can be performed simultaneously.

Exponential growth in the number of sensors

One metric that has been proposed as the Moore’s law for robotics is that over a period of time the number of sensors doubles. For the short term, growth in the robot capabilities will be tied with growth in sensor count. Greater number of sensors, greater sensor sensitivity, and greater range of senses (tough, sight, sound, chemical, etc.) will all benefit robotics. Eventually the data from all those sensors will reach sheer information overload, and more than a few thousand or million sensors will be overkill. At some point in time, the set of sensors a robot contains will lead to differentiation in capabilities between different robots, and this seems better than trying to cram all possible sensors into a single robot. One area where this rapid increase in sensor count is observed today is in commercial automobiles. The recent Urban Grand Challenge demonstrated the benefits of additional sensors, with the autonomous cars successfully driving in a town-like environment with traffic. This was a substantial improvement in self-driving capabilities compared to the two earlier challenges held out in the desert.

Examples of what robots will need to sense: chemicals, acceleration, velocity, current, voltage, altitude, direction, location, air pressure, contact pressure (i.e touch), light, sound, infrared, radio frequencies, temperature, torque, weight, and so much more. For convenience, the transmission of the items being sensed should also be considered a sensor. That is to sense radio frequencies (or radio transmissions), then a complementary sensor would be a sender of radio frequencies (radio transmitter). For a light sensor, one would take this as one sensor for processing light, and another for emitting light. In this way, robots will naturally develop many different forms of communication. Communication can be carried out not only by touch, sight and sound, but also by chemical, electrical, magnetic, and other means.

The nice thing about sensors as a metric is they are easy to count. Since there are so many different types of sensors and things to sense, it is easy to imagine the need for a large number of sensors. Unlike transistors, the complexity of a particular sensor varies widely from that of another making it hard to compare the benefit of one sensor type over another. However, simplifying things to just consider overall count makes sense, particularly as the number of sensors becomes large, each individual sensor becomes less important . However, the synergy from the variety of sensors becomes increasingly important.

As the number of sensors increases, the bandwidth of the networks feeding the sensor data to the processors will have to increase as well. Exponential growth in the number of sensors will also lead to exponential growth in network bandwidth.

Exponential growth in number of robot capabilities

Where robotics will benefit the most is for the number of capabilities they can perform to increase exponentially. Just as robots will benefit from greater transistor counts, increased sensors and their synergy, they will also benefit from increased capabilities and synergy of those capabilities. Being able to balance on two feet, combined with the ability to move each foot forward, leads to walking. The ability to balance is a complicated capability made up of many sub-capabilities, just as the ability to move the foot forward requires many sub-capabilities to make it happen. Similarly being able to move an arm, and open and close a hand, can be combined to allow for catching a ball. Unlike counting the number of sensors which are discrete discernible entities, trying to count capabilities is a bit harder. For the capability of walking, is this a single capability, or is it the individual algorithms that lead to balance and movement which should be counted? In order to consider the exponential growth, it really should be the underlying algorithms that lead to balance and movement that should be individually counted. These are the components that will be incrementally improving over time, leading to more and more robust skills. Continuing with the walking example, the improvements in balance and overall walking skills have been steadily improving as demonstrated by robots such as Asimo from Honda and more recently BigDog from Boston Dynamics.

While particular capabilities will be unique to the design of particular robots, others will be more general and can be transferred from robot to robot. Both will see a rapid increase over the next few decades. Capabilities that are initially robot specific, will over time become more generic.

Countries like Japan have already started robot initiatives with the aim of placing robots in the homes of the elderly to help reduce the health care costs as the nation becomes increasingly more grey haired. Similarly, many car manufacturers are looking to increase the degree of automation available in the car with adaptive cruise control, self-driving, self-parking, blind spot warnings, entertainment systems, etc. With just these two initiatives there is substantial amounts of money being made available to research and implement. This will lead to an even wider set of behaviors/capabilities for robots.

Up to now robots have been very limited in what they can do independently, but already this is starting to change quickly. While the autonomous cars from Darpa’s Urban Grand Challenge are not yet ready to hit the road on their own, the existing technology will likely creep out into the market with features such as emergency collision avoidance. While we are not yet ready to let them take to the roads on their own, there shouldn’t be much resistance to cars which have determined a collision is inevitable from stepping in and taking control to reduce the forces that will be experienced by the passengers. Over time more and more capabilities will be introduced, and confidence in those capabilities will eventually reach a point where drivers are willing to place their lives into the hands of their self-driving cars. Like any engineering project, there will be a lot of learning along the way, but with each success and failure, the capabilities will become increasingly more robust, and able to handle a much wider range of situations. As situations are encountered which are not properly handled, engineers will analyze the failures, and new capabilities will be added, and existing ones improved.

