0018-9162/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society November 2013 95

Science Fiction Protot yPing

What if you could design a robot to suit your own personality and behaviors, just as you can make apps to do just about anything your imagination can dream up?

In September 2013, Jimmy the robot took New York City by storm. As I was carrying the little guy through a throng of

media to take the stage at the World Maker Faire, a reporter asked me, “What does your robot actually do?”

“Capture the hearts, minds, and imaginations of everyone he meets,” I replied, slipping into the talent-only green room that was actually gray. I was about to go on stage and launch the 21st Century Robot proj-ect to the world.

A ROBOT’S PAPARAZZI MOMENT

The crowd settled down as Dale Dougherty, CEO of Maker Media and publisher of Make magazine, intro-duced me. The audience clapped as I took the stage and explained who I was and what I do. I described the process of science fiction proto- typing and how we used it to de-velop a robot for this century.

A lot of the history is described in the March 2013 installment of this column, “Jimmy: The Robot That Changed It All” (www.computer.

org/csdl/mags/co/2013/03/mco2013030104-abs.html), where I introduced our robot friend. Born in science fiction prototypes nearly a decade ago, Jimmy came to life in collaboration with an international team of scientists, engineers, and educators. Over the years, I’ve partnered with Simon Egerton, Vic Callaghan, and the rest of the Creative Science Foundation (www.creative-science.org) to explore what it would be like to interact and live with a new kind of robot.

To help us visualize what it would look like, we brought illustrator Sandy Winkelman of Winkstink (winkstink.com), into the picture. He gave Jimmy and the other robots a face and made them real, working hard to remove any notion that they would be a threat to humans. He deliberately took a page from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, aiming for something more familiar and cute.

After several years of research and science fiction prototypes, it became clear to us that we had cre-ated a very different kind of robot, one that was meant to interact with

people. Prodded by Dougherty, I drafted a 21st Century Robot Mani-festo. “What makes your robots different than other robots?” he asked. “What’s the difference between a 20th century robot and a 21st century robot?” “Well … ,” I started and out popped, “a robot is: imagined first; easy to build; com-pletely open source; fiercely social; intentionally iterative; filled with humanity and dreams; thinks for her/him/itself.” And every single one of those points is true.

Humans build tools and steep them with culture, ideals, and dreams for the future. Technology is no different. It’s a tool, but it isn’t separate from us—rather, it’s an ex-tension of who we are. Accordingly, you can design your robot to suit your own personality and behav-iors, just as you can make apps to do just about anything your imagi-nation can dream up.

Back in front of the crowd in New York, I explained to the audi-ence how we took Jimmy from the original science fiction prototypes and illustrations and brought him

Jimmy Takes ManhattanBrian David Johnson, Intel

Science Fiction Protot yPing

96 computer

to life. Working with toymaker and 3D designer Wayne Losey of Dynamo Development Labs (www.dynamodevlabs.com), we evolved Jimmy’s design to the point where we could use a consumer 3D printer. Before talking about that process any further, I dashed backstage and emerged from the wings with a two-foot-tall exoskeleton and placed it center stage. “I want to introduce you to Jimmy,” I declared.

The entire audience of experi- enced engineers and makers

collectively gasped upon seeing Jimmy standing on the stage. Then the digital cameras and smart-phones started to click away. It was a little overwhelming to have a pa-parazzi moment on stage at a Maker Faire, but Jimmy had arrived!

THE MEDIA BLITZ BEGINSI spent the next three days in a

madcap media tour across Man-hattan. From curmudgeonly news anchors to hotshot new media CEOs, Jimmy charmed them all. Not too

bad for something that couldn’t move yet.

“So tell me,” one news commen-tator asked. “What will he do?”

“He’s like a smartphone with legs,” I replied. “The apps on your smartphone are wildly different from the ones on mine. Why should our robots be any different?”

The commentator wasn’t con-vinced. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me one thing he might actually do.”

“Imagine you’re caring for an aging family member,” I began.

Jimmy takes Manhattan. Clockwise from the top left: Jimmy looking from the green room to the set of CBS This Morning; the original illustration by Sandy Winkelman; on the set of Fast Money; Jimmy and Dale Dougherty at the World Maker Faire; Jimmy in a taxi looking nervous; the 3D design by Wayne Losey; Jimmy outside the New York Stock Exchange; Jimmy and Peter Cashmore, CEO of Mashable; and in the center, me and the man in front of Fox News headquarters.

November 2013 97

“Most of us will experience that in our lives. It’s important and a lot of work. Just getting the people we love to remember to take their medica-tion can be challenging. We need to call and remind them, or maybe get them a smartphone or a com-puter with an app that can remind them. Now imagine we had Jimmy.” I pointed to the little guy. “Imagine we gave Jimmy a little app so that at 8 am and 8 pm each day he would walk up to grandma and say, ‘Don’t forget to take your heart medica-tion, grandma.’ And then he walked away.”

“Ah!” the commentator’s eyes lit up.

“It’s a completely different way for us to interact with technology,” I fin-ished. “And it’s much more human. It can make people’s lives better.”

From there, we were whisked off to Wall Street for a hardnosed look at the particulars of the ro-bot’s design. As we were exiting the studio, technicians and people from the office came out of their cubes to have their pictures taken with Jimmy.

Next, we rocketed uptown to the NASDAQ building for a live panel discussion about how we planned to get Jimmy walking and talking.

“Right now, there are 10 teams of makers and students designing 10 versions of Jimmy,” I explained. “In the last few months of 2013, we’ll get together and put on some Robot Maker Faires. We’re going to give people the design and the software and have them build their own 21st century robots. The only thing we ask is that if they build something great, please share it, and we’ll make it a part of the project. We’ll put it in the book and give them credit.”

