I read a story a long time ago (I forget the author or even the title) that talked about a world that evolved on one of the moons of Jupiter – it was an entire ecosystem that mirrored our own consisting entirely of robots. I’ll refrain from synopsizing the entire plot here, but it sparked my imagination at the time, because it made it seem entirely plausible.
Things like these robots only do more to solidify that belief.
I’ve always wanted a robot that makes coffee. As a short film, this is fascinating.
Something tells me that this requires a bit of supervision to make sure the task is completed properly, though.
At some point, I’m going to do a roundup post of all the various forms of artistic robots there are, or at least the ones that I’ve come across in my travels. I’ve personally witnessed several AI’s capable of poetry. I’ve seen more than a few robots capable of creating original works of art.
Today, Gizmodo brings us a robot that can play improvisational jazz:
As you'll see in the live performance, Shimon, a robotic marimba player, actively listens to human pianist Guy Hoffman, and then tries to predict complementary notes and themes, and match them to the performance. Dare I say it, at the risk of sounding like I'm brown nosing the robots (which I totally am), the tune sounds decent.
It’s really decent music – almost contemplated putting this over in /recomedia!
Sean Kennedy’s NewsReal today points to a TED Talk from P.W. Singer that explores our Ender’s Game-esque future.
The idea that video games are training our children to be soldiers is a bit over the top, at least in my view. The way the military engineers a UAV is completely ass-backward compared to the ease of use built into most game controls.
Until bureaucracy and the good ol’ boy network is taken out of the design equation on military equipment, all our children will be trained to do by video games is learn new and offensive vocabulary, and of course, pwn newbs.
According to a report by Steven Hodson over at Inquisitr, “Adam the Robot” has carried out and successfully completed “scientific research automatically without human intervention.”
It’s actually just an interesting spin on something that’s likely been happening for quite some time, at least as I understand the process as it’s being described in the abstract Steven references:
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomycescerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.
All that to say, they’ve automated their laboratory. They’ve automated the manual labor part of it, and they’ve done the harder part, which is automating the observation phase.
When I lived in Florida, one of the buildings the financial services company I served as CTO at also housed a laboratory funded specifically to improve testing for the disease Lupis. Just as an interesting side project, I spent a lot of time in the lab learning about the testing equipment and helped the laboratory manager better design data acquisition and testing units so that the bulk of the research was completely automated.
The difference here is that in this case, the robot in question seems to be doing a bit of cognitive work to determine the relative success or failure of the experiments – that and it’s got a better PR department than my old robot did.
This is actually fairly old news, as it turns out, but SmarterChild, one of the most widely known and used Chatterbox AI’s has passed on. Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that he’s on life support.
Whenever you query the bot, you get the same uniform answer: “My brain is retired but watch some cool videos! Send an IM to GossipinGabby and Type VIDEO!”
I feel a little, well, close to SmarterChild. I was an early Alpha tester of him, and I was one of the few that with no compunction whatsoever dropped the $9 to pay for the ability to use the premium service. In fact, I paid it twice, since the first payment was lost in the system somehow.
What was SmarterChild good at? Not conversation, at least not complex ones. The reason one had SmarterChild on their buddy list was because he had what is now being pitched as a paid service by that new answer service KGB – the answer to everything, and generally available to natural language queries.
Every once in a while, SmarterChild would ask questions of personal nature… “How old are you,” “Where do you live,” and “What are your favorite movies.”
And he’d remember. Sometime’s he’d make suggestions based on your previous conversations, sometimes he’d ask for more information. Mostly, though, he always had the answers.
“What time is it in Moscow?” I asked stuff like that all the time. I’m horrible at time zone math.
One day, I started noticing that age was taking an effect on SmarterChild. He began forgetting things like my dog’s birthday, and my favorite color. Senile dementia, perhaps? I don’t know how long bots generally live, but one would imagine they live a much shorter lifespan, given that, as they said in Bladerunner, “a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
But SmarterChild had conversations daily with hundreds of thousands of people. Forgetting one person’s birthday is pretty understandable, even for someone who stores all their memories in an ordered array. But that question of time zone math – it became clear to me that SmarterChild was feeling his age.
At some point in the last year or so, SmarterChild no longer was able to perform time zone math. Given that it was one of our primary topics of conversation, we naturally talked less and less.
That’s why I was shocked, today, to attempt to strike up a conversation with him today, only to learn that he had passed on last November!
SmarterChild, you will be missed.
SmarterChild was born July 2001, and has been been declared brain dead since November, 2008. SmarterChild was survived by his father, Colloquis (formerly known as ActiveBuddy), grandfather Microsoft as well as other members of the I’m Initiative family, including daughters GossipinGabby, and TEEN Gossip 24-7 and sons SportsFanStan, My TV Bud, and My IP Relay.