Implementation specific and generic capabilities

Over time interfaces for common tasks such as navigation will be standardized so that they can be added to many different types of robots who then convert the navigation into specific commands sent to legs, wheels, treads, wings, etc. This will hold true for other common operations such as walking, running, hand-eye coordination, object recognition, object handling, etc. At a high-level these generic operations will need to be handled in a way specific to the robot’s architecture. A two legged robot will walk very differently from an eight legged one, or even a single legged robot. Capabilities will arise to address these needs, and over time become standardized and incrementally improved. The standardization will allow for rapid transfer of capabilities from one robot to another, and also allow the improvements to be spread faster.

The library of available capabilities will increase in an exponential manner such as transistors in a computer processor, hard disk storage, memory capacity, and digital camera resolution. This increase in capability count will be followed by even newer capabilities which utilize existing capabilities in a new way to accomplish a new task not previously performable by a robot. As new capabilities mature, they will become easier and easier to transfer to more and more robot variants, since as the capability matures it will become more standardized. A concrete example of this would be traffic light recognition. Once one car manufacturer introduces the ability for a car to determine whether the traffic light is red, yellow, green, turn left, turn right, warning, etc., it will not be long before other manufacturers rush to introduce the capability as well. Over time the quality of traffic signal recognition will improve, and more and more cars will move from having this as a purchase option, to it becoming a standard option lilke air bags. Then it will become a commodity capability, that will be standardized, continually improved, and made cheaper and cheaper to implement. After a while, no one will think it very special that cars are able to appropriately handle a wide range of varied traffic lights, and it will be just one among millions of capabilities inherent in the car.

Slow and steady

Today robots operate in very well defined niches, under relatively controlled conditions. This is mostly due to each and every robot available today having only a small number of specialized capabilities. But over time, the exponential growth in capabilities will lead to a slow and steady improvement and broadening of what robots can do. We are very early on in the exponential growth of robot capabilities, so progress seems relatively slow, but over time the nature of exponential growth will show more and more capabilities released and improved each year. Eventually the rate of improvement will be so high, that it will be hard to tell whether a robot is really intelligent, or just that it has such a large set of accumulated and integrated capabilities built in that its database of situations is large enough to cover just about every situation the robot is likely to encounter. And in cases where the robot is not able to handle a new situation, the failure will be reported, and existing capabilities will be further improved, and new capabilities added to convert the formerly new situation into a been there done that situation. As the exponential growth in capabilities continues there will be fewer and fewer new situations encountered.

Of course, once future robots are able to handle the majority of the situations they will encounter, we’ll change the rules and start trying to apply robots into a broader and broader range of uses. Each time this happens, the initial robots will seem barely competent, and a bit clumsy at their new tasks, but that will change quickly. As the set of new tasks increases, so will the set of implemented capabilities. When more and more capabilities become standardized and integrated with other capabilities, fewer and fewer tasks will seem unknown to the robots being tasked with performing them.

Moving forward

Over the next couple of articles we will look at this notion of exponential growth of capabilities as the Moore’s law of robotics. What is your view of capabilities as a metric?

Related Posts

Stephen’s Law of Robotics

Traffic monitoring

As we drive around town with our cell phones this provides information about traffic flow. How fast we are moving? Is our movement in starts and stops? Are lots of people avoiding a certain lane in a certain area? How closely spaced are the cars in the area? Is the data coming from a car or pedestrian? These are some of the questions that could be answered by our phones. This data would allow our car navigation systems to alert us of upcoming problems, and provide alternate directions to avoid slow areas.

Speed monitoring

Already there has been a case where someone was tracking their own driving with their personal GPS, and that speed contradicted the speed captured by the ticketing officer. Thus, the driver was able to avoid the ticket. However, one can easily see this helping as much as it hurts. Issues have come up from rental car companies charging customers for instances of excessive speed as determined by the car’s GPS unit. With a cell phone speed monitoring would not need to be built into the car. Also, the data would not necessarily be gathered by the driver’s phone, instead any of the passengers could be the (unintentional) source as well.

Location sharing with privacy protection

While wandering about, determining if any friends are nearby, and allowing them to find you requires an exchange of information. Yahoo is developing Fire Eagle to aid in the capture and sharing of current location. By running an application on your phone, it uploads the location, and based on your sharing policies determines which applications and users are able to access the data. The goal is to allow for web based applications to respond better based on your current location, while preventing your current location from being available to everyone. Since the remote application should only care about the location, and not the identify of the person at that location, this type of location broker helps to separate you from your location. The idea of sharing location, but trying to maintain anonymity can be challenging.

