Who decides what robots look like?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm, and if that music sounds a little tinny today, it's because it's coming out of a robot, a robot called an Omron. This one's name is Gulliver, and it works at Global Foundries at a fabrication foundry in Vermont, and its job is to transport things from one place to another. It's kind of mad at me right now.

Today we're going to talk all about robots. Going to 973, doc.

Global Foundries is a big company that operates around the world, making microchips that go in everything from cell phones to cars to maybe the tablets you're using. The factory in Vermont is called Fab9. It's a really big place. So sometimes they use robots to help carry boxes from one place to another. There are robots in a lot of their tools that do repetitive tasks that would be really hard for a human to do the same way every time.

And sometimes they even have robots that go around rooms sensing the temperature of the equipment to make sure it's not overheating. So since it's just a couple of miles from our headquarters at Vermont Public, we thought we'd go to Global Foundries to learn more about robots and to get some answers to the questions you've been sending us.

The robot playing the But Why theme song is one of the robots that takes boxes of microchips from one part of the facility to another. It looks a little bit like a filing cabinet on wheels, but it has big googly eyes stuck on the front of it. As you heard, it plays music as it roams the hallways. And if you get in its way, it very politely says, excuse me.

This type of robot is called an Omron, and this one in particular was named Gulliver, after a fictional character that travels the world. Gulliver might seem like it's moving around of its own free will, but it's actually been programmed by an engineer, and you can see the marks from its wheels all through the hallways as it travels the same path back and forth day after day.

One of the people in charge of programming robots like Gulliver is Adrian Plouffe, a factory automation engineer at Global Foundries. Adrian told us a little bit about how Gulliver works. It's called an Omron robot. What does Omron do? So Omron robots are mobile platforms for our site. So picture it as a cart with a shelf on top. And that robot can go to different locations and pick up and drop off product for us.

Why wouldn't you want a person to do that? So our people here are very busy actually operating the tools on the process floor. So why would we have them carry things from one end of the site to the other, which can take 15 or 20 minutes when we could have a robot do that for us. We did not want to keep Gulliver from its work for too long, so Adrian pushed a couple of buttons and Gulliver left on its way. Go ahead, Gulliver. Playing the But Why theme song. See you later.

We decided we'd better get out of the way of any other robots or people moving through the halls. So Adrian and I went to a quieter room where we were joined by another engineer so he could answer your robot questions and find out a little bit more about what robots do at this company. Hi.

Hi, I'm Lucy White and I'm a process engineer at Global Foundries. My job means that I am in charge of a certain kind of equipment and making sure that it's running correctly and if it's not working properly, I try to figure out what's wrong with it. You both work at this place called Global Foundries, but it's hard to tell from the name

what it makes and why you need robots. We produce microchips that go in all types of technologies that are distributed around the world. Specifically, Global Foundries in Burlington is a 200 millimeter semiconductor foundry. And when we say microchip, micro means small. So these are very tiny little things that go in technology. How big are they? That 200 millimeter, it's hard to understand what that means.

Yeah, so the wafer that we do our production on, so think of that like our piece of paper you're drawing on, is eight inches across. But within that eight inch shape, we have incremental lines where all this data gets transmitted through and all these little wires. And those can be smaller than like your piece of hair. It could be 10,000 times smaller than a piece of hair.

So on that one big, we call them wafers, the piece of paper, there can be up to 20,000 microchips on that one piece of paper. And they're not really paper, right? No, they're actually made on silicon. What's silicon? Silicon is a semiconductor, meaning that it both can conduct electricity and cannot conduct electricity. Why is that important that it does both things? It's important because that's how we're able to turn things on and off.

To put all of that simply, Global Foundries makes microchips. Microchips are tiny pieces of technology that go in all kinds of devices, from your electronic games to the cell phones your adults use, laptop computers, modern cars, the International Space Station orbiting the Earth.

They're kind of like the miniature brains of your electronic devices. Each microchip is a series of electronic circuits on a small flat piece of silicon or other semi-conducting material. That means a material that can both move electricity through it, but can also act as an insulator, stopping electricity from moving through it. So it can be turned on and off.

Microchips can store a ton of information in very small packages. So at a place like Global Foundries, they're making these complicated microchips all day and all night, and they use robots to help build the microchips and do other things. We definitely have hundreds of types of robots. I bet we have somewhere less than a thousand, but definitely more than 700 individual robots here on site. What do robots do here?

