Robotic Cheetah And Other Advanced ‘Terror Bots’ In Development
BigDog robot. Photo: Boston Dynamics
Discovery News reports on more nightmare-fuel for believers in the robopocalypse:
A headless metal warrior stomps towards you, shooting. Fortunately, you’ve been training for a marathon and easily jet off to safety down an alleyway. But wait -– now a metal cheeta-bot is after you, racing faster than your puny legs can go. As the space between you and the galloping beast closes, you round a corner, see a door and dive through. It slams behind you. As you freeze, holding your breath, the robotic cat passes by outside with a wake of metallic echoes.
Relieved, you exhale into the dark. A fatal mistake -– outside, another robot has detected your breath and alerted the enemy to your location …
Waking up from this nightmare is a way to save yourself, for now, but in fact all three ‘terror’ bots it featured are based on actual prototypes being developed in…
The Race To Built A Computer That Acts Perfectly Human
Computers may now be able to win on Jeopardy, but they still cannot quite trick us into thinking that they are flesh and blood. Writing for the The Atlantic, Brian Christian discusses taking part in the annual Turing Test, the goal of which is to design a computer that thinks and talks as a human does, and to fool judges into believing that they are chatting with a living person:
Each year for the past two decades, the artificial-intelligence community has convened for the field’s most anticipated and controversial event—a meeting to confer the Loebner Prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing Test. The test is named for the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated…
Designers Create Meat-Powered Robots
Discovery News provides the latest on the impending robo-pocalypse:
A fly-catching clock, pest-control lampshade and mouse-eating table all together make for one hungry living room. But if you’re into cyborg, self-sufficient furniture, incorporating carnivorous robots into the design is one way to go.
Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots from Auger-Loizeau on Vimeo.
Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau are working on it. As part of a conceptual project to rethink how robots could fit into our lives, the duo has created a set of autonomous household objects that each perform both a regular function (like “table”) and a technological one (like “digital clock”). But instead of going for solar power or some other renewable source of energy, they decided bugs and rodents could do the job. Not sure I’d want to put my mug on the cheese-baited mouse-eating coffee table though…
Robots Coming To An Office Near You
Gives literal meaning to “office drone”:
Business Week reports:
Between the global economic downturn and stubborn unemployment, the last few years have not been kind to the workforce. Now a new menace looms. At just five feet tall and 86 pounds, the HRP-4 may be the office grunt of tomorrow. The humanoid robot, developed by Tokyo-based Kawada Industries and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, is programmed to deliver mail, pour coffee, and recognize its co-workers’ faces. On Jan. 28, Kawada will begin selling it to research institutions and universities around the world for about $350,000…
South Korean Schools Introduce Egg-Shaped Robot Teachers
Each android teacher is equipped with a screen displaying the face of a human avatar, and is controlled remotely by an actual instructor in the Philippines. It’s a way of outsourcing a job (educating children) that one would have thought had to be done in person. The Daily Mail reports:
Pupils often assume their teachers don’t really exist outside the school gates, now robot classroom assistants could make this a reality. Almost 30 egg-shaped robots have started teaching English at primary schools in South Korea.
The 3.3ft high machines have a TV panel that displays a female Caucasian face and can wheel around the classroom while speaking to the students. The robots are also able to read books and dance to music moving their head and arms.
But despite appearances the robots, developed the Korea Institute of Science of Technology, are not autonomous beings. They are actually controlled remotely by English teachers living in…
Robot Wars – For Real
I always liked the Robot Wars organized by Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories in the ’80s and ’90s. I wasn’t the only one and eventually they graduated from cool underground happenings to a TV series (yes, I know the creators will claim that SRL was not the inspiration, but I ain’t buying it!). Now the United States military is gearing up for real life robot wars. The New York Times‘ tech expert John Markoff reports from Fort Benning, Georgia:
War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots.
And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots — none of them particularly human-looking — are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.
In a mock city here used…
Actroid-F: Japan’s Most Realistic Robot Yet
The newly unveiled Actroid-F mimics the actions of its operator, acting as a sort of “surrogate.” The level of lifelike authenticity is unnerving — people will soon be falling in love with robots.
DARPA Seeking Small Business Partners To Develop Robots
Hard to believe that DARPA is feeling the pinch as Obama’s never-ending wars push our national debt to unimaginable levels, but apparently they need help. Report from Fast Company:
Back in July the government identified robots as one of the R&D priorities for the 2012 budget (about a decade behind the rest of us). Now there’s a research funding round to aid small business robotic’s efforts, to build robot gear DARPA can’t manage.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy was behind July’s thinking that “Robotics is an important technology because of its potential to advance national needs such as homeland security, defense, medicine, healthcare, space exploration,” and a whole list of other purposes. The OSTP thinks it’s also a tech at “a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility,” thanks to innovations in programming, hardware, and computer vision.
Now the White House has announced that five federal agencies have banded together…
Breakthrough In Artificial Skin With The Ability To Feel
The robots of the future will have soft skin with as refined and sensitive a sense of touch as ours. Smell and taste are now the biggest hurtles in terms of replicating the human senses electronically — as of now, androids will be able to see, hear, and touch, and yet be unable to savor a juicy hamburger. Via Google, AFP reports:
Biotech wizards have engineered electronic skin that can sense touch, in a major step towards next-generation robotics and prosthetic limbs.
The lab-tested material responds to almost the same pressures as human skin and with the same speed, they reported in the British journal Nature Materials.
The “e-skin” made by Javey’s team comprises a matrix of nanowires made of germanium and silicon rolled onto a sticky polyimide film.