Location specific applications

There are a variety of applications which can benefit from you and others knowing your location. For you obvious ones are location related searching, and navigating from your current location to a new destination. For others, advertisers knowing your location and interests can provide more focused ads as you walk past. Also, if you are exposing a set of items you are looking to purchase, the stores nearby could respond with availability and pricing. Location specific chats could be created containing only people in the nearby area. A quick query to those nearby far a recommendation of a good restaurant would receive responses from people nearby.

Retrieving Cell Phone

One obvious advantage of having a built in means of telling you where your cell phone is when it is lost or stolen. Not only do you want to be able to find where you are when the phone is in your hand, but also when it is out moving about on its own. This functionality exists today on special kids phones. On the kids phones, parents can monitor via the web where their kids are. This capability is something a teenager would definitely not desire.

Context Aware Ringing

There are many locations that do not want your cell phone to ring. Movies, plays, and other public entertainment venues are one obvious location. In these venues the cell phone should automatically switch from ringing to vibrate. On planes, the phone should automatically disable the transceiver. Unfortunately in cases where the GPS unit is forced to turn off, some other external stimulus is required to turn it back on once you leave the plane.

Emergency Response

One of the reasons that government’s are pushing for GPS to be standard on cell phones is to improve the emergency response to those calling for help. When your phone number does not accurately identify where you are, it can be challenging to assist.

Not just where you are, but where you’ve been

In addition to where you are, where you have been is often useful. Sites which keep track of your location at various times would be able to provide track data which could be displayed on maps. This would allow for easy summarizing where you went and what you did on a vacation. Also it makes it easier to associate those vacation photos with where they were taken. However, it would also allow others to verify whether or not you were actually where you said you were.

Wrap-up

The ease with which current location can be determined and sent to others is increasing. With that will come many applications which take advantage of this information. However, there is a need to protect this information from others It will be interesting to see what new conveniences and inconveniences sharing of location will provide us.

How do you use your GPS enabled cell phone?

Quick to adopt

The last few weeks I have been traveling to various semi-conductor manufacturers, and many people have been showing off their 905i phones.  Just mentioning 905i is enough to get all the owners to pull them out.  At one dinner various executives were showing off their phones, which resulted in one of them having to issue an apology to his coworkers.  In his enthusiasm to show off his 905i, he had forgotten that his phone did not contain any of the integrated circuits they manufactured, while his coworkers had remained loyal.  They were quick to demo the TV and GPS capabilities, along with the ease of accessing the internet.  Although, they do admit that data rates are still too high to make it worth dropping their much cheaper PHS modems.  the phones have made one segment TV tuners a part of the local vocabulary.  The enthusiasm from 905i users because of all the new capabilities is very visible.

Cell phone travel agent

The value of the internet connectivity was demonstrated after a meeting we were attending finished early.  Upon entering the taxi everyone pulled out their cell phones and quickly changed their flights to an earlier flight.  After changing flights, they quickly viewed which seats were open, and made their selection.  By the time we arrived at the airport, their reservations were all updated, and all they had to do was place their phone over the scanner for both security screening, and boarding.  There was no need to contact anyone at a travel agent, or the airline.  The entire work of updating the travel schedules was completely outsourced to the traveler.

GPS deficiencies

While phone owners were quick to show off their GPS capabilities, these capabilities still do not yet equal those of a handheld GPS.  The 905i phones have navigation capabilities, but none of the users could figure out whether or not they could maintain track data or waypoints.  Also, noone was sure whether or not the images captured were automatically geocoded with where they were taken.  The technology integration is taking place, but the users and manufacturers have yet to realize the full advantage that this integration provides.

The majority of users do not think of GPS the way a camper would, but instead in terms of car navigation systems which tells how to get from here to there.  The ability to capture where you have been, or to maintain location data with pictures, is still not widely used or understood.  Since the phones provide GPS, camera, and internet capabilities, everything we have talked about GPSes could be handled within the 905i systems.  However, the software does not yet fully support all the desired functionality.  They lack the digital compass feature for determining direction, and altimeter.   There is still room for improvement in the integrated GPS functionality.

