The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Leonardo Books) [Hardcover]

The anthology of Prof. Ken Goldberg discusses the questions such as What is the essential relationship between distance and knowledge? How to technologies affect this relationship? How does technology alter our perceptions of distance and scale and our understanding of truth? What are the limits to the new technologies and how do they depend on existing human perceptual, cognitive and active capacities? How much can a human being change, even when equipped with an armory of telerobotic apparatus and how much can the concept of being human change?

"The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on the Net" documents the projects and provokes thought with critical essays on its philosophical and cultural implications.

The book is highly recommended to philosophers, media artists and robotics engineers.

Webcams are a set of wired eyes giving expansion to our personal space and time envelope. The cyberspace of the net operates more or less independent of physical space, terrain, or geography and the built landscape meaning cyberspace attempts to symbolize reality in virtual. The "World Wide Web" provides inexpensive and ready access to a global computer network. Web cameras have are on interpretative aspect bridging the gulf between reality and virtual reality, mapping reality into cyberspace. People all over the world are able to keep in touch with everyone electronically. Goldberg says, "our mind expanding to all parts of the Universe", supposing the world to be produced by our mind, but how does the mind justify reality? Decartes skepticism possesses the possibility of deception, stating, "since senses can malfunction, all information about the body and the external world is intrinsically unreliable." One thought is that reliability is established through rational justification. Epistemology attempts to determine how and to what extent our everyday beliefs about the world can be justified. Conventionally, philosophy abandoned Epistemology declaring there must be something wrong with the view that the mind as having only an indirect access to reality. Our basic relationship to reality is direct. Global skeptical doubts are incompatible with everyday experience. Humans are essentially a being (physical and spiritual) in the world, and assume roles of leadership. Cognition does not defined existence nor does the ability to mentally abstract. Without roles of leadership, morality, and law - chaos would clashes between spheres of intelligent agents. "I think therefore I am" is incomplete because it does not explain how humans make sense of everyday things and themselves and their relationship to other humans. Albert Borgman said, "the presentation of reality in cyberspace is shallow and discontinuous". Continuous experiences, connected meaning, and aesthetic value are critical themes for appreciating man existence. Goldberg believes that Epistemology will return in the age to protect against deception in the age of Virtual reality.

Technology has been condemned as the spoiler of the garden and yet embraces, on the other hand, as necessary too getting back to nature. Technology distills or amplifies certain interpretative aspects of the natural world.

Personal Roving Presence devices ProPs are simple, inexpensive, internet controlled, untethered tele-robots. ProPs do not exist in the virtual world, they exist in the physical world. ProP is an individual presence, and represents a unique remote participant. ProPs are cubist statues, with rearrangements of face and arms, and separation of eyes from gaze; they support gaze, proxemics (body location), gesture, posture, and dialogue. The controller or designer of ProPs discovers the importance of various sensing and action channels on higher behaviors by pulling switches and looking for change at the higher levels becoming students learning by decomposing social behaviors. The pilot is interacting with the control interface rather than people, however, if the human-machine coupling is tight enough, and if the pilot is expert at using the machine, the interface disappears.

In 1995, remote web users were querying Mechanical Gaze, commanding its six degree-of-freedom robotic arm to browse and explore real remote artifacts and tangibles, at museums associate with UC Berkley. In 1996, Space Browsers when airborne and they consisted of a helium filled blimp with several light weight motors directly connected to propellers and onboard the blimp were a color video camera, microphone, speaker, simple electronics, and radio links. The design was small enough to allow navigation down narrow hallways, up stairwells, into elevators, and through doorways. Blimp behavior and appearance made them non-threatening and easily approachable. A user on the internet can pilot the blimp using a simple Java applet on the browser. Wireless signals transmitted to the blimp guide it up and down and left and right. The pilot observes the real world from the vantage of the blimp while listening to the sounds and conversations within its proximity and converse with groups and individuals by speaking into the microphone. Today's social machines are toys with computer cores and capabilities like touch sensing and speech. The can participate in reasonable complex interactive behaviors and are capable of situational activity. The toy response by touching by talking or playing encouraging the child to use touch to communicate, yet the toy can not hug back. Eventually toys will be able to hug back or be remotely controlled to hug back through remote control by a parent and be capable of generating familiar voice patterns. Tele-touch connects two simple touch sensors and haptic actuators together to create Datamitt. A participant in Los Angeles places his hand inside a tube and squeezes and a participant in New York will feel the pressure. The success of this simple inexpensive low-resolution device is promising.

IRobot PackBot is used by the military to assist with Ordinance disposal. It has a robotic arm that can be remotely control reaching as far as 2 meters in any direction. It can traverse stairs, curbs, rubble, rocks, sand and mud. It has a high power rotating and pan zoom camera (300x) and a laser range finder to help size objects and determine position.