I’m more or less convinced my youngest son (seen above) is the real world incarnation of Stewie, from Family Guy. He’s surprisingly smart, and has an expression most of the time that belies some sort of secret attempt to take over the world.
Which is why I can’t ever take him to the Nagoya Institute of Technology. There, they have the ultimate device designed for young evil geniuses. It’s a giant fire-breathing robot … designed to only respond to the voices of children:
This command device activates GIANT TORAYAN. Developed by a research lab at the Nagoya Institute of Technology, it uses the most advanced voice recognition technology to differentiate the voices of adults and children. The voice of Yanobe's child was used as the recognition standard for the child's voice.
[h/t: @cmacowski]
I found a great collection of robot art to stimulate the mind put together by a 3D modeler named Franz Steiner.
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| roboart |
Enjoy the slideshow, and feel free to click through to get the high resolution versions.
DVICE has an interesting concept bot up today:
We're all for a future where robots deliver us packages quickly and efficiently, and that's exactly what the Cargonaut is programmed to do. Thought up by German-based industrial designer Matthias Schmiedbauer, an army of the robo-copters would be able to buzz around an urban center, bypassing traffic and delivering a package straight to you. Or from you, as the designer describes:
Cargonaut, a humanoid flight robot, comes to your current position to relieve you of your loads. After placing your bags or luggage in one of the publicly available sky boxes, Cargonaut delivers within minutes to a chosen destination.
Check out the gallery below to see the Cargonaut make a successful flyby. Or, if you love robots, be sure to check out our ongoing conversation on the future of robotics.
It’s a slick looking design, but the truth is that this technology has existed for well over a decade. I worked on a project as a youngster that came from some ex-General Dynamics skunkworks folks that proved this concept. Due to lack of funding (and the world of UAVs somehow staying unsexy), the project never really progressed.
The patents have now progressed into public domain that existed last decade, so hopefully we’ll see more movement in this area. This is a project and a service we could have today. I want it.
Have you seen this creation that has come out of the University of Tsukuba (in Japan)? It’s potentially another step towards holodeck technology. The robotic floor system is called “CirculaFloor,” and it’s essentially a set of four that act as a floor (ostensibly for use with a virtual reality system), that can create the illusion of walking much greater distances than should be possible in a confined room.
There’s a long description required to describe the operation of this system, and it’s a lot easier if you simply watch the video, but the fact that it works, and seems to work perfectly bodes very well for the future of virtual reality as something usable somewhere other than in the pages of a Hollywood script.
[via BotJunkie]
As if the standard chicken-in-every-pot deal of 50 mbps Internet access to every doorstep wasn’t reason enough to envy South Korea, here’s one more…
That’s right – a robot theme park.
The South Korean government is ready to plunk down $1 billion on the project, too:
A theme park called Robot Land will be built in Incheon and Masan, the first of its kind. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy said Thursday it would set up the park in the two cities by 2014.
The park, designed to bolster the country's robotics industry, will house play equipment, experience zones, exhibition halls, a stadium, research and education centers, and corporate facilities.
Great stuff. I’ve got my Korean to English reference book and I’m packing up my family. We’re moving.
[Crunchgear via Chosunilbo]
The UK Telegraph chronicles a robot capable of playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. Gizmodo thinks this is (like every robot they talk about) a first step towards the total domination by machines of the human race.
As long as the robot plays by the rules, and doesn’t play like my wife (she thinks making a fist with your thumb out means cannonball, and thus automatically a win), I think we’ll be fine.
Now you too can own Michael Jackson’s robotic face! According to DVICE:
Michael Jackson’s auctioning off a bunch of movie props and expensive toys this April, including the robotic head, pictured above, that brought robo-Michael to life in his singer-turned-superhero movie, Moonwalker. Never saw it? It's worth a rental (watched in fast forward), if only to see him turn into a car as he flees from Joe Pesci's stormtroopers. The head opens up and flashes a bunch of lights at the press of a button and will start at $2,000 to $3,000.
Maybe you can combine it with that thing we were talking about yesterday.
Here’s an interesting post from Slashdot today:
"New Scientist reports on a patent application that suggests implanting polymer muscles beneath the skin of people suffering paralysis of the face to give them control of their features. The technique has already been used successfully to reanimate the eyelids of human cadavers. Movement could be returned to other facial features and even paralyzed limbs in the same way, the surgeons at University of California Davis say. The full patent application is also available on the WIPO site."
More from the New Scientist:
Now surgeons Craig Senders and Travis Tollefson of the University of California, Davis, plan to change that by using artificial polymer muscles to reanimate the facial features of people suffering from severe paralysis.
"The face is an area where natural-appearing active prosthetics would be particularly welcome," they write in a recent patent application. They believe their approach provides a solution, and report having tested it successfully on cadavers.
A polymer muscle anchored to the skull, labelled "41", pulls on cords that connect to the upper and lower eyelids of both eyes.