Robots here help us in many different ways. First, robots can be used to help making sure that our larger pieces of equipment are working properly and help the maintenance team then fix the robots if they're not.

Most of our robots are helping us move the wafers that we were talking about or the boxes that carry all the wafers from place to place. Our fab is very big and so humans no longer have to walk all the way across the fab every single time. We can give them to robots and have the robots move them for us. My name is Elisha. I'm five years old. I live in Clarksville, Michigan. How do robots work?

I'm from Los Angeles, California. I'm four. How do robots work? I am Hank. I am five years old. I live in Green Bay, California. I want to know how robots work. My name is Luca. I live in South Lyon, Michigan. And I would like to know how robots work.

My name is James. I'm six and I live on St. Jacobs, Ontario. My question is, how do you program a robot?

So how do robots work? That's an awesome question. Robots work by being given commands. So for example, go here, pick something up here. A lot of our robots work kind of like a taxi cab service if you want to think about it that way. They said, hey, I have to pick something up here and then drop it off here. And then once they arrive at their drop off location, they go right back into kind of the flow where they say, okay, I can now pick something else up from somewhere else and drop it off somewhere different.

When you say they respond to commands, if I go up to a robot here and I say, "Move!" Is that the kind of command you mean? They might not listen to that command. Most of our robots work off being sent like a text or an email that has the list of say, "Hey, here's where you're going to pick up and then here's where you're going to drop off." But we do have other ways of interacting with these robots where we can go up to a screen and push a couple of buttons that tell it where to go and then where to end up.

It's all computer programming. That's essentially the language that robots speak or respond to. Digital commands that help a robot understand how to respond in various situations. Here's a question from Nicholas.

And I'm five years old. I live in Washington, D.C. How does remote control send signals to robots? So when Nicholas asks, "How do remote controls send signals to robots?" How are the robots getting those texts and those signals? It's a little bit of a tricky answer. Think of a remote controller like a magic wand. When you point the controller at the robot, what you're actually doing is sending invisible waves with information on it.

The robots then take that information, turn it into the commands, and then do what we want it to do.

And that's what we do at Global Foundries and what a microchip is. The microchips help send the signals and receive the signals for the robots to do their jobs. So it's kind of blowing my mind in that the robots are helping to make microchips, but the microchips are what are controlling the robots to begin with. So they're kind of making something that's already in them. It's like a full circle. Chicken and roe. Yeah, it's pretty crazy when you think about it. I'm Hughes, and I'm four years old. I love it.

And I live in Chattanooga and I want to know how are robots controlled?

How are robots controlled? You mentioned commands. They respond to commands, but are we always using little controllers to make them move? Not always. So that's the most fun way to do it, I think, because we can literally use a video game controller to drive the robot, or there's buttons that tell it to do all the different things that it can do. But we can also, like I said earlier, send an email or a text command to it, and then eventually we can get to the point where the robots...

can just kind of operate on their own. They know that they get a call or a response from something that says, "Hey, I need you to do this, but do it in 10 minutes or do it in an hour." I'm Ezra. I'm from Ogden, Utah. I'm four years old. And how do robots move?

Robots move a ton of ways. But the two things that a robot needs to move are it needs a power source and then needs a way to convert the power from that source into movement. So that could be like a battery and an electric motor, or you could think about it like an engine in the car, or it could even just be like wind and, you know, like a windmill, the way it can convert wind power into movement.

And some of the ways that robots are being developed is to move in new kinds of ways because early robots, ones that moved on their own, would often encounter an obstacle and they couldn't do anything about it. And some of the new robots that are being developed can go on uneven ground and can climb sort of rocks and boulders without just tipping over, which is pretty wild to think about that nobody's telling them, look out, there's a rock.

they can sense it and know how to actually move without a human lifting them up and making them move.

What do robots do generally around the world? How do we think about what a robot is and how it's different from just a tool or a computer? Well, I think that tools help humans do a job easier. So in a way, robots are kind of like tools. However, if you had to point out some differences, I would say that robots use power

and robots are able to do the task without a human having to be right there. So if you think about a screwdriver and a drill, a screwdriver you have to hold in your hand and turn it in order to get that screw in. A drill is powered and can help do that task a lot easier. And then if we had a robot with a drill on it, we would be able to set up that robot to be drilling without a human having to stand next to it.

So a robot is a tool, but it's also capable of doing complex tasks through that programming Adrienne was talking about earlier without a human having to move it. It moves automatically, and many advanced robots can sense things in the environment and act differently depending on the situation. It can sometimes be tricky to decide exactly what is and isn't a robot. Like, is your car a robot?

