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February 25, 2005: Post Budget Address on Funding for British Columbia, Science, Innovation and Space by The Honourable David L. Emerson Minister of Industry. Industry Canada. "We chose to do this briefing here, at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, because science centres and museums are such a source of inspiration and learning for Canada’s young people. By taking advantage of the fascination with space, we inspire and contribute to the level of science literacy in youth -- they are our next generation of scientists, engineers and researchers. ... There is an additional $20 million in 2004–05 for Precarn to fund the next five-year phase of its pre-competitive research and development projects in artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. Our goal is to take the important accomplishments of the past few years and drive a technological transformation in the Canadian economy, to push the scientific advances occurring on campuses and in research institutions across this country into the marketplace, to the benefit of the economy… ultimately to the benefit of citizens. A prime example of how this can work is in the aerospace industry, which is growing here in British Columbia. The space component of the aerospace industry in this province is a key player in radar satellite data markets, space robotics and satellite communications. It delivers high-paying jobs in research, it innovates and its effects are felt throughout society… and unlike some other parts of aerospace, it is realizing significant employment growth. Across Canada, the space cluster generates annual revenues of $2 billion, employs over 6000 highly skilled workers, and has linkages to a number of other technology sectors in Canada." February 24, 2005: A breed apart - Robots could yet hit the big time, now that the Pentagon has set its sights on the four-legged variety. By David Hambling. Guardian Unlimited. "The robotic mule has far more advanced electronics and will work with minimal human guidance, perhaps no more than an instruction on who to follow. Part of the secret is in learning from nature. Many biomimetic robotics programs copy the designs that nature has perfected over millions of years, including robot snakes and lobsters. However, Raibert uses a different term. 'What we are doing is 'biodynotics'; biologically inspired dynamic robots. Biomimetic implies a slavish imitation of nature; biodynotics looks for the physical principles used in nature, then uses them in robots.' The BigDog team comes from a range of organisations, including Boston Dynamics, MIT, Harvard and Stanford. One member is a biologist with expertise in animal locomotion, and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is helping integrate the vision system." February 23, 2005: Brave new world. Get ready for robots that can think Artificial intelligence bringing that day closer, professor says . By Jodie Sinnema. Edmonton Journal & canada.com. "Timmy is no R2D2 or C-3P0 from Star Wars, what with his joystick handling and his lazy soccer-kicking abilities. But his creator believes Timmy may be one step closer to becoming the Rosie of the future, a Jetsons-like autonomous robot capable of interacting with humans. 'People want to have an equivalent of a maid cooking them dinner and washing their dishes,' said Michael Bowling, a professor in the University of Alberta computing science department. 'What they want is Rosie, although maybe the young kids want Bicentennial Man.' ... Bowling is creating a 67.5-kilogram robot capable of speeds up to 20 kilometres an hour to play soccer with and against humans on Segway human transporters. ... Timmy -- fondly named after the wheelchair-bound cartoon character from South Park -- will soon be weaned off his joystick and given camera eyes and will have to play on his own with no human intervention, Bowling said. In May, Timmy will be off to Atlanta, Ga., to compete with other robots and their human counterparts on Segways. ... 'This isn't about building entertaining robots that play soccer. This is about making robots work and perform useful tasks.' Bowling said other robots just haven't been capable of interacting with humans." February 22, 2005: Mission - Make cool stuff. Creator of robotic vacuum visits aspiring young inventors By K.C. Myers. Cape Cod Times. "Cape Cod high school students showed off their robotic inventions to Colin Angle, the cofounder and chief executive officer of iRobot, Thursday before the Cape Cod Technology Council's annual dinner and meeting. ... Angle, an MIT graduate who brought low-cost robotics into households, is a successful guy. But he said he was not able to build a successful trebuchet in high school. Not like the students from Cape Cod Tech in Harwich.... Cape Cod students' creations were made possible because of GEARS, a kit containing the basic ingredients of machines and robotics. ... [T]he idea behind GEARS is to make science and math more interesting and fun. ... To illustrate the limitless possibilities was the story of Angle and the Roomba." February 16, 2005: A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield. By Tim Weiner. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has. 'They don't get hungry,' said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. 'They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.' The robot soldier is coming. The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history. ... Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react increasingly like humans. In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their autonomy. ... As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of the robot soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow, the tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control it. ... The hardest thing of all, robot designers say, is to build a soldier that looks and acts human, like the 'I, Robot' model imagined by Isaac Asimov and featured in the recent movie of the same name. Still, Mr. [Bart] Everett's personal goal is to create 'an android-like robot that can go out with a solider to do a lot of human-like tasks that soldiers are doing now.' A prototype, about four feet high, with a Cyclops eye and a gun for a right arm, stood in a workshop at the center recently. It readied, aimed and fired at a Pepsi can, performing the basic tasks of hunting and killing. 'It's the first robot that I know of that can find targets and shoot them,' Mr. Everett said. His colleague, Jeff Grossman, spoke of the evolving intelligence of robot soldiers. 'Now, maybe, we're a mammal,' he says. 'We're trying to get to the level of a primate, where we are making sensible decisions'" February 9, 2005: William 'Red' Whittaker - A Man and His Machines. By Bjorn Carey. Space.com. (The article also appears in USA Today: Whittaker takes robotics where no man can go.) "A self described 'old man of the trade', [William 'Red'] Whittaker is celebrity in the rarified world of robotics, having won many awards for his innovative designs which have applications on Earth and in Space. ... This October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ... will sponsor its second annual Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge pits robotically operated vehicles against each other in a 175 mile race across the Mojave Desert. ... Last year, Whittaker’s entry, Sandstorm, burst off the starting line before getting stuck on an obstacle 7.4 miles from the start -- the furthest any of the vehicles in the race made it. ... '[It is] more than just another competition -- like the [Ansari] X-Prize, or Lindbergh [flying over the Atlantic Ocean], or computer beating a human at chess -- it grabs your attention,' adding that, 'It’s a hard hitting competition so the world brings its best." ... There is currently a robotic revolution taking place in many markets and arenas. Whittaker says we have gotten past the ‘no robots allowed’ stigma that hurt the early days of robotics, and now the technology is being embraced in agricultural and automotive industries, as well as in Space. ... 'It’s no longer a question of could there be robots, could they move around, could they gather data, could they survive,' says Whittaker. 'In many ways they are the agents of choice to the universe.' ...The biggest shortfall, in Whittaker’s opinion, is that right now robotics is a well kept secret and not in mainstream conversations enough. Robotics, as a field, has also suffered somewhat for the failure to meet the lofty and imaginative heights that science fiction fans dream about, but Whittaker sees a change coming." February 8, 2005: Robot wars - Technology guru Ray Kurzweil offers a vision of future fighting machines. By Philip Ball. news @ nature.com. "BALL: How will warfare change in the next 50 years? KURZWEIL: ... Already, our abilities benefit from close collaboration with machines. Within 50 years, the non-biological portion of the intelligence of our civilization will predominate. Applying non-biological intelligence to areas such as strategy, decision-making and intelligent weapons will characterize military power. ... BALL: Where will the future battlefields be? Will they include cyberspace? KURZWEIL: One major development will be swarms of nano-engineered devices. Already, the US Department of Defense's Smart Dust project has prototypes that can reconnoitre. ..." February 6, 2005: The theological robot. By Joshua Glenn. The Boston Globe. "[S]elf--described robotics theologian Anne Foerst ... seeks to bridge the divide between religion and AI research--by arguing that robots have much to teach us about ourselves and our relationship with God. Foerst spoke with me from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, where she teaches theology and computer science. ... FOERST: What I learned from the AI Lab's robots, which were designed to trigger emotional and social responses, is that we can bond with them. So although they can't be human--to be human, I think, means needing to participate in the mutual process of telling stories that make sense of the world and who we are--humanoid robots can still be considered persons. Personhood simply means playing a role, if only a passive one, in that mutual narrative process. Like babies, or Alzheimer's patients, humanoid robots don't tell their own stories, but they play a role in our lives so we include them in our narrative structures. This suggests that perhaps we ought to think about treating robots right." February 4, 2005: Conversation with iRobot Founder, Helen Greiner. Radio broadcast of Talk of the Nation - Science Friday, hosted by Ira Flatow. "FLATOW: How did you get interested in this? Have you always been interested in robots? GREINER: I saw Star Wars when I was 11. ... FLATOW: And if somebody wants to get into robotics, what would you tell them? GREINER: I would say, study engineering or sciences, and one of the things we look for when we interview people ... people who have built robots before, like whether as a hobbyist ... because then you can tell it's their passion. ... GREINER: We have a swarm project here. This is research that we do for the military. We actually have a hundred robots that work together, and it's a real experiment into purely distributed algorithms so it can scale from a hundred units to a thousand units to 10,000 units. ... They can follow the leader and, you know, when I give people tours of the company ... ...you know, people's mouths drop open when they see this. It's like, `Those robots are cooperating.'" February 4, 2005: Robotics group offers unique underwater challenge. By Melissa Cataldo. Technique (Georgia Tech; Volume 90, Issue 21). "Artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that could shape our society during the next century as profoundly as the advent of computers during the 20th century. It’s exciting to be at a school where AI research is happening all the time. Underwater robots can fix sea floor oil pipelines, locate and safely detonate underwater landmines, or explore the deep ocean floor. Autonomous exploration of the seafloor would have many important applications underwater, an environment where it is costly and often dangerous for humankind to venture. Surprisingly, the sole club at Tech dealing with underwater robotics was founded just during this school year. The Marine Robotics Group (MRG) got off the ground this past fall mainly through the efforts of friends Lucas Garza, Rick Uhlman and Daniel Cooksey, all in their third year studying Aerospace Engineering. ... The club advisor is Dr. Tucker Balch, a College of Computing professor whose research focuses on artificial intelligence. ... The MRG is working on a robot for the 2005 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in San Diego this August. They will be competing against schools such as MIT, Duke, Cornell and international schools such as Ecole De Technologie Superieure." February 3, 2005: Augmented-reality machine works in real time. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news service. "Computer-generated scenery can be realistically added to live video footage, using a machine vision system developed at Oxford University, UK. Researchers Andrew Davison and Ian Reid say the augmented-reality system could also in the longer term enable robots to navigate more effectively. Or it could be used to virtually decorate a real house or plan engineering work. It allows a computer to build an accurate three dimensional model of the world using only a video camera feed. It can also keep track of the camera's movement within its environment - all in real time." February 2005: The Super Bowl of Smart - Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be slackers when the difference between success and failure is as simple as building a robot. By Brad Lemley. Discover Magazine (Vol. 26 No. 02). "[Joseph] Parker is one of 36 students from Clinton High School in Clinton, Massachusetts, who designed and built Gael Force as their entry in the First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, an annual challenge that brings together hundreds of teams of junior high and high school technophiles from around the world. ... First is doing what it was designed to do at schools like Clinton --- drastically alter the career paths of students. Fifteen years ago, maybe three Clinton graduates a year went on to pursue a technical or engineering career; now, about 20 do so. In 2003, for the first time in the school’s recent history, a Clinton grad went to MIT. ... Also striking is the bond forged between students in the program and the adults who volunteer to help them. As Dean Kamen predicted when he dreamed up First, one emergent property of robot-building is hero realignment." January 29, 2005: Qrio dances into spotlight at Carnegie Mellon. By Michael Yeomans. Tribune-Review & PittsburghLIVE.com. "Qrio, a 2-year-old humanoid robot and corporate ambassador for Sony Electronics Inc., wowed a packed house at the [Carnegie Mellon University's] Campus Center with its fluidity of movement during preprogrammed dances. ... Knock it over, as its handler did intentionally, and Qrio braces its fall with its hands, and within 15 seconds, brings itself upright. ... Seema Patel, a graduate student at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, was impressed with the face and sound recognition, sensor and movement technology on display in Qrio, but said an animatronic robot she and some of her fellow students are developing named Quasi aspires to improve the artificial intelligence of robots so they can have more meaningful interactions with people." January 27, 2005: Battle bot: the future of war? Sharpshooting robots evoke 'Terminator.' The more pertinent question is how these automated soldiers will transform military conflict. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "This spring, the United States armed forces are expected to deploy 18 Talon robots to Iraq. The semi-autonomous machines will be capable of firing rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and rockets with better accuracy than human soldiers. They're the latest step in a surge of battlefield 'bots' that are increasingly shouldering the military's most dangerous jobs. ... The evolution of war is at its midpoint, Mr. [John] Pike says. 'First you had human beings without machines. Then you had human beings with machines. And finally you have machines without human beings.' ... To advance research in the field, the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will hold its second 'grand challenge' this year, offering a $2 million prize to any robotic vehicle that can maneuver across 175 miles of desert terrain with no human aid. ... If such technological challenges are met, robot armies could someday become so powerful that the idea of war itself could become unthinkable. ... Or would war become easier?" January 24, 2005: Redstone developing robot that may save soldiers' lives - Small, fast device with camera geared to troops reared on video games. By Shelby G. Spires. The Huntsville Times / abailable from al.com. "Redstone Arsenal's Robotics Systems Joint Project Office is developing a small wheeled robot that may be able to reduce that danger. Slightly smaller than a soda can, the robot has a transmitter and a camera on board, weighs less than 2 pounds and has a range of about 100 feet. ... The simple design makes the throwbot easy to use, Griffin said. "It's pretty simple in that a soldier can just throw it into a room or around a corner, and then drive it around to explore," [Col. Terry] Griffin said." January 22, 2005: Army prepares armed 'robo-soldier' for Iraq. By Michael P. Regan. Associated Press / available from Newsday.com. "The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in March or April. Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp. It's easy to humanize the SWORDS (a tendency robotics researchers say is only human) as it moves out of the flashy lobby of an office building and into the cold with nary a shiver. ... They may be able to offer cues to their operators when potential foes are near, but it's doubtful any of them will ever be allowed to make the decision to pull the trigger, according to Jim Lowrie, president of Perceptek Inc., a Littleton, Colo., firm that is developing robotics systems for the military. 'For the foreseeable future, there always will be a person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That's a hard problem to determine autonomously,' said Lowrie."
>>> Robots, Military, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications January 20, 2005: Rock climbing robot. The Engineer. "A robot able to prevent landslides, whose development involved funding from both the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been tested successfully in Italy. Roboclimber is a four tonne robot able to climb vertical slopes and drill deep holes into solid rock walls - typically the first step in the procedure to stabilise walls at risk of landslides." January 18, 2005: For Surgery, an Automated Helping Hand. By Marc Santora. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "'Meet Penelope,' Dr. [Michael R.] Treat said, motioning toward a robotic arm poised over a set of surgical tools. ...She is meant to replace the scrub nurse, the person in the operating room who hands the surgeon the tools of surgery. Responding to the ever-widening shortage of nurses in the country, and looking to deal with a problem that frustrated him as a working surgeon, Dr. Treat and his team of tech whizzes are working feverishly to get Penelope ready for her public debut. New York-Presbyterian Hospital has agreed to test Penelope in March in the operating room on a simple removal of a benign cyst. ... Some of Penelope's technology is off the shelf, like the voice recognition software. Dr. Treat said that this way, as others develop better software, they can update Penelope with relative ease. The major innovation is in Penelope's visual recognition, the ability to distinguish between surgical tools. Currently, Penelope can recognize 12 tools and will soon be able to recognize twice that many. That is harder then it might sound, because the tools often look very much alike." January 11, 2005: Is it a cockroach? A robot? Artificial intelligence takes a new form when Stanford researchers mix robotics with biology. By Jessica Lin. The Stanford Daily Online Edition. "Stanford researchers in the Engineering Department are looking at other creatures to model in their artificial intelligence projects, specifically insects. ... This sprawl project is led by Engineering Prof. Mark Cutkosky. The Daily took an opportunity to chat with this innovative robotics researcher to find out more. ... The Daily: Why are you designing robots that imitate animals as opposed to humans? Mark Cutkosky: There are some things that animals can do much better than humans.... TD: Where did the idea of biomimetic robots originate --- and when did you get involved? MC: I think that robots have always, to some extent, been inspired by animals or humans. That’s part of what the historical dream behind having robots is all about. What is new is that we can start to build and control them more as nature does. The days of 'tin men' robots are over." January 11, 2005: A robot in every home? A prototype next-generation "leisure robot" went on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. By Jo Twist. BBC News. "Robosapien V2 is the successor to what was one of the top-selling toys last Christmas. ... The robot, out in September, is entertainment, but is 'serious robotics', said its makers. 'This is a real robot,' Art Janis from WowWee, Robosapien's creators told the BBC news website. ... 'Our competition costs thousands, but we want the common person to have a robot,' added Mr Janis." January 6, 2005: Solar robots. e4engineering.com. "A group of researchers is working to develop a network of distributed sensing devices and water-monitoring robots, including solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicles (SAUVs). ... The goal of ongoing experimentation by the researchers at Rensselaer's Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) on Lake George, NY is to develop SAUVs that will communicate and network together, thus allowing a coordinated effort of long-term monitoring, according to Art Sanderson, professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer. ... 'This research is a significant step toward obtaining real-time monitoring of water quality,' said Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer...." January 6, 2005: With Japan aging, Toyota to staff factories with robots. Agence France Presse / available from Channel NewsAsia. "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage as the country ages, according to a press report. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. ... Toyota has been increasingly turning to robot development and plans to welcome visitors to its pavillion at the World Expo in Japan in March with humanoid robots jamming in a brass ensemble and performing hip-hop." January 6, 2005: S Korean android learns faces, shakes hands. Asia Pulse & Yonhap / available from Asia Times Online. "A team of South Korean scientists unveiled a bipedal robot equipped with wireless networking capabilities Thursday, which they claim is the first such android ever developed. ... 'Through the wireless networking ability, NBH-1 can recognize people using facial recognition technology,' said Yoo [Beom-jae], a professor at the state-run Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). It has enough in-built artificial intelligence to be able to recognize voices and motions as well, Yoo said." January 4, 2005: Welcome to the next generation of robots - Will machines soon be taking over the world? Doubtful, but they could be doing your chores for you. By Chris Arnot. The Guardian. "Robot dogs don't chew the hearth rug and demand to be taken for a walk at inconvenient times. Computerised vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers carry out the tasks that some of us find a bore, others a strain. 'All very limited,' says Professor Aaron Sloman, from Birmingham University's School of Computer Science. 