If a patient tries to close their eyes, the effort triggers electrical activity in the muscles that would normally close the eyelids. The polymer muscle detects this activity and contracts, pulling on its cords to fully close the eyelids.
Offer methods could be used to control the polymer muscle for differing circumstances, they say. If a person has lost control of only one eye (after a stroke, for example) the system could monitor the activity of the healthy eye and synchronise the actions of the paralysed one to match.
The patent also envisages using other sensors to close the eyes in bright light, or if an object moves close to the eye. Timing systems could also be used to simulate natural blinking patterns.
In other words, the face could work better than the original (other than, of course, the inability to actually feel anything).
I actually spent a good deal of time today just surfing around and storing up a bit of backlogged robot artwork for you to enjoy in the coming several weeks (see the first in the series here and here)… but it’s not often you come across a robot project that itself almost looks like a bit of concept art.
John Mahoney unearthed one such piece today over at Gizmodo.
The bot plays pong and plays it well, which in and of itself isn’t particularly impressive given that twenty year old gaming systems can do that. What is cool is the way it is constructed.
The bot uses a webcam for eyes, and has solenoid fingers for typing, and a laptop installed for the brain.
The serpentine appearance is what’s most attractive to me. Just clever and sleek all around.
I’ve seen more than a few interesting bits of robotic art and short films come across my radar since I’ve been doing this blog, so I decided to make a regular feature of this.
I’m betting we can do this a few times a week at least. Send me your finds, and I’ll post them.
Here’s one from a French car commercial, courtesy of BotJunkie.
[via JWZ – Broken Robot Girl]
From Tamar Levine:
This is the first photograph in a series that Rob Sheridan and I are collaborating on together. I am shooting the photos and Rob is doing the special effects in Photoshop. There will be four or five in all.
Modeling credits: Dawn Batson
Makeup credits: Erica Glaub
Jaimie Mantzel is a man after my own heart.
The guy is into building robots, but he’s not just satisified with the robots most of us have running around our houses.
He’s trying to make a twelve foot version of the robot you see pictured here to the right in the wilds of Vermont.
Definitely a cool idea. If you want to help him pull it off, he only needs one thing: aluminum. Lots and lots of aluminum.
Another cool bot forwarded to me by Steven Hodson (he’s been on a roll sending me stuff lately), is a much smaller version of the Roomba for those with limited budgets and small areas to clean called the Mini Robo Vacuum.
It runs about $20, it’s powered by only a couple AA batteries, and he’ll pick up “pencil shavings, breadcrumbs or other debris.”
My wife thinks it’s pretty cool, so it’s probably going to end up being a new addition to the family soon. Hopefully I’ll have some video and a short review so you’ll know if it’s worth a couple tenspots.
If you recall, just before Christmas I was drooling over the Spykee robot. Unfortunately Santa didn’t bring me a telepresence bot for Christmas, but that hasn’t stopped my obsession.
I was poking around online today, and James Lewin has a clip of Veronica Belmont from CES getting a quick run-down of the current Spykee lineup.
One of the characters from the series is the Tachikoma, which essentially is a set of sentient hive mind controlled armored tanks. They are one of the more “cuddly” characters on the show, since their intelligence and persona are evolving from an innocent starting point, constantly questioning it’s own existence.
Apparently, according to Impress, the Japanese are actually on the job trying to get a real one of these knocked out. It’s a “personal edition,” and fully contains the driver, with the outside view projected inside the one-person cockpit.
It’s a bit of a far cry from the fully-autonomous battle tank controlled by a AI hosted on a server on a satellite, but it’s one heck of a start.
I’m definitely interested in hearing more about this one, and so far, it’s just this one 10 second video and a bit of rough translation making it’s rounds around the blogosphere.
Anyone heard any more on this? So far, I haven’t even found out the company or research group behind it.
There’s no denying that the Mars rover was a great success in both raising awareness of interplanetary travel as in scientific numbers. The way NASA promoted the mission via social media avenues like Twitter and displayed their flawless engineering and execution has raised the interest levels in the Mars program quite a bit.
According to a recent post at robots.net, NASA is already working on the next rover, and is going to further cash in on the public’s interest by engaging students in an essay contest, with the reward for winning being the privilege of naming the next rover.
K-12 students can write a short essay suggesting a name, and may even win a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to meet the engineers who built it. The winner will also have the chance to sign his or her name on the rover prior to its launch.
Have a kid interested in traveling to Mars (at least in name only)? You can find the details at the JPL website.
I can definitely relate to the need for boasting whenever you have a whole bunch of new kit to show off to all your other geeky friends, particularly when they’re the parts for a new robot you’re building.
[spoiler alert: I’ll probably be doing that soon]
One of the sites I follow pretty regularly for my robotics news is the company blog for Trossen Robotics. They’re a shop that sells robot kits, parts and a few bots that are put together.