Maybe not. Maybe it's a tool that helps you get from one place to another and you're the one or your adult is the one pushing the pedal and steering the steering wheel. But some cars can drive without someone pushing the pedal or without someone even steering. You may have heard of driverless cars, but even in cars with drivers, sometimes the car will alert the driver if they're veering off to the side and correct on its own.

or will stop on its own if it senses an object behind the car when the car is reversing, or you could take your hands off the wheel altogether and some cars will do a tricky parallel park for you while you are just sitting in the driver's seat.

So, are they robots? I think a car can be a robot. I think as technology gets more and more advanced, it becomes a little bit trickier to define what's a robot and what's a tool. Hi, my name is Joaquin and I'm six years old. And I'm Romina, I'm Joaquin's mom and I'm 37 years old.

I live in Australia, specifically in Richmond with my mama. My question is why are robots made out of metal and who decides what they look like? Robots are made out of metal is an awesome thought to have because metal is a great material to work with. It's strong, it lasts up against wear and tear. It can also be shaped in a lot of different ways. You know, we can bend it and cut it and weld it and even form it with some really fancy CNC machines.

In addition to metal though, sometimes we need to think about how heavy a robot's going to be because it has to be able to move. So sometimes we use other materials like plastic or carbon fiber where we can also make robots lighter and you know so they can have different properties or different abilities to be able to move and kind of seamlessly work. Well Joaquin also wants to know though who decides what a robot looks like? So what really decides what a robot looks like is the process of deciding what the robot's going to do.

So you think a robot that looks like, I don't know, a whale, probably wouldn't be too helpful for cleaning your room. So you need to think about it in a way that says, "Okay, a robot that's gonna help me, you know, pick up my toys probably needs to have an arm on it." So that all of a sudden, great, now we have an arm on this robot. Is my room upstairs? Now the robot has to have legs so it can go upstairs instead of wheels.

But the person who actually puts those thoughts together now are engineers or what we call roboticists. And they're the people who are imagining what all these devices can look like and how they work and actually building them. Coming up, we're going to meet a robot dog.

This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. We're talking about robots today with engineers Adrian Plouffe and Lucy White at the place where they work, a microchip factory in Essex Junction, Vermont, called Global Foundries. The whole time I've been talking with Adrian and Lucy in this nice, quiet conference room, there's been a robot in the room with us.

rolled over on its side. But here's the thing. The robot is shaped to look like a dog. So it's like we've had this pet dog rolled over on its side, sleeping next to us as we're chatting. Adrienne told me before we got started that this type of robot is called Spot. And this particular one was given the name Squidward. That's a character in a cartoon show called SpongeBob SquarePants.

At some point, I just had to ask, can we talk about Spot? Of course we can talk about Spot. He is a good boy sitting right there. Spot is an autonomous mobile robot from a company called Boston Dynamics. So autonomous means this robot doesn't need to be told explicitly where you can and can't walk.

he has the ability to see around him as he's moving and able to determine, "Hey, can I walk down this aisle or can I go up these stairs?" Spot we use to look at or inspect our equipment. So one of the big components we use at this facility is we move a lot of water and chemicals. And to do that we need pumps, which can push that liquid to the different types of equipment.

and we need to maintain that equipment. So Spot has a thermal camera on his head, picture it like a thermometer that you can use from a distance, and he can take pictures of that equipment for us and then export them to my computer or Lucy's computer or even to an AI-driven data aggregation system where we can have the computer tell us, "Hey, is this piece of equipment running too hot or too cold?"

So instead of having me walk around our basement and inspect hundreds of possibly thousands of different pieces of equipment, I can only look at the five or six that Spot thinks might have a problem.

And so robots can also do things that are dangerous for people to do. And you can send a robot like Spot in to check things out and walk around and see if everything is safe or if it had a different sensor on it to see what chemicals are in the air and keep people safe so that they're not having to be in that environment. Absolutely. Can you show us how it works? We can absolutely talk about how it works. Adrian pushed a few buttons on his controller, which looked a lot like a gaming controller or a small tablet.

And this robot dog rolled over and stood up. Right now, I am making a move. When we actually put him to work, he does it all on his own, kind of like a Roomba. And what does Squidward do if somebody walks in front of him? He stops. Can we try it? Absolutely we can. Okay, you have him walk and I'll stand in front of him. You want to stand in front of him? Yeah. So all I'm going to do is just say, Squidward, go forward. And I'm not going to do anything else. Okay. He's better behaved than my dog. Okay.