The team then laid nano-scale transistors on top, followed by a flexible, pressure-sensitive rubber. The prototype, measuring 49 square centimetres (7.6 square inches), can detect…
The World Cup Of Robot Soccer
In addition to the World Cup, this summer featured RoboCup — an international tournament in which teams of soccer-playing robots square off. The level of play is low, and the game is often unsettling to watch, as when a fallen robot player struggles fruitlessly to right itself, limbs flailing. The hope, however, is that by 2050, a robot team skilled enough to compete against humans will be developed.
Hierarchy Of Robot Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of psychology’s most important theories regarding the search for happiness and self-actualization. Via Flickr, here it is adapted for robots:
MIT Unveils Nanotech/Robot Swarm To Skim Ocean Oil
Saturday MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil “like paper towels soak up water,” absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly “digesting” the oil by burning it off.
Telenoid R1: Japan’s Most Disturbing Robot
CNET reports that famed Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro has just created the Telenoid R1, a “minimalistic human” robot designed to aid in long-distance communication:
Telenoid users can interact with people at a distance through a laptop. The control system tracks the user’s face and head motion and captures his or her voice. The motions and voice are relayed to Telenoid, which expresses them while interacting.
Hearing the voice of a loved one emerge from the “mouth” of the ageless, genderless, limbless robo-baby seems like a waking nightmare.
Meet Your Surgeon: I, Robot
I wonder how its bedside manners are? Probably less important than that it presumably is not subject to human error, hangovers, working without sleep for days, etc. From Fast Company:
Paging Dr. 3PO. One day soon robots could performing routine procedures in the OR.
Bioengineers at Duke University announced yesterday that they’ve created a robot that can “locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session,” all without a doctor’s supervision. Researchers hope these developments could one day lead to robots working autonomously on basic surgical operations.
Nicknamed the Biopsy Bot, the robot relies on 3-D and…
Robot Border Patrol at DMZ
Photo: Samsung Techwin, SGR-1 gun bot
South Korea has begun using robots to survey and, if necessary, fire at intruders crossing the DMZ line from the North. It is operated by soldiers who verify intruders through audio visual equipment. It is designed to “detect threats,” but with the reliance on human operation, there is just as much room for error as a solider standing guard. From the Telegraph:
The 400 million won (£220,000) unit was installed last month at a guard post in the central section of the Demilitarised Zone which bisects the peninsula, Yonhap news agency said.
South Korea is also developing highly sophisticated combat robots armed with weapons and sensors that could complement human soldiers on battlefields.
The robot uses heat and motion detectors to sense possible threats, and alerts command centres, Yonhap said.
If the command centre operator cannot identify possible intruders through the robot’s audio or video communications system, the operator…
Interview: What’s It Like To Be A Robot?
That was the starting topic of New York Times reporter Amy Harmon’s interview with Bina48, a cutting edge humanoid robot housed at the Terasem Movement Foundation in Vermont. There’s long way to go before robots develop the conversational skills necessary to blend in with the general public, although they could pass as disturbed weirdos — Bina48’s answers were often confusing, sometimes creepy, and occasionally cheeky.
Northern China Hosts Robot Olympics
Walking, running and even dancing robots have been competing at the International Robot Olympic Games in China:
Israel Is Building A Robot Army
Israel has quietly become a world leader in robotic weaponry. After deploying the first unmanned aircraft in 1981, Israel developed unmanned ground vehicles and speedboats, and even border guard robo-snipers and camouflaged robot snakes. (Plus a nine-inch tall robot that shoots hostiles with a mini Uzi submachine gun…) Israel’s goal is to robotize one-third of its military machinery in the next 10-15 years, and for peacetime applications, they’ve also developed a robotic prosthetic hand and a bionic retina implant.
Tel Aviv skyline. Photo: Deanb (CC)
But this article also notes that Israel’s “Renewable Energy Initiative” seeks to replace all fossil fuel with renewable resources, primarily solar, within the next 10 years. (One Israeli company even signed a deal recently to build solar energy farms in California and Nevada.) Israel aims to be the first nation with a national electric car network, fully operational by late 2011, and Israeli engineers are also developing…
DNA ‘Spiderbot’ Is On The Prowl
Via AFP:
Scientists on Wednesday announced they had created a molecular robot made out of DNA that walks like a spider along a track made out of the chemical code for life.
The achievement, reported in the British journal Nature, is a further step in nanoscale experiments that, one day, may lead to robot armies to clean arteries and fix damaged tissues.
The robot is just four nanometres — four billionths of a metre — in diameter.
Milan Stojanovic of New York’s Columbia University, who led the venture, likens the nanobot to “a four-legged spider.”
The beast moves along a track comprising stitched-together strands of DNA that is essentially a pre-programmed course, in the same way that industrial robots move along an assembly line.
The track exploits one of the basic characteristics of DNA. A double-helix molecule, DNA comprises four chemicals which pair in rungs.
By “unzipping” the DNA, one is left with one side of the…
Telepathic Japanese Robots Within 10 Years? (Video)
Via h+ magazine:
Japan has announced a goal of commercial mind-reading devices and helper robots within the next 10 years. “While the U.S. Army actively pursues ‘thought helmets’ that might someday lead to secure mind-to-mind communication between soldiers, the Japanese are going after the consumer
market.”
The “brainwave initiative” involves the government and private sector collaborating on electronics that can be controlled by thought alone. (Several years ago, Hitachi announced the goal of a commercial brain-machine interface by 2011, and they’re already actively pursuing thought-controlled TV.)