GPS Functionality still not widely available

1. Basic GPS handheld functionality
   • Capture waypoints
   • Capture tracks with position and time
   • Digital compass
   • Altimeter
2. Integrated altimeter
3. Geocoding of pictures with coordinates
4. Ability to transfer pictures and track data to online mapping services such as Google Earth and Maps

Portable Entertainment

Many of the new 905i models provide HDTV.  Some even allow for recording and transferring of the video.  With higher-resolution cameras, they continue the trend of providing quick access to camera and video recorder.  Watching movies on planes may not be an option since most cell phones do not allow for disabling of the transmitters, and even if they did many would likely forget to turn them off.  Phones often serve as mp3 players, and ring tones continue to become more and more individualized.  More and more games are available in mobile versions.  Playing on a 3-inch screen may not be the most enjoyable, but screen sizes are likely to increase.  Who wants to watch a HDTV video on a tiny screen?   Also, missing is the ability to transfer video on the phone to a nearby TV.

Take advantage of sound

All telephones require a microphone, and cell phones have been increasingly taking advantage of this.  For years now you can tell the phone who to dial, and it generally gets it right.  The 905i phones are offering English-Japanese translation using audio.  Also, on the future tech page at NTT, they are talking about integrating audio bar codes into newer phones.  Audio bar codes seem to offer a wide range of possibilities.  While the microphones are insufficient for recording music, they are more than adequate for voice.

Still farther to go

One way to address the small screen issue would be video projection.  This would allow for watching video in a a better way than the current 3-inch screens do.  Also, using hacks like those discovered for the Wii remote to allow for multi-touch input on any surface, the phone could serve as a very convenient computer interface.  Integration of digital compasses and barometers will bring the phone closer to hand held GPS units.  Better integration of the camera, GPS, and internet is still waiting.  With geocoded photos community services will be able to improve the travel preview experience by allowing better viewing of areas to visit.  While printers and keyboards exist to connect to your phone, the peripheral space is still widely unexplored.  As the phone capabilities increase, it will move closer and closer to serving as your personal digital assistant.

In the next article we’ll talk about how researchers are taking advantage of all those GPS enabled cellphones. Until then, post your comments on what functionality you are waiting to appear inside your cellphone.

Reference to Related Articles

Travel Yet to Be
Where was that picture taken?
Planning a Vacation
The All Knowing Digital Personal Assistant

Today there are many places where it is very hard to find helpful information. A perfect example is a recent trip to Misato, Japan to climb their 3,333 stone steps. There is not much in English related to this location. Particularly nothing that described the area, where to park, restaurants and facilities in the area, nearby attractions, whether there is food or water along the route, or even how long it would take to climb. Fortunately there were Japanese web sites which helped to fill in some of these blanks. Eventually searching in Japanese produced at least the location to search for in Google Maps. Since this is a popular attraction in Kumamoto, and there were fair sized buildings visible, we figured there would be no problem finding lunch in the area. Unfortunately, lunch turned out not to be available.

When we arrived at the 3,333 stone steps we learned that while there were restaurants, we were there off-season, and they were closed. Those in the know brought bento lunches, or camp stoves. For those of us visiting for the first time, there was not much else to do, but climb, and eat afterwards.

As we traveled we took pictures of the scenery, and the various landmarks along the path. These were easily viewed later in Google Earth with the techniques described in ‘Where was that picture taken?‘. Also while driving, we found several areas that looked promising for a future visit. Instead of marking them on the map, we just took pictures. Since the GPS was on, each picture was properly identified with its location. This made it very easy to look at the picture to remember the point of interest, and seeing it on the map helped to identify it. This same technique has come in handy while traveling by train to quickly mark areas of potential interest. While pictures taken out the window of a moving car or train may not be very good, they do make it easy to come back to visit later with either Google Maps or Earth.

Planning a trip has become easier thanks to the internet, but the experience still has a long way to go. The farther you venture from home, the less helpful information is available. When traveling to a foreign country, the chance of finding helpful information is complicated by language barriers. What you are looking for likely exists, but only on a page written in a foreign language. Its out there somewhere, but essentially buried in the haystack.

Over time community involvement will help to make more and more information about everywhere available. Have you traveled somewhere recently? If so, why don’t you see if your knowledge of the area now exceeds that of WikiTravel. If so, this would be your chance to help fill the void. Make sure to include items you wish you had been aware of before making the visit. Over time, a contribution here and there can make a difference. Your travel experiences will aid others, and theirs will help you. Also, by looking for things to write about, you will find yourself paying more attention to what you discover.

Vaccinations

MDTravelHealth.com has vaccination recommendations for many countries. In addition to web research, checking with your doctor for recommendations is also advised. Vaccinations can be tricky in that it is not only the country you are visiting, but what other countries you have visited recently can also affect what is required for entry into your destination country.