He's very good. And all of these settings we can control. So we say, hey, maybe that was too close. We can say, nope, don't get that close. Stay a little further away or take like a wider path. So the reason that he looks like a dog is why? Mother Nature is an incredible inventor. So why would we have to go and try to design something when we already have a design that's been thought of for us that we know physically is functional?

So if we don't have to do any of the work to design what like a knee looks like or what a shoulder looks like, why would we do all that work? And then, so can Squidward go upstairs? Squidward can go up and downstairs. Wow. And this looks like Squidward's head, but is this part of the tool? This is part of the tool. So that is the arm that is attached to Spot. So the arm adds a whole bunch of additional capabilities

to what he can do. So now instead of just walking around and taking pictures, Spot can go open doors and close doors. It can pick up things or like flip switches or valves for us too. And when it's time for Squidward or Spot to go to sleep, how do you put him to sleep? He does it on his own. He goes back to his dock, sits down, charges up, and then he's ready for the next mission. Can you make him roll over? Absolutely we can make him roll over. What kind of dog doesn't roll over?

And one of his favorite things? Belly rubs. Spot is really cool. And it does look and move like a dog. Although it has a giant neck and a grasping arm instead of a head, which can be kind of weird looking. But still, you could easily think of Spot like a pet dog and imagine it's happy when it gets a belly rub or get annoyed when someone steps in front of it. That idea that

inanimate, non-human, non-alive objects have thoughts and feelings like humans do is called anthropomorphism. It's a tendency that we have to relate to non-human things by assuming that they're like us. But Spot isn't human. It's not even a dog.

It can move on its own. It can climb stairs and avoid obstacles. And Lucy and Adrian say lots of their robots seem to have their own personalities. So is Spot and our other robots alive? My name is Raphael. I'm four years old. I live in Melbourne, Australia. And my question is, are robots alive? I don't think that they're alive.

When you think about it, humans have to build a robot, turn it on, and tell it what to do. A robot can't think by itself, and it doesn't eat food.

So, I don't think they're alive. And if you think about a car, a car won't turn on or move until a human gets into it and drives it. So, based on that, I don't think it's alive. Robots are not alive. They are built and controlled by humans. They don't breathe on their own. They don't eat. They can't reproduce and create new robots. And they don't have consciousness, meaning they don't have a sense of themselves or have emotions. But it can be confusing.

Some robots are designed to look like they're alive. They can react to new situations without having to be programmed to do something specific. And as technology improves, robots can even seem like they're thinking and responding to us on their own. Plus, there are tons of movies and books that imagine what it would be like if robots came to life and maybe took over the world.

Yeah, I think that that is interesting that we sometimes will say a robot's seeing something or it's thinking or it knows to do something and does something that we didn't expect it to. But really, humans are the ones with the brains and the imagination. So when we see a robot that's moving on its own, we think, oh, it can see and oh, it can hear. But really, you just have to remember that humans are the ones that built the robots and put the sensors in the robots to tell it what to do.

My name is Rohan and I live in New York City and I'm five years old. Do robots cry? No, robots don't spontaneously cry. At least not because they're upset or sad or anything like that. But I'm sure someone has made a robot that sheds tears because it's been programmed to do that. Before we stop this episode today, Lucy and Adrian wanted to make sure that if you're interested in robots, you know that there are lots of ways to work with them as you get older.

Lucy and Adrian are both engineers, and they recommend studying engineering as a good pathway to a career in robotics.

But a good place to start is just having fun in science and math, and even playing games like Legos or taking a computer programming course after school. I would ask your parents to look for different after school activities that might be under the name STEM. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. At Global Foundries, we work with different schools and libraries to put on after school activities for kids in our area to play with robots.

Having a passion for robots is the most important thing. Science and math is hard, and it takes practice to be able to do it well. So if you don't think you're good at science and math, don't be discouraged. Thanks to Lucy White and Adrian Plouffe at Global Foundries for helping us understand how robots work. Extra thanks to Gina DeRossi, Marvin Monticue, and Otto Funke at Global Foundries for helping us get access to these robots.

That's it for this episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are along with your question. Then email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. We can't answer every question we get, but we love listening to all of them and definitely use them to help understand what we should be doing episodes about.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public. Special thanks to Joey Palumbo and Kaylee Mumford for their help with this episode. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds and we're distributed by PRX. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. ♪

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