'They can do specific things but none can say why they do it.' Sloman and fellow researchers around Europe are primed to take the next step in the ongoing search for more intelligent robots, thanks to a grant of €6.25m (£4.3m) from the European Union. One of his colleagues in Birmingham, Dr Jeremy Wyatt, explains: 'We think experiments so far have had limited objectives. What has not been done is to put together, in a working robot, the things that humans can do - seeing, manipulating, hearing, learning and answering questions.' ... What about the suggestion, put forward by generations of science-fiction writers, that intelligent computers will one day take over and control our lives? 'There are people who worry where it will all end,' [Sloman] accepts. 'But I don't think that machines will ever be as nasty to human beings as humans have been to each other.'" January 2, 2005: How to Pick an Orange? The choice between back-breaking human labor and efficient fruit-harvesting machines is approaching fast, just as it did more than 40 years ago when the mechanical tomato harvester revolutionized California agriculture. So why is there no easy answer to the question? By Karen Brandon. Los Angeles Times Magazine. "Part robot, part tractor, the contraption is an unusual combination of one internal-combustion engine, four rubber tires, eight digital cameras, eight electronic arms and an excruciating number of computer algorithms that choreograph every movement. Its metal arms maneuver among the branches, where 'eyes' spot the fruit and suction-cup 'hands' grasp them even more gently than human hands, which is what they are designed to replace. ... For now, this machine exists exclusively in a virtual citrus orchard on a computer screen in an unassuming second-story office in Sorrento Valley, San Diego's corridor of high-technology entrepreneurship. It was conceived by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated inventers, Bret Wallach and Tony Koselka, who founded Vision Robotics Corp., a 4-year-old company whose most recent success was the invention of a robot vacuum cleaner capable of cleaning the carpet by itself while dodging table legs and other obstacles. ... Many agricultural researchers say machines may offer the best hope for many types of American agriculture that now depend on an immigrant workforce, subsidies and tariffs. Many believe machines offer a better, cheaper and possibly more humane way to harvest the labor-intensive crops that are the hallmark of farming in California, a nearly $28-billion industry. ... California --- the state with the nation's largest and most complicated agricultural labor market --- has been down the road to mechanization before, when the tomato harvester revolutionized production of that crop more than 40 years ago. But now, as then, the questions raised by the technology are rife with political, social and economic implications. ... César Chávez, quoting fearful farmworkers in a 1978 article in the Nation, called such machines 'los monstruos,' the monsters. ... Clearly, machine harvesting was a better way to get tomatoes out of the field. Not everyone, however, agreed that ought to be the only goal." January 2005: Ethics for the Robot Age- Should bots carry weapons? Should they win patents? Questions we must answer as automation advances. View by Jordan Pollack. Wired Magazine (Issue 13.01). "While our hopes for and fears of robots may be overblown, there is plenty to worry about as automation progresses. The future will have many more robots, and they'll most certainly be much more advanced. This raises important ethical questions that we must begin to confront. 1. Should robots be humanoid? ... 2. Should humans become robots? ... 4. Should robots eat? ... 6. Should robots carry weapons? ... " January 2005: What We Can Learn from Robots. By Gregory T. Huang. Technology Review. "On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration.... On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato’s turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music. ... [T]here is a difference between him and other attendees. Kawato loves robots not because they are cool, but because he believes they can teach him how the human brain works. 'Only when we try to reproduce brain functions in artificial machines can we understand the information processing of the brain,' he says. It’s what he calls 'understanding the brain by creating the brain.' By programming a robot to reach out and grasp an object, for instance, Kawato hopes to learn the patterns in which electrical signals flow among neurons in the brain to control a human arm. ... 'This is very different from the usual justification for building humanoid robots --- that they are economically useful or will help take care of the elderly,' says Christopher Atkeson, a robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon. ... The evolution of robots into something more humanlike is probably inevitable. Experts agree there is nothing magical about how the brain works, nothing that is too inherently complex to figure out and copy. As Kawato is learning in his lab, the ultimate value in closing the gap between humans and machines might lie in what new generations of robots can teach us about ourselves." January 2005: You, Robot - He says humans will download their minds into computers one day. With a new robotics firm, Hans Moravec begins the journey from warehouse drones to robo sapiens. By Chip Walter. Scientific American. "The 56-year-old Moravec should know. Born in Kautzen, Austria, and raised in Montreal, he has been pushing the envelope on robotics theory and experimentation for the past 35 years, first as the graduate student at Stanford University who created the 'Stanford Cart,' the first mobile robot capable of seeing and autonomously navigating the world around it (albeit very slowly), and later as a central force in Carnegie Mellon's vaunted Robotics Institute. His iconoclastic theories and inventive work in machine vision have both shocked his colleagues and jump-started research; Seegrid [Corporation] is just the next logical step. ... Industrial robots already flourish in tightly constrained environments such as assembly lines. Where they fail is in locations loaded with unpredictability. So Seegrid concentrated on creating vision systems that enable simple machines to move supplies around warehouses without any human direction. Not exactly the stuff of science fiction, Moravec agrees, and a long way from superintelligent robots, but he says you have to start somewhere. ... The same themes run through his view of the future of robotics. Evolution moves in tiny steps, Moravec notes, but accomplishes amazing things. Machine evolution will do the same as it incrementally nudges robots from their clumsy beginnings to the heights of human-level intelligence and mobility." December 31, 2004: Analysis - The triumph of the robots. By Phil Berardelli. United Press International / available from The Washington Times. "NASA's robotic craft exploring Mars and the Saturnian system in 2004, however, have carried off feats that are unparalleled in human history -- and they promise to deliver more wonders in the new year. ... Cassini and Huygens, like the twin Mars rovers, represent perhaps the most sophisticated robotic craft built so far. They are designed to act largely independently because the rovers -- and the Saturn craft even more so -- are beyond the range of direct control from mission scientists. ... The situation is much more so for Cassini and Huygens, which currently are about 800 million miles away from Earth." December 30, 2004: Cabinet okays ban on use of child jockeys in camel races. QNA/AFP - available from The Peninsula. "Qatar said yesterday that it was banning the use of children as jockeys in camel races, a favourite sport in the Gulf region that has been widely criticised over the use of children brought from southern Asia. ... The move follows an announcement by Doha that it was preparing to substitute robots for jockeys from next year. ... Sheikh Hamad had told in October that the robot was being developed by a Swiss company and would be ready in 2005. Property rights for the robot have since been registered for Qatar. Sheikh Hamad announced last March that robot-jockeys had been used in a camel race for the first time." December 29, 2004: Fly-eating robot powers itself. CNN. "Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself. Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies. Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas. Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision. ... The EcoBot II powers itself in much the same way as animals feed themselves to get their energy, he said." December 23, 2004: Robocopters dodge obstacles. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "University of California researchers are tinkering with technology that will, ideally, let helicopters fly themselves. The Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) project passed a significant milestone earlier this month, when a 130-pound model of a helicopter successfully guided itself through a course that included random obstacles that weren't on its internal map -- a first, according to the university. ... Last year, BEAR researchers flew two helicopters at each other in a game of chicken. 'They flew toward each other, sensed each other and adjusted their course,' said a UC Berkeley spokeswoman. ... While the obstacle avoidance system tested this month relies on lasers, researchers will start to dedicate more energy to computer vision systems. In these, sensors feed digital images to onboard computers, which then, through probability and artificial intelligence, try to chart a safe course." December 22, 2004: Robots Suffer for Art's Sake. By Daniel Terdiman. Wired News. "In Hollywood these days, post-modern technologies -- and in particular, robots -- are often portrayed as a threat to humanity. In films like Metropolis, I Robot, The Matrix and Minority Report, the audience faces endless scenes where people must fight or be scared of technology. ... [Fernando] Orellana recently won an honorable-mention prize at the Spanish art show, Vida 7.0, for his piece, Unending Closure, an installation aimed at showing that sometimes, common perceptions are far off base. ... Sabrina Raaf, who originally curated Unending Closure, thinks Orellana is making a wry observation about a pop-culture view of technology, especially in light of the way Hollywood has presented robots and other technology as embarked on a malicious path to eventually outsmart humans. 'To portray machines, or to make a machine that is shy or reticent,' Raaf said, 'then you're flipping that notion on its head, that machines are these dark, insidious forces in our culture and that machines will eventually enslave us.'" December 19, 2004: Network Robot Project Gets Boost- Carnegie Mellon’s Raj Reddy Manifests Much-Touted 80/20 Rule. By Kim Tae-gyu. The Korea Times. "South Korea's scheme of launching network-based robots gained a boost after a world-famous artificial intelligence (AI) expert confirmed Korea is heading in the right direction. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Raj Reddy, one of the most respected scholars in the promising AI field, made the point in an e-mail interview with The Korea Times. ... On the development path of robots and AI, Reddy has provided an uncanny insight to the world, clearly manifest in the much-touted 80/20 rule. It refers to the concept of making the computer perform 80 percent of the task while leaving the other 20 percent to the human being. .... KT: In your own career, you started and continued emphasis on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), even though many left these fields for greener pastures. Why did you maintain your emphasis on these fields? Reddy: I continue to work in AI and Robotics as my primary intellectual activity and scientific activity. In doing so, I followed examples of Carnegie Mellon's thought leaders, the intellectual giants such as Perlis, Newell and Simon. They encouraged young faculty to explore further development of the applications of computer science as a set of great challenges. Many other activities are related to societal issues and public policy. They are equally important and need to be pursued by scientists, engineers, executives, and everyone who can contribute to such endeavor. KT: What are the promises and challenges of artificial intelligence? Reddy: We will have super human capability to improve our capability. The challenge is to build systems that can learn from experience, and operate in human real time." December 17, 2004: Talon Today Is U.S. Military's Real-Life 'RoboCop'. By David Isaac. Investor's Business Daily (reg. req'd). "Science-fiction buffs seeing the military's armed Talon robot for the first time can't help but make comparisons to famous movie robots. Most say it looks like Number Johnny 5 from the 1986 film 'Short Circuit,' the story of a robot that becomes intelligent when struck by lightning, says Noah Shachtman, editor of the site Defensetech.org. The Talon reminds this reporter of one of the more menacing robots of the movies, ED-209, which goes berserk in the 1987 film 'RoboCop.' What makes the Talon important is that it's the first ground robot to carry arms. 'It's a bit of a turning point,' Shachtman said. 'It's a step everyone knew was coming at some point. It's still a little surprising when it finally hits.' ... The Department of Defense is pushing for more robots in all its branches. It's part of its Future Combat Systems program, a major overhaul of the military in which robots will play a central role. ... 'The day of fully autonomous large, unmanned ground vehicles is probably still six years away,' [Stephen DiAntonio of the the National Robotics Engineering Consortium] said." December 16, 2004: Technologies for the blind. Design Engineering. "Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are developing new assistive technologies for the blind based on advances in computer vision that have emerged from research in robotics. A 'virtual white cane' is one of several prototype tools for the visually impaired developed by Roberto Manduchi, an assistant professor of computer engineering, and his students. ... Before coming to UC Santa Cruz in 2001, Manduchi worked for several years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, applying computer vision technology to autonomous robotic systems. 'It is a natural evolution from helping a robot drive around to helping a blind person navigate their environment,' he said." December 15, 2004: Building thinking robotics for the real world. IST Results. "Researchers at the Bayesian Inspired Brain and Artefacts (BIBA) project are using a novel application of Bayesian reasoning to design artefacts (objects produced or shaped by human craft) that can learn to act rationally with incomplete information. ... BIBA project researchers use Bayesian reasoning to understand the behaviour of animals and then apply this same logic to create artefacts for the 'real world'. Pierre Bessière, Scientific Manager of the IST programme-funded BIBA project at INRIA’s GRAVIR laboratory in France explains: 'Both living organisms and robotic systems face the difficulty of how to use an incomplete model of their environment to perceive, infer, decide and act efficiently.' ... BIBA researchers developed probabilistic programming methods for the Cycab that use biologically plausible techniques to define the obstacle avoidance system as a survival instinct. The goal is to create a completely automatic car that doesn’t need a human driver and can safely navigate streets that are beset with unpredictable occurrences." December 15, 2004: Next generation of Honda's walking 'bot learns to jog. By Yuri Kageyama. Associated Press / available from USA Today. "The walking, talking child-size robot from Honda now manages an easy, although comical, jog --- the latest in the Japanese automaker's quest to imitate human movement. ... Although Asimo has already climbed up and down stairs and carried on simple conversations with voice-recognition capability, it still can't step over things in its way or run up and down slopes, Honda officials said.... Honda is hoping Asimo will be running errands, delivering relatively light things such as in-office mail, working side by side with Honda employees perhaps by 2010, said Takanobu Ito, a managing director." December 15, 2004: Ecobot Eats Dead Flies for Fuel. By Lakshmi Sandhana. Wired News. "Robots walk, robots talk and, soon, robots will eat, too. Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol, are working on creating autonomous robots that power themselves using substances found in the environment. Professors Chris Melhuish and John Greenman plan to give robots their very own guts -- artificial digestive systems and the corresponding metabolisms that will allow robots to digest food. ... 'People have built these things before but this is the first robot that actually uses unrefined food,' said Melhuish. ... Given the complex behaviors involved with luring and trapping prey, though, the first generation of such robots is more likely to consist of natural vegetarians, eventually developing in such a way as to eat any organic matter. ... 'It's like the very first petrol engine that was ever invented,' Greenman said. 'If you compare the power output from the first petrol engine compared to the Formula One racing engine that they have nowadays....'" December 14, 2004: Robot, go forth and multiply. Stuff. "Korean scientists have created the world's first 'artificial species' - a robot with genes that it can pass on to other robots. Professor Kim Jong-Hwan, already known as the creator of 'robot football', has developed 14 artificial chromosomes that he says will determine robots' 'personality'. He said he believed that within 20 years lonely people will use their personal robots to keep them company, replacing cats and dogs. ... Dr Kim is in New Zealand as the keynote speaker at the second international conference on 'autonomous robots and agents'. ... 'The artificial chromosome is a software system. It means that the information - their 'genes' - can be easily sent to other robots,' he said. ... Dr Kim said there was no danger that such self-reproducing robots would take over the world as portrayed in movies such as this year's blockbuster I, Robot." December 10, 2004: Flying eyes. By Helen Knight. The Engineer. "A fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles will co-operate with a ground robot on surveillance tasks in the Australian Outback, in trials to be held next year by BAE Systems. The series of trials are being organised by researchers at the company's Advanced Technology Centre (ATC), to demonstrate its autonomous systems, data fusion and artificial intelligence technologies. ... 'We hope to deploy a land vehicle in some preliminary experiments, where we would have air vehicles gathering information, and we will look at how they would interact with something on the ground, perhaps by giving it information it can use to decide where it should move to, to participate in the sensing task,' [Dr Phil Greenway] said. ... To allow the system to deal with uncertainties such as incomplete observations, problems with sensors or deliberate attempts to fool it by enemy forces, the team is using Bayesian network technology. These networks, based on statistical pattern recognition, use probability theory to cope with such uncertainties." December 7, 2004: Second Career for Old Robot: Art. By David Cohn. Wired News. "Robotlab acquires industrial robots -- the metal arms on factory floors that wield welding torches and other manufacturing tools -- and reprograms them to become performers in public spaces. Some of the reprogrammed beasts spin tunes, others paint, and still others perform intricate dances to music. The group, based in Karlsruhe, Germany, sees the project as part of an artistic and educational movement to prepare us for when similar machines are part of our daily lives." December 6, 2004: Engineering intelligence. The Times of India. "Is robotics' engineering all about designing robots, maintaining them, developing new applications and conducting research? If that's the case, then you need a re-thinking on the whole concept behind developing robots. ... In the Indian system, 'robotics' is quite often considered as the synonym for 'unemployment'. This is supposedly because of the fear that robots will replace human workers. However, surveys conducted by the government and private agencies reveal that the fear is unreal. ... A specialisation in robotics' engineering will lead to potential career opportunities in manufacturing, research and engineering, agriculture, mining, nuclear power-plant maintenance and a variety of other areas. 'If you consider a robot as a machine, which can perform numerous tasks, it could act as a catalyst for a change in our everyday life,' [associate professor Subir Kumar] Saha said. One of the great ways to learn about robotics is to take part in robotics' competitions. ... Institutes running programme in robotics' engineering: ...." December 6, 2004: Robots making good on futuristic promise. By Gerard Voland. Journal Gazette & FortWayne.com. "Once upon a time, there was a world in which robots did so much for people, from mowing lawns and exploring other worlds to fighting wars and helping surgeons perform life-saving operations. And the people wondered what could be next for robots to do in this world. Of course, this time is now, and the world is our own. Robots no longer exist only in science fiction stories, and their roles in society are significant and varied. ... Although robots are gradually becoming more popular machines around the home, they have been vital to the industrial world since the introduction in 1961 of the 4,000-pound Unimate robotic arm at General Motors’ manufacturing operations. ... But what of tomorrow’s world of robots? Some people might imagine that future robots will resemble humans, with two arms, two legs, eyes and articulated body movements. ... Future robots also can be expected to evolve into new forms and behaviors." December 2, 2004: Rover data makes return a must. BBC News. "Data from Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity shows its unique landing site is a prime spot for a return mission to look for life, scientists say. ... A raft of Mars missions are currently in the pipeline. The next one to reach the surface will probably be a low-cost "scout" mission called Phoenix in 2007. Future landing missions could speed up the process of selecting interesting targets in the landscape by using artificial intelligence (AI). 'The rovers used quite advanced technology to explore Mars. But there is only a small amount of AI in the robots. Most of the geology is done by a large team of people,' said Dr Patrick McGuire of the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain. Dr McGuire and colleague Jens Ormö have devised a wearable computer system which uses intelligent software to select interesting rocks. They have named the system the cyborg astrobiologist." December 1, 2004: More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. ... In a warren of hangar-sized hotel ballrooms in Orlando, military engineers this week showed off their next generation of robots, as they got the machines ready for the war zone. ... The Robotic Extraction Vehicle, or REV, is a 10-foot-long, 3,500-pound robot that can tuck a pair of stretchers -- and life-support systems -- beneath its armored skin. The idea is for battlefield medics to stabilize injured soldiers, and then send them back to a field hospital in the REV. ... But this early version will be limited, [Patrick] Howe said. Ideally, the REV would drive around on its own, with no help from human operators. In practice, the robot would either be driven by a person with a joystick, or it would get around by itself by sticking to carefully preplanned routes. As the limited performances in the Pentagon's robot off-road rally in March showed, unmanned drivers are still pretty lousy at handling open, unknown terrain. ... GlobalSecurity.org's [John] Pike isn't worried about the Talon going haywire. He's concerned about what the armed UGV represents for the future. 