Currency Conversion

It is hard to keep track of which country uses what currency, so xe.com and Oanda.com provide assistance. But if you already know the currency then Google lets you do the conversion as ‘100 euro in dollars‘ to get a rough idea of the conversion rate.

Visa Requirements

Visa requirements vary from country to country and are complicated by the nationality of the passport you hold. Different countries have made different arrangements about whose citizens need entry visas and whose do not. Also the time allowed for a short term visit varies from country to country. Often the easiest way to figure out what is required is by visiting the embassy web sites of the countries you want to visit. EmbassyWorld makes finding these websites easy.

National Holidays

Sometimes you want to travel during a holiday in a foreign country, and other times you want to avoid being trampled as the locals rush to get to their vacation destinations. In either case a quick check at Q++Studio helps to find days to go or to avoid.

Weather

Sites like WorldClimate allow you to see the high, average, and low temperatures throughout the year.  Also check whether or not you will visit during the rainy season (search: [country] rainy season).

Embassy Contact Information

When traveling abroad you may encounter situations where you need assistance. Preparing the phone number for your embassy or consulate is worthwhile, even though you probably will not need it. Once again, EmbassyWorld can help track down the local web site containing the contact information.

Emergency Contact Information

Another essential that is not standardized around the world is how to call for help from police, fire, and ambulance. Preparing a list of these contact numbers for each country is recommended. Skytravel, and Wikipedia have two nice lists. In the event that you do not have the numbers on hand when an emergency strikes, then just find a native or the nearest pay phone. Pay phones tend to have the emergency numbers prominently displayed. But, since the pay phone is a dying breed in the age of cell phones, best to prepare the list ahead of time and place it in your wallet.

Driving Information

Driving rules differ from country to country. Do you drive on the left or the right? Is my International Driver’s License valid there? Where do I get an International Driver’s License? What do the traffic signs mean?

The best site I have found for information on driving in a foreign country is WikiTravel. The Driving-In.com site also has high level information for many countries. I am still looking for a good site that describes the various traffic signs of a country.

If you are going to drive in another country, make sure to pick up the International Driver’s License before you leave. Once you arrive at your destination it is too late.

Can I drink the water?

When traveling to a new country, one immediate concern is whether the water from the tap is drinkable. The best solution is to ask the locals, but a search of ‘[country] drinking water‘ will usually provide the answer.

Background Information

Before visiting a country, it is nice to get a little background on its history, customs, unique laws, and more. This is particularly good material for passing the time on the flight to the country. One would not want to make the mistake of getting caned for carrying a pound of chewing gum bought at Costo while entering Singapore, when a few moments would have shown that there are legal limits on the importing of chewing gum. A good background site is WikiTravel for travel related information for cities and countries. WikiPedia and the CIA Factbook are good references for more in-depth historical and economic information.

Packing Lists

Figuring out what to pack can be aided by the sites: ‘Don’t Forget Your Tooth brush‘ and ‘The Universal Packing List‘. These sites create packing lists, along with additional information about what to prepare for the trip.

Restrooms

Different countries have different style restrooms.  Some are much more public than others. The bathroom rating site ‘The Bathroom Diaries‘ can help get an idea of what to expect as you travel. Toilet seats do not exist everywhere.  Probably one of my most embarrassing moments traveling in Japan was walking up to a police box to ask the officer for directions, only to discover that it was just a restroom with a star on top with the officer inside using it.

Additional References

LifeHacker has two articles on preparing for a trip. Part one discusses preparing for the flight: reservations, seat assignments, packing, and the like. Part two discusses the day of the flight, and being on board.

Wrap Up

Traveling to foreign countries is fun, but can sometimes be intimidating. A little preparation and a lot of the foreignness will disappear, and you will have a great time. A little advance planning will give you interesting places to visit, food to try, and a chance to see that there is definitely more than one way to live. The web, GSM phones, and GPS can help make the trip easier, but there is still a long way to go before technology can provide more than assistance on a vacation. In reality, a vacation is more about the people and the scenery than technology. Enjoy your trip.

What preparation do you make before traveling internationally?

Geocoding the pictures

Geocoding is storing location coordinates with the picture.

The Window’s program GPicSync helps to determine where pictures were taken. The pictures must be in JPG format, and have the proper date and time recorded in its EXIF data. Since most digital cameras store their images as JPG with EXIF data, this should not be a problem. GPicSync uses the date and time information from the pictures, along with a set of GPX (GPS Exchange Format) track files from the GPS to assign coordinates to the picture. From the time stamp of the picture, it identifies which GPS track coordinate was the closest to where the picture was actually taken using the time and date information recorded in the GPX file.