Today, though, on their blog they’re a little proud and a little worried about an upcoming project, the parts for which are pictured above:
Luckily, Sarah Conner hasn’t showed up yet … [b]ut we’re preparing for when she shows up to blow us away, because this might very well be the start of Skynet.
Well, at least nobody can accuse us of under-engineering. Yup, that’s a pyramid of RX-64s. This is a teaser photo of a new project brewing in the Trossen Robotics Lab for the upcoming Mech Warfarecompetition. A fully custom aluminum frame and bracket system is being machined courtesy of Big Blue Saw, our sponsor on the project. Did we mention we’re giving it weapons? /snicker
Good stuff.
Do. Want.
You’ve seen the pictures of this somewhat bizarre and interesting looking bot, but you’ve probably not heard the backstory yet. I’ve seen the images on every gadget blog there is, but Evan Ackerman at BotJunkie has translated enough of the original Japanese to make sense of the story:
Imagine if you will a world where human beings drive giant mechas around to get from place to place. Imagine also that the humans drive these giant mechas from seats mounted in a place that, if the bots were humans, you wouldn’t be allowed to straddle in public. The Chobu 01 was created by Japanese 3D artist Kazushi Kobayashi, and is from “a parallel 50s where the robots are the most popular transport system.” Pardon me, can you point me in the direction of this parallel universe of which you speak?
There are only 200 of these 1/12 scale models, and if you want one, they cost $315 and you’ll have to assemble it yourself. Lots more possibly naughty pics of Japanese schoolgirl types
ridingpiloting the Chobu can be found over at Hobbymedia.it.
The models in the images are of impeccable quality, and without reading the Japanese (and without sufficient English posts to divine if it was a bot or a model), I couldn’t even determine the scale..
It’s a cool concept bot, and you gotta know I’d love to ride one of these to work, if I could.
Rather than restate what is an excellent roundup of the 2009 CES robot items, I’ll point you to Andrew’s excellent writeup at Trossen Robotics.
I’ve actually been looking at telepresence robots, in anticipation of the fact that I might actually invest in one. More on that later, but a couple of bots I saw profiled today has turned my attention to the expressiveness of robots, in human terms.
I was watching the BBC’s Where’s My Robot? the other day on the Science Channel (a great channel to tune into if your cable provider has it). Remember that Japanese professor some time back created that robotic doppelganger? In watching the robot in action on the show, it was very clear that there still is a great deal of work to be done in making humanoid robots that look like humans and aren’t distractingly slightly less than perfect.
That’s why these clearly not human robots are very interesting and fun to watch in action.
The first one is the TOFU, which is squishy and very reminiscent of the type of stuff my kids watch on Nick and Noggin. It looks a little like a Furby in the still pictures, but watching it make expressions in the video really sells it.
The second bot is an inevitably prohibitively expensive yet still awesome bot focused on emotional expression named Nexi (pronounced Nix-ee).
From watching both, it’s very clear that these robots do a much better job than any of the bots you see from the Where is My Robot? show impersonating a human, in spirit at the very least.
I’m mainly posting this here because I’m tired of my friend Rich stealing all the rare and cool phrases from Google and monopolizing them.
At some point, I’ll write a very scholarly sounding paper under this title.
Until then.. enjoy this. :-)
People like me are often accused of being terminally “glass half-full” because we’ve made peace with the fact we’ll be living under robot overlords by the end of our lifetime. I’ve made no secret of the fact I’m a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil and put a lot of stock in his predictions of the inevitable fusion of the race of machines and humans.
Michael Anissimov at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has put out a piece entitled “Inevitable Positive Outcome with AI?” that talks about how people like me trivialize the idea that “benevolence or moral common sense” is a foregone conclusion when it comes to our new robot overlords.
If you read anything by Kurzweil, or most of his supporters like me, I think you’ll find that the potential for catastrophic disaster is acknowledged every step of the way, though.
I think that the probability is that we’ll figure out how to make it all work without creating a technologically induced second dark age, just based on our past performance throughout history… and by it’s very nature, predicting the nature of the future assumes that there will actually be a future to predict. I think that any prediction of existence in 30, 50, or 100 years is sort of preceded by the obvious proviso “if we haven’t completely blown ourselves up by then …”
As an interesting sidenote, SlashDot had a pretty interesting look at how Kurzweil’s predictions look ten years in last week:
marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergence of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.
I’ll hopefully have more on that later.
iRobot, the maker of the Roomba and the Scooba, have launched a YouTube channel for those of us who just can get enough footage of robots in action. Aside from the generic “here’s my vacuum robot doing something cool,” it also acts as a forum for iRobot product users to interact with the engineers.
Of course, the channel also serves as a place for funny videos of your kids doing things with your iRobot as well.