'This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. ...'" December 2004: AI Revisited - Pieces of the AI Puzzle are Already Deployed, but Much Remains to be Done. Bart Eisenberg's Pacific Connection series in Software Design Magazine. "'There's a joke in the AI community that as soon as AI works, it is no longer called AI,' says Sara Hedberg, a spokeswoman for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Hedberg, who has written about AI for the past 20 years or so, has done her share of trying to enlighten reporters who are ready to declare AI dead. 'Once a technology leaves the research labs and gets proven, it becomes ubiquitous to the point where it is almost invisible,' she says. ... The American Association for Artificial Intelligence serves as a kind of crossroads for AI researchers. Ahead of its 2004 conference, the organization identified a slew of emerging fields where AI research is going strong, starting with counter-terrorism, crisis management and defense. One big project funder is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same U.S. government agency that first funded the Internet. Other research areas include space exploration, robotics, Web search engines and agents, healthcare, and manufacturing. And what do all of these areas have in common? AI applications have grown so diverse that the shared term 'artificial intelligence' may be the only thing these applications share. If you declare that your research is AI-related-then, ipso facto, it is. 'AI has splintered into various isolated sub-fields,' says Bill Havens, the chief technology officer for Actenum, a Vancouver-based startup tackling difficult scheduling problems. ... To get a sense of what AI looks like in the year 2004, I spoke with researchers in a variety of fields. ..." December 2004: Man vs. Machine. By Andrew Chaikin. Wired (Issue 12.12). "Of course, the costs and risks of sending humans to the moon, Mars, or nearby asteroids will outweigh the benefits for at least the next decade. Until that balance is tilted by the development of new spacecraft and protective measures that reduce danger and expense, we'll have to live by the watchword of engineer Gentry Lee, a 30-year veteran of NASA's Mars missions: 'Never send a human to do a robot's job.' But the balance will tilt, and when it does, humans will follow in the footsteps of our robotic creations. That doesn't mean machines will act only as a kind of advance team for people; even after astronauts have begun exploring alien worlds, they will need robotic assistants to handle repetitive or especially dangerous tasks. But only human explorers can raise the pace of discovery a quantum leap. And only they will tell us what it is like to be there." December 2004: To Hell and Back. By Jeffrey M. O'Brien. Wired (Issue 12.12). "Over the course of two summer evenings, we sit at a card table and discuss invention, risk, NASA, and [Bill] Stone's latest quest: to develop an intelligent autonomous hydrobot. ... These days, he's absorbed by two projects. The first: Stone is chief architect of a next-generation ladar (laser radar) system at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helping craft a beer can-sized guidance system for unmanned military vehicles. And then there's DepthX, an audacious NASA-funded project formally known as the Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer. It's a robot that will map an ocean 6 miles beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa and sniff out microbiological life. A team of researchers - roboticists, astrobiologists, and electromechanical engineers - from six universities are working on the project. But it's Stone's baby. Even though DepthX is about robotically exploring a moon 400 million miles away, it's a direct result of Stone's life as this world's preeminent cave explorer. ... If DepthX works, it'll represent not only a huge boost to NASA's quest to find extraterrestrial life, but also a significant advancement in robotic intelligence." November 30, 2004: The Guitarist Is Metal. No, Not Heavy Metal. By Michael Beckerman. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "'We weren't interested in making robots that played musical instruments,' said Mr. Singer, of Lemur (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots), in the subsequent conversation. 'We wanted robots that were musical instruments.' GuitarBot will appear again tonight - thrilling the audience as four moving bridges zing up and down its four strings like in a racehorse game at a carnival - in a concert by Mr. Adamson at the Juilliard School. 'Robo Recital,' it is billed. 'No Human Performers.' This kind of 'posthuman' hype creates everything from shivers of delight (Robots, how neat!) to shivers of fear (What? They don't need us humans anymore?), which have been part of the response to robots since they first appeared in fiction at the beginning of the last century. ... GuitarBot claims its ancestor not in the golem - which, after all, has decidedly human characteristics - but in the ingenious automated machines of the last three centuries. In the mid-18th century, the Maillardet brothers created an astonishing writer-draftsman that could write poetry and do amazing drawings of ships and buildings. Around the same time, Jacques de Vaucanson created his famous defecating duck, which could eat, digest and all the rest. ... While audiences may be titillated by the prospect of seeing such devices and their descendants do 'human' things, Mr. Singer and Mr. [J. Brendan] Adamson have something else in mind. Mr. Adamson, in particular, is more concerned with technical issues and the ability of machines to do things that humans cannot accomplish." November 28, 2004: A Robot for the Masses. By Francisco Goldman. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (no fee reg. req'd.). "Mark Tilden, a robotic physicist formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA, invented Robosapien, or at least the prototype, in an intense three-week effort in 2001. Tilden, who is in his 40's, described it as 'the first real mass-marketed humanoid robot.' I was told that it would be commercially available the summer of 2004 for $99. ... In his booming, grandiloquent voice, Tilden began a highly scientific-sounding explanation of why Robosapien's price was so low -- something to do with his pioneering work in analog robotics, which uses simple electronics parts and imitates the natural physics of nature rather than computer-driven digital mechanics. ... The word 'robot,' originally coined by Karel Capek in his futuristic play 'R.U.R.,' comes from the Czech word for forced labor. A robot must be able to perform tasks -- and Robosapien can, depending on your skill. You can make it pick up your socks, but for the ordinary user, it can take a long time. A plastic cup is far easier. ... There are philosophers of the future and experts on the subjects of robotics and artificial intelligence who are certain that on some far-off day the most pressing moral issue humans will face will be how to distinguish ourselves from lifelike machines. Maybe we will even have joined them, evolving into cyborgs, hybrid human-machines. Such speculations far outpace the current stage of robotics. The field, for all its advances, is still in its infancy. Some scientists have predicted that the real advances in robotics will not occur in university or government labs but in entertainment robots like Robosapien, conceived to appeal to consumers. In a remarkable scholarly book, 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced from religion to such expressions of popular culture as superheroes, robots and cyborgs. We want robots that will perform chores for us, but want them for deeper, more mysterious reasons, too." November 26, 2004: Got Robot? Dairy Farmer Sees 'Milking Parlor' as Tourist Stop - Cows don't seem to mind the machines that Clark Hinsdale II says hike output, cut costs. By Elizabeth Mehren. Los Angeles Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Although widely used in Europe, the mechanized milking systems are the first of their kind in New England, and one of several dozen scattered across North America. ... [Clark] Hinsdale said visitors who expected to see 'R2D2 running around the barn' would be disappointed when the dairy robot turned out to be a stationary unit made out of gleaming stainless steel. The Lely automatic milking system, from the Netherlands, looks clinical and has a cow-wash as part of the process. ... Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Steve Kerr called Hinsdale's robot-farm 'a cool thing' that introduced a new element to dairy farming, the dominant portion of the state's half-billion-dollar agricultural industry. ... 'These are smart, simple robots,' he said. 'And they are cool to watch.'" November 26, 2004: Man and machine - Part 1: the quest for mechanical man. By Dheera Sujan. Radio Netherlands. "In her book Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood documents the long history of humanity's fascination with mechanical representations of itself. And she poses the question - what do we want from a machine that simulates us? 'Is it supposed to be as close as possible to a human being, or to improve on that, and become superhuman? In the quest for mechanical perfection, does perfection mean infallibility (as in the computer), or innocence (as in the child)?' These questions have been around since the Enlightenment and the dawn of the age of machines; now researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence are returning to them as they gain renewed relevance. ... At what pointpoint does a humanoid machine achieve personhood? Dr [Anne] Foerst's search for an answer to this question has led her through a philosophical maze that has forced her to examine her own ideas on what it means to be alive. ... Fear has always been part of the fascination we have for the idea of reproducing ourselves mechanically. According to Dr Foerst, however, that won't happen if we take responsibility for our creation. After all, Dr Frankenstein didn't create a monster; the creature (never dignified with a name) only became a monster when he was rejected by his creator and the rest of mankind." You can listen to the broadcast via a link on the page. November 25, 2004: 'Swarm-bots' offer sniff of the future. Mini-robots with a sense of smell are on the march. By Emma Young. EducationGuardian.co.uk. "Ultimately, [Andy] Russell [of Monash University] wants to build swarms of mini-robots to go where no sniffer dog could survive. They could be sent into a chemical weapons dump to locate and patch holes in damaged canisters. They could even use scent trails to work together to build bases on Mars. 