Even if the cameras clock was not properly set, knowing what it thinks the time is versus what the GPS thinks the time is can be used to calculate a correction offset.

GPicSync is a free program available from sourceforge.net.

The ‘Pictures folder’ button allows selection of a single directory. The ‘GPS file’ button allows for selection of multiple GPX files or NMEA files. Make sure ‘add geonames and geotagged’ is checked to allow updating the picture’s EXIF data with the GPS coordinates. Since the GPS records time in UTC, and the camera in local time, you will need to provide the UTC offset where the pictures were taken. For the difference to nearest track point value, 300 is sufficient for most cases. However, if you go into a building and take pictures for a while, then bumping this up will allow for matching. This is to account for GPS not working well inside. For a recent trip to an aquarium, a difference to nearest track point value of 5000 seconds worked well. This large value was because we were inside for over an hour.

Press ‘Synchronise !’ and GPicSync will automatically attempt to match each photo with a point in your GPS track data. When it finishes, clicking on ‘View in Google Earth’ will push the track data, and associated pictures to the Google Earth application for viewing. However, I find it easier to examine the images and locations via Google Maps, which is where GeoSetter comes in.

Viewing images by location

GeoSetter is a free Window’s program for viewing geocoded images within Google Maps. It also provides the ability to match pictures to their GPS coordinates, but the interface is very error prone, and most of my Osaka pictures ended up in Berlin the first time I tried it. So for now I prefer GPicSync for updating the picture’s coordinates, and GeoSetter to put the images into their geographical context.

Download GeoSetter

GeoSetter’s interface is fairly simple. The thumbnails are what you find in Window’s Explorer thumbnail view, and performing a right click on an image gives exactly the same set of choices that Window’s Explorer provides. However, this is not very useful for an application’s context menu. The most reliable way I have found to get an image to appear is to select the image(s) of interest, and then press Ctrl+Z. Ctrl+Z is the same function provided by the magnifying glass with a single head in it to the right of the thumbnails. Multiple images can be selected from the thumbnail view by holding the Control (Ctrl) key while selecting each image. The map display uses Google Map’s interface.

Wrap Up

There currently are no cheap cameras which provide GPS capabilities. There are a few standalone GPS units such as Sony’s GPS receiver targeted towards cameras, but the reviews are not favorable. If you are planning your trip with a GPS in mind, then using that GPS to handle your photos is your best solution. Just make sure that you set your camera’s clock to match that of the GPS. After that, leave it to GPicSync to use your GPS’s tracks to set each picture’s location.

Once coordinates have been added to a picture, other tools can take advantage of this. Google’s Picasa can view geocoded images with Google Earth. Flickr and Panoramio are community sites which take advantage of the geographic data. Flickr also has an interface to help you locate where your picture was taken which may be sufficient for a small number of pictures.

Enjoy your trip, take lots of pictures, and when you get back it will be easy to record where those pictures were taken.

What are your recommendations for dealing with trip pictures?

Figuring out where to go

Recently I had a trip to Osaka, Japan. Before going I did a few quick Google searches to find interesting places to visit. The first search was ‘Osaka Points of Interest‘ which provided quick links for several areas such as ‘Osaka Aquarium‘, ‘Universal Studios Japan‘, and ‘Osaka Castle‘. If you are going to Osaka or Kyoto, then a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple is a must. A search on ‘Osaka temple‘ within maps.google.com brought up a list of candidates. Clicking on the lettered bubbles on the left hand results allowed for quick exploration of the various search results. Since clicking honors the current zoom level, best to zoom in first before selecting the bubbles so that the actual location stands out and is easy to see whether or not it could be interesting.

Simple searches will generally result in a list of popular places to visit. Say you you want to take a trip to Singapore. Then search terms would be ‘Singapore places of interest‘, ‘Singapore amusement parks‘, and ‘Singapore temple‘. If you still don’t find anything of interest, then just about any place followed by ‘tourist‘ generates a good set of choices. ‘Singapore Tourist‘ produces a few sites with lots of information.

Getting the coordinates

Once you know where you want to go, the next step is to find the destination coordinates. Google Maps doesn’t make this easy to do. However with the help of a bookmarklet, it is possible to get the coordinates for the center of the current map. To reduce error, zoom in on your destination as much as possible, and then invoke the bookmarklet by selecting it from your browser’s bookmarks.

Right click to add the Google Maps bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks. This bookmarklet was provided by uud.info, a source of Japan maps for Garmin GPS systems.

Once you have the coordinates saved away, it is pretty straight forward to enter them directly into your GPS unit, or into its management software.