As part of the big project launch, we released an early version of a book that you can download for free at www.robots21.com. The book, called 21st Century Robot, has four science fiction prototypes that de-scribe Jimmy and the rest of the

robots, along with an overview of the manifesto and four “how to” chapters that show people how to build the robots that they’ve read about in the prototypes. But be-cause it’s an early release version, and we’re open sourcing the project, we don’t know all the details about building the robots—the book is very much a work in progress.

In May 2014, after all the Robot Maker Faires and online collabo-rations, we’ll publish a completed book with contributions from people around the world. We’ll also see if we can pull together a kit, culled from the best ideas of people build-ing Jimmys and other 21st century robots, so that anyone can buy a battery, the servos, and the other components needed to build and 3D print their own robot.

JIMMY HITS THE BIG TIMEThe hard thing about doing morn-

ing TV shows is that you have to get up early—I’m talking crazy early. It doesn’t mean much to the robot, but it takes a toll on the humans.

Jimmy was headed for CBS This Morning. He had a car, a driver, and a date with the two hosts. By this point in the media tour, I was just along for the ride. As he got mobbed upon arrival, I stood outside and took a picture of the scene. Our little robot had truly arrived.

When we hit the stage and chatted with the hosts, they loved the idea of a hyperpersonalized robot that could weave itself into the fabric of our lives. This strange little robot that did strange little things, this piece of technology born in fiction and de-veloped through an international

collaboration of science fiction pro-totyping, had become real. It hadn’t become real as a piece of technol-ogy—that would come later, when he started walking and talking. But he became real in the imaginations of everyone who met him. They could see what it would be like to live in a world in which we casu-ally interacted with robots. They could imagine how this two-foot, 3D-printed exoskeleton would one day be real, and they were excited by it. The physical Jimmy that I gingerly carried as we dashed around New York had become a physical science fiction prototype. When people saw him, they felt like they were looking directly at the future—and it excited them.

The highlight of Jimmy’s intro-duction to the world was my final day in the Big Apple, just after CBS This Morning. In our booth at the World Maker Faire, I wanted to talk to people about the possibilities of a 21st century robot and what they might want their own robot to do. We were swamped. Seemingly every-one had watched TV that morning and were headed our way to get their picture taken with Jimmy or to get the early release copies of the book so they could, say, get their students involved and building robots.

On this last day, I was losing my voice from talking for three days straight, but still floored to see so many people excited and wanting to learn more about the robots.

Then a mom passed by with her eight-year-old son.

“See, honey,” she said. “Here’s the robot from TV.”

The boy looked up at Jimmy. I

to readers

I’d love to hear from you! What role does imagination play in your research and development? Was science fiction your inspiration to become an engi-

neer? Does science fiction drive you today?

Send your science fiction prototypes to brian.david.johnson@intel.com.

Science Fiction Protot yPing

98 computer

placed the robot on a stool so the kid could get a better view.

“This is Jimmy,” I smiled. “He’s an open source, 3D printable robot. We’re going to design and build him with students and makers, so we’re asking everyone to tell us what they think a 21st century robot should be. How can he be your friend?”

The boy looked at me with a dead serious face and said, “You can’t design robots to be our friends. When robots have free will, you won’t be able to control them. You can’t guarantee that they’ll be friendly. You can’t guarantee they won’t harm humans.”

Wow! Here was an eight-year-old in the middle of the swarming excite-ment of the Maker Faire schooling me about the fundamentals of free will and artificial intelligence. I’ve written peer- reviewed scientific papers on this subject, and here’s someone four feet tall putting me in my place. He was so serious. No smile, all business.

I crouched down to the boy’s

level. “But what if we design the software that runs them? Humans design robots, which means we get to decide what they do,” I explained. “So what if we designed them so that all they really wanted to do was to be social with us? What if we de-signed them so that they wouldn’t want to harm us, but instead just wanted to be our friends?”

The kid paused with a tense brow and replied, “Okay, I’ll give you that.”

Then he moved on to the gumball machine.

We live in a world with an entire generation of kids who have never known a

time without the Internet. I remem-ber those pre-Internet days—they were cold, dark, and boring. What innovations will this new crowd come up with? They’re used to find-ing any information at any time and communicating with anyone else on Earth at any time. Now envision a generation that has never known

a time when they couldn’t imagine, build, program, and live with robots. What will that crowd produce?

It’s my job—and yours—to be the tool makers for this new genera-tion. They’ll build our future, and we need to enable them to imagine a far grander future than we have today.

Brian David Johnson, Science Fiction Prototyping column editor, is Intel’s first futurist. Johnson is charged with developing an actionable vision for computing 10 to 15 years in the future. His latest book, Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian and a Futurist Journey through Steampunk and into the Future of Technology (Make, 2013), is available on Amazon (www.amazon.com/Vintage-Tomorrows-Historian-Steampunk-Technology/dp/1449337996). Contact him at brian.david.johnson@intel.com or follow him on Twitter @IntelFuturist.

Selected CS articles and columns are available for free at http://ComputingNow.computer.org.

The Technology Trends You Need— When You Need Them We Deliver!Introducing

The customized information revolution is in your hands. That’s right, you simply choose three subject areas from 30 of today’s hottest technology trends. We do the rest.

Each month we’ll search through our 13 leading-edge publications and 200 conferences to deliver to your inbox the top on-trend, peer-reviewed articles and papers in your chosen subject areas. With myComputer you get to select 24 of these articles or papers per year. Plus you also receive the digital edition of Computer magazine.

Go to mycomputer.computer.org. You’ll agree. myComputer is a technology professional’s best friend.

Special Introductory Price $59 Member Price $39

$45 $25