'There's lots of interest in swarms of robots that can organise themselves and operate without human assistance,' Russell says. This work does not require the creation of new forms of behaviour. Russell is using algorithms developed from studies of insects. Ants are a particular favourite. Marco Dorigo, director of the artificial intelligence research lab at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, leads a 'swarm-bots' project funded by the EU. As he says, ants are simple creatures that can perform complicated tasks without centralised control. Dorigo and his colleagues are using ant algorithms to help control 20 mini-robots. Working together, these robots can cooperate to complete tasks such as transporting an object too heavy for an individual." November 24, 2004: Toward a More Human Robot - Carnegie Mellon's Takeo Kanade explains why making smarter systems requires better understanding about how people really act. Interview by Cliff Edwards. BusinessWeek Online. "Q: What's ripe for innovation? A: Certainly, I'd like to comment on my own area, that is robotics, artificial intelligence [AI], and the like. My own thinking today is that I think we should understand how humans act and use that [insight] to develop a better system that serves for human. You can call it AI. I'm more interested in, and I believe it's useful and enormously valuable to understand, how humans function, not necessarily how humans are made. ... Q: What are the hurdles that robotics and AI need to overcome? A: The hurdle is we do not know ourselves, how we are doing. In general, I call it an invisible robotics -- environmental robotics. The environment as a whole is a robot, not the human individual humanoid or arm or mobile robot. ... Q: Is there a problem in the U.S. of underfunding areas of research? A: I'm less familiar about that area. I'm mostly dealing with places like DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. My concern is that we may be reducing what I call playfulness. In research, a large part of it is based on results. We're too result-oriented. The hallmark of the U.S., and I came from Japan and was very impressed with the difference I found, was what I call this playfulness -- people willing to pay money for those things which appeared to be somewhat ridiculous ideas. ..." November 23, 2004: The human behind this year's hot robot - Robotic physicist Mark Tilden looks back, looks ahead. Interview by Alan Boyle. MSNBC. "Robosapien took its curmudgeonly place this year in a toy menagerie that also includes cyber-critters ranging from the occasionally annoying talking Furby pet to the gleaming, expensive Sony Aibo robotic dog. The humanoid robot stands out in part because there's a human behind the marketing campaign: Mark Tilden, the British-born 'robotics physicist' at Hong Kong-based Wow Wee. ... Are there things that you believe your former employers (NASA, DARPA, Los Alamos, etc.) could learn from this? Tilden: I'm hoping a few will try out their many Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life science ideas using the Robosapien. Many colleagues complained there was always a shortage of inexpensive robot bodies to do experimentation with. The Robosapien is smart enough to use in an advanced robotics course as is, but with a little tweaking..." November 21, 2004: More robots mean more tech jobs - Rather than supplant workers, robots create a support need By Victor Godinez. Dallas Morning News / available from The Beacon Journal & Ohio.com. "Robby the Robot and C-3PO may still be years away from reality, but robot vacuum cleaners, medical robots, surveillance robots, underwater robots and demolition robots are here now. And rather than replacing the human work force, robots are creating a booming job market for engineers, software developers and other technical professionals, experts say. American Honda Motor Co. is touring the country with the company's Asimo robot (http://asimo.honda.com), visiting schools to show off the two-legged 'bot to students and spread awareness of careers in the robotics industry. Asimo project leader Stephen Keeney said he hopes to make young students aware of how many different paths there are in the robotics profession. 'Our message that we're trying to get across to students is that to build something like a robot like Asimo, it takes many, many different sciences,' he said. 'It takes people who understand mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer scientists such as hardware and software developers, it includes people who understand mathematics,' said Keeney. 'And it includes professions that might not come immediately to mind, people like chemists and physiologists.'" November 19, 2004: Robo Grand Prix attracts more than 100 robotic racing teams. By Dominique Loh. Channel NewsAsia. "More than 100 teams have gathered for the Robo Grand Prix at the Singapore Motorshow. ... A critical component for each team will be the software, the set of instructions that will tell the racer exactly what to do. And the instructions are downloaded into the racer just seconds before the race. A group of boys from the Marsiling Ring Secondary have a lot to live up to. ... The competition brings together many elements from the different scientific disciplines. Knowledge in robotics, artificial intelligence, computer engineering and programming may decide if you win or lose. Yong Fook Seng, teacher in charge of special projects at Temasek Polytechnic, said: 'We are getting lower and lower enrolment in engineering. Everyone is going for soft options. One of the things we decided to do was to bring technology down to the secondary schools so they get a feel of technology, see how it works and get an interest in engineering.'" November 18, 2004: Love for robots conjures dreams of helping others - UT research gives wheelchairs sensors to help the disabled. By Cindy Stowell. The Daily Texan. "While you walk to class, you're probably not thinking 'don't walk into that parked car.' Although that's a great concept, your eyes see the car, and your brain adjusts your path almost automatically, so that thought doesn't enter your consciousness. But as researchers working under UT computer sciences professor Benjamin Kuipers know when you're building a robotic wheelchair designed to get you to your next class, not hitting the parked car becomes an obsession. The wheelchair, named Vulcan after the physically disabled Roman god of fire and metal working, is an ongoing project, designed to assist people who have difficulty with fine motor skills, but still have perceptual and cognitive ability. ... Over the next three years, the goal is to get Vulcan to see more of its environment by building 3-D models of its surroundings using the optical binoculars. ... Other challenges include voice interface, path choices - when the final destination is known, but not the best way of getting there - dealing with non-stationary objects and following directions. UT graduate students are currently working on some of those topics." November 17, 2004: New Vehicles Will Make Own Decisions Based on Commands - Engineers Designing Unmanned Aircraft That Can Make Own Decisions. Commentary by Lee Dye. ABC News. "The next war could be fought partly by unmanned aircraft that respond to spoken commands in plain English and then figure out on their own how to get the job done, even dodging enemy aircraft as they carry out their assignments. This isn't just robotics, in which someone has to be on hand to issue commands to an unmanned vehicle all along the way. This is autonomy at its best, with vehicles that can make decisions similar to the way a human pilot figures out how to accomplish a task and then carries it out. Engineers and scientists at several institutions and corporations are working on the project, chiefly under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have already demonstrated that the idea can work. ... The program builds on research that enables computers to receive and act upon verbal commands, a hot item these days. The Teragram Corp., a software company in Cambridge, Mass., is developing the speech software for the unmanned vehicle project. The researchers aren't interested in software that will accept simple commands like 'turn right' or 'turn left.' Instead, they want the aircraft to respond to broad commands, like go to a certain area and photograph a specific building. Then, it would be up to the unmanned vehicle to figure out how to do that. ... But how do you carry out those tasks? ... That's where the work of Tom Schouwenaars comes into play. He's working on his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and he has developed something called a 'trajectory planner.' That's the software that translates the verbal command into a series of coded representations that the computer can understand." November 17, 2004: New horizons for robotics - European researchers have created the world's first multi-molecular shape-shifting robot, a development that could lead to new applications in areas such as medicine and space exploration. e4engineering.com. "On display at IST 2004 in The Hague and being showcased today in Tokyo, the HYDRA project's robots have broken new ground in robotics and artificial intelligence through a simple but highly effective design that allows the devices to configure themselves into almost any shape and perform a variety of functions. ... Over the last three years the Maersk Institute, together with LEGO, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Zurich, developed two types of spherical modules, the ATRON and the HYDRON that can operate autonomously, communicate with each other and be programmed to take on virtually any shape and behaviour. The HYDRON was developed for use in fluids while the ATRON, which is the module being presented widely this week, was created for terrestrial use. ... 'Fundamentally, however, this is a research project through which we have proven that shape-shifting robots can be created,' [Henrik Hautop] Lund says. 'Now it's a question of letting people know about it and seeing what new horizons it opens up.'" November 15, 2004: Technology expo celebrates robots. By Francine Brevetti. Oakland Tribune Online. "At NextFest, a recent expo of technology that has yet to reach the stream of commerce, Honda not only demonstrated the four-foot-tall robot, it compared the robot to its much earlier version in a film 18 years ago of a two-legged device led about by a pulley. Today, ASIMO (pronounced AH-si-mo for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) is a self-contained and self-locomoting presence. ... ASIMO has just been honored by Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute. In its second annual Robot Hall of Fame, ASIMO was distinguished along with SRI International's Shakey, Astro Boy, C-3PO, and Robby the Robot. ASIMO and Shakey are the only nuts-and-bolts robots. The other three are inventions of science fiction. ... Charlie Ortiz, program manager for SRI's artificial intelligence center, is in charge of the demonstration team of 100 robots that operate together. He said Shakey was one of the first autonomous robots and was debuted in 1966. He said all robots that SRI has developed since then 'have embodied the research in artificial intelligence used in Shakey.' 'New developments in planning and perception and learning were novel at the time for Shakey and embodied important elements in thinking, which are necessary if you're going to solve problems in the world, if you're going to navigate around the world, move objects around. These were important elements of intelligent beings, and in 1966 artificial intelligence was a very young field.' Ortiz said that the capabilities pioneered by Shakey, which now resides at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, are essential for current devices used in space exploration." November 14, 2004: Editorial: Robots and us. The Japan Times Online. "Personal robots have been a long time coming. ... [T]eams from Japan's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and America's Purdue University have announced the launch recently of an ambitious four-year project to 'give humanoid robots the ability to behave and move more like human beings, to have the skill-learning capabilities of humans.' That last clause brings into focus the corner that robot technology is about to turn. The next generation of robots will not feature machines mindlessly performing pre-programmed tasks. It will -- so scientists hope -- feature machines that can adapt and learn. ... As has happened at every step on the road to the robotics revolution, there are those who fear what such developments might portend. It hardly matters that scientists are talking about endowing a robot with the dexterity of a human 6-year-old -- or the reflexes of a smart dog. In some people, the Frankenstein complex lurks so deep it is hard to persuade them that there is not something sinister in the rise of the robot helpers. ... Of all the nations involved in such research, Japan is the most inclined to approach it in a spirit of fun -- hence Aibo and QRIO and the other quirky assistants and companions dreamed up here. The United States, by contrast, has invented robotic military vehicles, vacuum cleaners, gardeners and pill dispensers -- all thoroughly utilitarian applications. According to some observers, however, there is more common ground between the two approaches than might seem apparent." November 12, 2004: Cyborg geologist explores Spain - Part human, part machine