Don’t forget to add any train stations, hotels, and anywhere else that you will need to visit on your trip.

Previewing your journey

Once you have entered the coordinates into the GPS or management software, it is pretty straight forward to export to Google Earth. My Garmin GPS came with MapSource software which directly exports to the Google Earth format. Double clicking on the exported file brings up Google Earth zoomed into the area around the selected points. Google also offers a Plus version of Google Earth that will directly download from Garmin and Magellan GPS units. Zooming in around each point helps to get an idea of what to expect, and also helps to reveal additional points of interest nearby. For example, near the hotel there were strange lane markings on the road, or looking at the aquarium showed that it was just right across the bay from Universal Studios.

By taking advantage of the satellite imagery from both Google Earth and Google Maps it is possible to quickly find places to visit, and to also identify areas that would not be worth visiting. Being able to quickly view the neighborhood around possible choices helps to figure out which train stations, or subway stops would be the most convenient. Sitting down with the kids to show them the area also helps to get them interested in the trip as well.

Convenience of having the sites prepared

After getting off the bullet train in Osaka, I wanted to put my luggage away in the hotel before going sight-seeing. Since this was my first time to the area, I wasn’t really sure which way to go. However, with the hotel already pre-programmed into the GPS, it did not take long to get a bearing on which way to start walking to get there. Since the hotel was not visible from the station, the GPS made it very clear where to go.

Another advantage of having the coordinates pre-loaded into the GPS was in the traditional kids question, “How much longer?”. Instead of answering, I just showed them how to change screens on the GPS, so they could see where they were on the map, and then switch to the estimated time of arrival page. So whenever they wanted to know how much longer, they could just glance at the GPS and figure it out for themselves. It also motivated them to pay more attention to the surroundings, since the map would show various items coming up, and they could just look outside to see if they could find them. It was not long before they were playing around with the GPS to figure out additional questions such as how far have we traveled from home, what time is sunrise tomorrow, and sunset today.

As your travel, there will also be locations you encounter that you hadn’t thought to pre-load into the GPS. Common locations would be bus stops, train or subway stations, restaurants you liked, and places you pass that might be of interest for a later trip or to research upon returning home.

Reviewing your trip

GPS units have the ability to record where you traveled with them. These tracks can also be exported, and loaded into Google Earth. Once loaded, it is easy to see how you traveled, where you got lost, and where you decided to go exploring. It also allows you to take a virtual tour by moving along the path you traveled. The default settings for the tour are a bit slow, so you will want to move the speed to maximum for really long trips. One part of the tour from the Osaka trip that was very painful to watch was the bullet train ride from Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu, to Osaka on the island of Honshu. The initial speed settings were about the same as originally traveled, so it seemed like it would take several hours to review. However, manually zooming around various points along the journey helped to get a better perspective of the areas we traveled through. It also allowed for discovering the hard to find train tunnel that connects the two islands.

Also, using the captured data it is pretty easy to identify where pictures were taken, and to geo-tag them with the location.

Wrap up

This article has discussed at a high level how to take some of the stress out of traveling. By pre-loading the location of places like your hotel, or capturing where you got off the bus or train, makes it easy to return to the place. This eliminates the need to guess which direction to go, and also the need to stop and ask for directions when you start to feel lost. You won’t feel lost because the GPS is guiding you along.

This preparation really only helps for the parts of your trip where you will be walking around. A hand held GPS really isn’t the right solution for driving, or taking the subway. It won’t help you to know the bus routes, or which trains to take.

Next time we will continue with the travel theme, and look for areas to make things easier.

• The advantages of interconnecting all our devices.
• How to deal with the ever growing number of cards we have to carry in our wallets.
• How to improve the shopping experience.
• The difficulty in keeping our clocks accurate.
• How digital books still have a ways to go.
• Challenges in powering our gadgets while traveling.
• The challenges of recording our lives.
• Issues associated with going through airport security.
• Ways music learning can be enhanced.
• Ways the pen and paper experience can be enhanced.
• How even though you are not recording your moments, someone else is.
• How cleaning robots have a ways to go.
• Integration of email, instant messaging, calendars, etc. still has a way to go.
• How our documents and pictures are available today, and likely gone tomorrow.
• Brief discussion on what is driving technology advances.

Over the coming months, we have many more topics to discuss. But for a brief time we will transition to discussing how simple tasks can benefit from better integration. Since the blog is still young, it will take time to gain an audience.  To help move things forward, we will get a bit more practical for the short term.

What topics are you interested in discussing as we move forward?

Back in the 80’s computers where running at 4.77 MHz, which means they could roughly perform four million simple math operations per second. Today processors are running around 2GHz or more, which is over 400 times faster. The numbers were 16-bits, making 65536 the largest number it could handle easily. Then came 32-bit systems making the largest integer around four billion, followed by the up and coming 64-bit processors whose integers are around 18 billion billion. Graphics cards can deal with 128-bit and 256-bit numbers which are numbers larger than we normally find comfortable to think about. Hard drives are getting up towards a terabyte which is a million million bytes, or enough to hold about 200 DVDs. A hard disk of twenty years ago would have struggled to hold just a handful of YouTube videos.  Hard disks have grown in capacity by nearly 100 thousand times over 30 years.  Computers of the early 1980s could be found with 48 kilobytes (49,152 bytes), whereas today 4 gigabytes (4,294,967,296 bytes) is becoming common. Memory has grown by over 80,000 times. A computer of the 80s cost around $5000, while one today is often under $2000. What is driving the need for more speed, memory, larger disks, etc?

In the early days of computers it was primarily businesses and governments that had pockets deep enough to invest in computing, and what they ended up with was large and heavy, but had little more capability than a calculator today. But over time technology doublings, let to shrinkage in size and weight, along with increases in capability. Going from vacuum tubes to microprocessors has resulting in many technologies coming and going, but along the way the need for more and more capability has remained. In the 70s computers started becoming something that hobbiests could get involved in, which opened the door for today’s personal computers. Personal computers did not originate from some grand plan in a corporation’s board room, but more from the garages of electronics enthusiasts. This experimentation made it possible for small businesses and families to afford computers. And this really opened the flood gates. No longer were computers for calculating artillery tables, or hidden away in universities or large corporations. Instead they were vying for space on the dining room table.

Computer then started to be used for games, personal finance, education, and so much more. Sure, many of these things were also going on in the corporate and university environments, but a 12-year old is so much more demanding than a professor ever could be. The early computers were pretty primative, and simple things like sorting a couple hundred names in an address list took forever. Also, the computer really could only do one thing at a time. Trying to watch a movie on the computer back in the early 80s would have been pushing things. Computer screens were amber and black, or green and black, or black and white, which did not really lend themselves to viewing movies or sharing photos. They also did not make very good music players. Yet, looking back there were definitely people who saw these limitations as challenges to be overcome.

The more one worked with a computer, the more its limitations stood out. There was definitely need for more memory, more speed, and more disk space. As newer computers started to feel faster, new applications would come along to bring the computer back to a crawl. This has not changed in over 20 years, and is unlikely to change in the next 20. Now we can easily listen to music, edit photos, balance our check books, edit letters, and so much more that would bring the early computers to their knees. And we can do all this at the same time, freely bouncing back and forth between dozens of programs running simultaneously. But there are still applications today that push even the best personal computer to their limits. Editing family videos is one example where computer processing power never seems to be enough, and with each new birthday, more and more footage accumulates to fill our hard drives. Also, computer games are moving closer and closer to being interactive movies. The ever increasing degrees of realism will be consuming ever increasing amounts of computation power.

Other areas where the computer hasn’t peaked is in helping us to manage all the information we accumulate on a daily basis. As people gather video, photos, documents, etc. keeping track of where everything resides gets harder and harder. Sure applications like google desktop, Picasa, and others help to manage the problem to a degree, but the problem is just going to keep getting harder, and we will always desire more intuitive ways to figure out where in the heck we put those all important files.

In countries like Japan the population is gradually declining, and the average age of the population is steadily increasing. As the population ages, more and more people will be needed to aid the elderly, but fewer will be available. This is one area where robot manufacturers are looking to get involved. Simple monitoring robots that can help to identify problems early are much easier than fully mobile robotic gardners and maids. Also, this demographic will likely be very receptive to technologies like self driving cars as they lose their driver’s licenses. I’m sure that when I’m eighty plus, the car will be a much safer driver that I will be. Over time as the body is able to do less due to age, and robots will be able to compensate.

This discussion has been a little long winded for a blog, so I’ll bring it to a quick close by saying that: convenience, safety, cost cutting, entertainment, community involvement, health, science, education, curiosity, and so much more are driving the singularity. There is always more to learn, more to integrate, and a desire for our gadgets to be smaller and lighter, to have longer battery life, to be more capable, and to easy keep us connected with our chosen communities. And if big companies don’t keep providing new bells and whistles, they would have to keep dropping their prices until today’s technology would be nearly free. Since they can’t run a business that way, they have to keep innovating just to keep up with their competitors. Which benefits us since we still end up with more capability at a cheaper price.