tests kit for planetary missions. By Philip Ball. news@science.com. "European scientists have sent a 'cyborg' to roam the Spanish countryside as part of a mission to create robots that are good at exploring planets independently. Researchers at the Centre for Astrobiology near Madrid kitted out a human with a camcorder linked to a computer system programmed to look for interesting features in the landscape. The human merely did the donkey-work of carrying the hardware while the computer did the 'thinking'. On a planetary mission, a robotic vehicle such as NASA's rovers Spirit and Opportunity, currently touring the surface of Mars, would carry the hardware. ... Proponents of human space exploration often argue that robots are no match for trained astronauts and geologists in spotting promising study sites and responding to chance discoveries. But if the current work fulfils its promise, future robotic explorers will have a decision-making capacity similar to that of human experts. ... The system's mapping software, developed by the Madrid team and computer scientists at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, mimics the behaviour of real geologists scanning a new scene." November 12, 2004: Robot Doctors and Cats? Oh, My! WISH-TV. "At the ninth annual Future of Health Technology Summit in Boston developers recently unveiled the Robo-doc - a robot that will allow doctors to visit patients anywhere in the world. ... If the Robo-doc's beside manner isn't your style then maybe you can embrace the technology with something smaller, like a pet. Robo-cat (we kid you not) sounds and acts like a real cat. It's programmed with artificial intelligence and sensory feedback that allows it to respond to the human voice and touch. The makers claim patients can have the best of both worlds: the therapeutic benefits of a pet without having to actually take care of one -- much like Rex the dog in Woody Allen’s futuristic seventies spoof 'Sleeper.'" November 11, 2004: Does Grandma Need a Hug? A Robotic Pillow Can Help. By Jeffrey Selingo. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "[R]obotics researchers at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh have designed a soft, huggable pillow that uses sensing and wireless phone technology to provide a physical touch, and thus better social and emotional support, for distant family members. The pillow, called the Hug, was developed after the researchers studied how robotics could improve products the elderly use every day. ... After it was developed, researchers showed it to residents at a nursing home they work with in Pittsburgh. The reaction was generally positive, Professor [Jodi] Forlizzi said, although there were plenty of opinions about the pillow's color and shape." November 10, 2004: Students use Legos to study, understand disabilities. By Jennie Runevitch. WNDU-TV. "For most people, living life with a disability is hard to imagine, but a group of Berrien County youngsters is learning about the challenges firsthand. They’re also developing ways to help the disabled, with toys and technology, through a group called Gears in Motion. The children are nine through 13-year-olds, gearing up for a national Lego robotics competition, whose theme is helping the disabled through robotic technology." November 10, 2004: Birmingham in €6m AI project. By Harry Yeates. ElectronicsWeekly.com. "Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Birmingham are participating in a €6.25m, four-year European project to develop a cognitive robot. One of the project's aims is to help throw some light on human cognition. The plan is to take the various AI systems that have so far been realised in some form or other ('natural language' systems that process human voice inputs and can use bits of our grammar and machine vision) and create a robot that combines those cognitive abilities. 'The idea is to put it all back together, and that's what's hard,' said Dr Jeremy Wyatt, a lecturer in computer science at Birmingham." November 9, 2004: Dancing to That Robotic Engineering Beat. By Chris Hedges. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "[Prof. Naomi Ehrich Leonard] has been able to transcend the boundaries of her physical surroundings, as well as the traditional boundaries of her discipline, as a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. She has interwoven control theory, fluid mechanics, robotics, computer science, oceanography and biology. Her work has shattered barriers and helped her design new sensing systems that replicate the coordinated behavior of flocks of birds and schools of fish. The advances she has made, which recently led to her being awarded a MacArthur fellowship worth $500,000, have been found to apply far beyond robotics, extending control theory to all mechanical systems. 'It comes from having many interests,' she said modestly. ... Professor Leonard's field is not one that has traditionally attracted women, something she is trying to change by helping Princeton recruit prospective engineers. 'People hear the term mechanical engineering and they think we wear jumpsuits, carry wrenches and fix cars,' she said. 'It is hard to enter a field where they are few other women, but once we get people to think beyond these old-fashioned labels, once we show people how engineering is interdisciplinary, how it can be a bridge even into the humanities, we will attract diverse students. We need people who think broadly and deeply.'" November 9, 2004: The age of the robot - The idea of machines taking charge of our daily chores has been the stuff of science fiction. But is that fantasy fast becoming a reality? By Charles Arthur. The Independent Online Edition. "They sing. They dance. They even play a limited game of golf - well, they're able to putt a ball into a well-defined hole, a talent that puts them on a par with many bored executives with too much office space. They are Sony's humanoid QRIO robots.... But do they herald a time when intelligent, autonomous machines will do our household chores, and then put on a show to entertain us as we sip a relaxing drink? Or are they no more than the phonetic spelling of their name implies - a curio, to be gazed at like a Victorian exhibit behind glass, but never taken out and used? More importantly, might the QRIO be a glimpse of the battlefield soldier of the future - a completely autonomous machine indifferent to humans in its path as it heads towards an objective? ... But even if the QRIO isn't going to be warbling in our living rooms any time soon, robots have already invaded our lives. They make our cars: almost every car is produced to some extent by robots, which perform welding, painting and simple assembly at car plants around the world. Any time you've been on an airplane you've entrusted your life to a robot - specifically, the automated pilot, which turns the entire aircraft into an autonomous machine where computers control the rudder, thrust and flaps. ... The concept of a mechanised automaton is almost a century old, first depicted in Karel Capek's stage play RUR (for "Rossum's Universal Robots") in the 1920s. ... Our expectations of what they should look like have been moulded by decades of science fiction books and films.... [T]he essential yardstick against which any robot application must be measured before it will become widespread is economic: that is, is it cheaper over the life of the machine to use a robot, or a human? ... And what about the fear that people express - that robots will first become more intelligent than humans, and then eradicate us?" November 8, 2004: Gidday mate, need a hand? By Anna Saunders. The Dominion Post / Stuff. "More than two-thirds of New Zealanders would welcome robots to do chores around the house, according to a study of 750 people, commissioned by Honda. Most people wanted robots to help with housework, many wanted an extra mechanical hand with the washing up and some wanted a robot to mow the lawns." November 7, 2004: WonderBots - You're in no danger, aging baby boomers. We'll clean and care for you and keep you company. By Kevin Maney. USA Today / available from News-Leader.com. "Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie 'I, Robot,' or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic 'Lost in Space' warning of danger on lonely planets. The real force driving the development of personal robots -- and what eventually will create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers. That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. ... 'As the demographics change, robots could help solve some problems,' says Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'The question is, where is that transition?' ... Robots that are likely to serve the elderly seem to fall into three broad categories. Though the categories don't officially have names, you could call them homebots, carebots and joybots. ... Joybots ... Here is a great point of departure between U.S. and Japanese robotics research. U.S. labs and companies generally approach robots as tools. The Japanese approach them as beings." November 7, 2004: Technology helping curb U.S. losses in Iraq. By Denis D. Gray. Associated Press / available from HoustonChronicle.com. "U.S. soldiers behind a computer screen inside a shed monitor video images from the plane, known as a Shadow, as it loiters over a traffic circle frequently attacked by insurgent bombs. 'We fill some of the gaps in the intelligence field. We put one of these in harm's way instead of a soldier. It's all about saving lives,' says Sgt. Francisco Huereque, who is in charge of the night's launch. Unmanned aerial vehicles and other so-called 'stand-off' weapons, whether currently used or in secret testing, belong to a developing high-tech arsenal that the U.S. military says will help minimize casualties as it battles insurgents. ... On the ground, a variety of new unmanned vehicles are expected to enter the field in coming years. Among them is the Military R-Gator, built by tractor-maker Deere & Co. and iRobot, which makes the far smaller remote-controlled PackBot robots already deployed to scout out dangerous locations and dispose of explosives. The R-Gator, set to begin full production in 2006, will be autonomous, meaning it will navigate and perform some tasks without any input from humans. In the air, military officials are investigating the use of stationary, spherical 'spy in the sky' airships and a digital camera packed into a mortar shell that transmits photos to a soldier's laptop while the shell floats to the ground attached to a parachute. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, were flying over Iraq even before the war began and now range from the high-altitude, super-sophisticated Global Hawk to the Raven, which comes in a carrying case and is launched by just flipping it into the air." November 5, 2004: Humanoid Robot Qrio Makes UK Debut. By Helen William. PA News / available from scotsman.com. "A humanoid robot, described as the most advanced of its kind, sang, danced and played football as it made its UK debut today. Qrio, which is about the size of a three-year-old child, is at the forefront of developments in artificial intelligence, according to its Japanese maker Sony. ... Qrio, which stands for quest for curiosity, can also hold intelligent conversations with people and recognise faces." November 5, 2004: Hi robot. By Jon Excell. The Engineer & e4engineering.com. "UK researchers have received 1m Euros (£700,000) to investigate intelligent robots that can understand the ambiguities of natural speech and work more effectively alongside humans. The four-year project forms part of a wider European Commission initiative consisting of seven academic teams from around Europe known as Cosy (Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants). ... Dr Jeremy Wyatt, who heads the Intelligent Robotics lab at Birmingham, said his group is looking at a number of significant problems involved in building 'thinking' robots. Wyatt referred to the recently published UN World 2004 robotics report - the theme of which was 'A robot in every home?' He explained that in order to arrive at such a situation, devices must be able to interact with us and satisfy our expectations about acceptable behaviour. One way in which they plan to do this is in the area of object recognition. Wyatt explained that his team will be working with computational linguists and cognitive psychologists in order to take ideas on how humans recognise things. He said that the team will begin by mounting a vision system on a mobile platform to watch an arm on a separate table and report back in natural language what it sees. An apparently humble aim, but it will nevertheless break new ground in the area of artificial intelligence." November 4, 2004: Humanoid domestic robots on sale next year - As technology improves, the devices will evolve into chatty companions for sick or elderly people living on their own, says maker of the R30000 Nuvo. By the Information Technology Editor. Business Day. "Next year, ZMP will release the first commercially available humanoid robot designed for home use. Nuvo will cost about R30000, and will contain enough artificial intelligence to hold short conversations using voice recognition technologies. It will also serve as a watchdog, transmitting images of what it sees around the house to the owner's cellphone. This week ZMP is demonstrating Pino, a more basic robot, at the International Science Innovation & Technology Exhibition (Insite) in Midrand. ... As technology improves, the robots will evolve into chatty companions for sick or elderly people living on their own, [Hiroshi] Kaminaga says. 'That could be the killer application for the next generation of robots." When he talks of "killer applications', he is using technology jargon for an idea so compelling that everyone has to have it. Yet anyone spooked by I, Robot may fear that the machines will take the idea of a killer application too literally. The variety of technologies on show at the inaugural Insite exhibition should kindle the interest of young black people in scientific careers, hopes Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena. Insite will also promote science and technology collaboration and let experts network within a showcase for their developments, he says." November 4, 2004: Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid. Duke University / available from PhysOrg.com. "A wall-climbing, book-sized autonomous vehicle made by a Duke University team drove up a challenging vertical course to win first prize in an international competition Sept. 22-24 in Madrid. The student competition was part of the seventh annual International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots. ... 'Robots that climb walls and cross ceilings can go where humans can’t," [Jason] Janet said. "They can do security and safety jobs like looking for bombs or finding cracks in a support beam or the wing of a jumbo jet.' ... Janet said Duke’s future robotics efforts include teaming with a group from Carnegie Mellon University for the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge to design a full-sized autonomous land vehicle and continuing the development of autonomous underwater vehicles." November 3, 2004: The autonomic army (third of four parts) - Intelligent software systems could put machines on the front lines instead of human beings, but analysts wonder whether killer robots are the military's best solution. By Fawzia Sheikh. ITBusiness.ca. "... autonomous intelligent systems. These are essentially software systems that can operate with 'a greater independence of human input,' explained Bruce Digney, a defence scientist at Defence R&D Canada-Suffield in Alberta. His team is developing these technologies for the country’s military ground vehicles, although they can also be fitted into unmanned air (UAV) and marine vehicles. Even Digney acknowledged the obstacles to putting this technology, which may be equipped with missiles, on to the world’s battlefields: 'If you have a machine that's making decisions in the world for itself, how do you gain some trust, especially if you're . . . expected to put your life in the decisions of that machine?' ... Ottawa-based Frontline Robotics Inc., which is developing these technologies, believes one of the greatest impediments to using these systems is asking the robots, or vehicles, to operate in an unconstrained world model in which 'you just literally drop it in the middle of nowhere and have it try to figure out what it can do next' -- a method requiring a great deal of computational power, said president and CEO Richard Lepack. Rather, he said, robots can better perform in a defined environment that limits the number of variables. There are, of course, advantages to a greater adoption of defence-related robotics, Lepack explained. Most notably, although an enemy or an intruder can destroy a robot, 'it's a lot better than taking out a soldier.'" November 3, 2004: My baby bot - A small robot has startling human characterists. By Peter Familar. "NEC designer Junichi Osada calls his latest robotic wonder his baby, and he isn't kidding. NEC's young genius has obviously developed a close relationship with the small robot that goes far beyond mechanical boundaries. Osada has programmed PaPeRo with a startling range of human responses. Up close, the machine responds to Osada's voice with an appropriate smile or sigh. It also converses, delivers personal messages and, when Osada dozes off, switches off the telly. And there's more. 'We've programmed PaPeRo to take photographs, tell us about tomorrow's weather, provide updates on the stock market and connect to the internet,' Osada says. ... PaPeRo, an acronym for partner-type personal robot, is the face of the near future, when electronic helpers could assume most of the duties of a housekeeper, security guard, children's companion and much more. ... It is one more example that alerts us that robots are really coming, says Mike Hanlon of Gizmag, an Australian-based magazine for early technology adopters. Another example is NEC's PDA-based travel interpreter at Narita Airport in Tokyo." November 1, 2004: JHU Course Catalog - The Natural and the Artificial ("part of an occasional series in which reporters drop in on interesting classes"). By Lisa De Nike. Johns Hopkins Gazette. "THE COURSE: The Natural and the Artificial: The Concept of the Man-Made Man. The course attempts to illustrate society's changing understanding of science by examining the concept of the artificial human being. It begins with the Renaissance's 'golem' legend and proceeds through the Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century. ... REQUIRED READING: R.U.R., by Karel Capek; The Fourth Discontinuity, by Bruce Mazlish; He, She and It, by Marge Piercy; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells. Students also read selections from Science and Change, by Hugh Kearney; The Golem, by Chaim Bloch; Man a Machine, by J.O. de la Mettrie; and The Sandman, by E.T.A. Hoffmann. FILMS VIEWED IN CLASS: The Golem; Frankenstein; Island of Lost Souls; Colossus: The Forbin Project; The Stepford Wives (the original version); Bladerunner; A.I. ..." November 1, 2004: Space-age vacuum cleaner
senses dirt, potential disasters. By Liane Faulder. Edmonton
Journal (subscription required). "The CEO of iRobot, Colin
Angle, says the robotic vacuum cleaner uses sensors and 'powerful
artificial intelligence software' to figure out the size of a room
and how to avoid getting stuck between the coffee table and the
armchair. 'Many people, when they think of a robot, believe it's
like (the Star Wars character) CP30, a humanoid,' says Angle. '...
If you wanted to build a vacuum-cleaning robot that was an android,
you could, but it would cost $200,000, and it's a complicated and
challenging program. Practical home robots are not going to work
like R2D2 or CP30.' What makes Roomba a robot is that it gathers
information from its environment and makes decisions about where
to go and what to do. It sells for $250. The Roomba Red is just
one among a growing group of robotic solutions for life's little
inconveniences. ... These projects and more are just part of the
push to come up with the next 'killer application' for robots,
to use the words of computer science Prof. Hong Zhang, a member
of the University of Alberta's Robocup project -- a robotic soccer-playing
initiative. A 'killer application' would be something comparable
to the use of robotics in automobile manufacturing, which revolutionized
that industry several decades ago. Zhang says cleaning devices
like Roomba Red may well take off, but the real promise for domestic
robots is in health care, where there are not enough humans to
do the work required. ... Zhang says Robocup can be compared to
the efforts to send the first man to the moon -- the journey is
as important as the destination." November 1, 2004: Organised
chaos gets robots going. By Will Knight. New Scientist
Magazine(Organised chaos gets robot walking; issue of October 30, 2004 at page25). "A
control system based on chaos has made a simulated, multi-legged
robot walk successfully. The researchers behind the feat say
it may have brought us closer to understanding how people and
animals learn to move. ... ... Remarkably, the robot performed
these tricks without any conventional programming. And its behaviour
emerged far more quickly than it would if it had used genetic
algorithms. Kuniyoshi suggests that his chaotic approach may
have similarities to the way that biological systems learn to
move. 'Many findings point to the presence of chaotic patterns
in general in the human brain,' says Max Lungarella, who researches
artificial intelligence at the University of Tokyo. But [Yasuo]
Kuniyoshi and [Shinsuke] Suzuki’s approach is still unconventional,
he says. 'It diverges radically from the traditional way of
thinking about intelligence.'" November/December 2004: Moving AI Out of Its Infancy - Changing Our Preconceptions. By Steve Grand. IEEE Intelligent Systems (Vol. 19, No. 6). The full text is only available to non-subscribers for a limited time. Abstract: "What we've learned about AI over the past 50 years is a lot about how not to build intelligent machines, explains Steve Grand. He argues that the critical breakthrough will require new and radical ideas at the most fundamental level. Consequently, he offers some of the deliberate provocations that stimulate his own research (a robot named Lucy)-provocations 'sufficiently misaligned with established wisdom to suggest interesting new directions.'" November 2004: The Real da Vinci Code - Is his mysterious three-wheeled cart a proto automobile? A remote-controlled robot? A rolling Renaissance computer? The quest to rebuild Leonardo's "impossible machine." By Tom Vanderbilt. Wired Magazine (Issue 12.11). "In the early 1990s, Rosheim's twin passions of da Vinci and robotics fatefully converged. After an Italian scholar showed Rosheim some recently recovered da Vinci drawings, [Mark] Rosheim took a fresh look at what had been dubbed 'Leonardo's automobile,' a wooden three-wheeled cart. Da Vinci enthusiasts have reconstructed the automobile several times during the past century, but it's never worked. The device seemed destined to join the ranks of da Vinci's grandiose but flawed inventions - what one scholar called his 'impossible machines.' To Rosheim, the machine was hardly impossible. Immersing himself in the minutiae of each sketch, gleaning inspiration from inventions that came later, he concluded that the device was not simply a spring-powered cart - as novel as that might be for 1478 - but something more radically innovative. Da Vinci's automobile, Rosheim maintains, is actually a robot with its own set of programmable instructions. This 'precursor to mobile robots,' Rosheim suggests, might even be 'the first record of a programmable analog computer in the history of civilization.' ... One of the biggest breakthroughs, strangely enough, came not from da Vinci's own work but from a drawing Rosheim had of a karakuri, an 18th-century Japanese tea-carrying automaton (often resembling a geisha) - the Sony Qrio of shogunate Japan." THERE'S MORE ! SEE THE ROBOT NEWS ARCHIVE |
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