robotics
robot rebellion is alive and well
Via Gizmodo :
“The army’s machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn’t supposed toâ€â€like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might’ve set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.
He confirmed that no inappropriate shots were fired, so no one was hurt. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any casualtiesâ€â€it might’ve basically killed the program says Fahey: “Once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” On the upside, it means we have another 10 to 20 years before they rise and go to war with us.”
Well, that’s relief.
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Legos turn 50
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of LEGO Group founder Ole Kirk Christiansen’s patenting of the now-iconic brick. This year is also the 30th anniversary of the minifig and 10th anniversary of LEGO MINDSTORMS.
(The company has actually been putting out toys since the ’40s but only settled on the perfect brick architecture in 1958.)
Who can doubt the huge impact of LEGO? The bricks have been used to create 3D printers, autopilots and buckyballs. Architects concept with LEGO bricks. It has inspired museum-quality works of art as well as more humble ones. There are an average of 62 legos per inhabitant of the Earth, with 2,400 different kinds of bricks in 53 colors. There are 55,600 LEGO videos on YouTube and over 170,000 pictures on Flickr.
To commemorate the anniversary, the LEGO Group is holding a series of building challenges around the world to determine the best builder in each country between the ages of 6 and 13. The finalists will be invited to Denmark to participate in a huge building bonanza. Details will be revealed in March on www.LEGO.com/Club.
Happy Birthday, Legos!
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Machines learn to lie
Scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other about food sources.
The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for “food” targets nearby while avoiding “poison.” Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.
The little wheeled robots had neural circuitry with about 30 “genes” that determine their behavior, and how much they react to light in the environment. The food sources charged up the robots’ batteries while the poison drained them, and by using the genes of the most successful feeders in 50 successive generations, the team was hoping to select the fittest.
Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots’ honor, luckily, there were also a few “hero robots” that signaled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.
Will this culture make it into consumer robots? Imagine the possibilities. Security systems lying about whether or not kids snuck out in the middle of the night…
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Chuck Keen
A favorite from the crew at Alaska Robotics:
Can’t believe i haven’t posted this before now!
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Arrrrrrrgh!!!
it’s not as silly as it sounds : piracy has exploded in the waters near Somalia where this past week US warships have fired on two pirate skiffs and are currently in pursuit of a hijacked Japanese-owned vessel. At least four other ships in the region remain under pirate control and the problem appears to be going global: The International Maritime Bureau is tracking a 14-percent increase in worldwide pirate attacks this year.
And although modern-day pirates enjoy collecting their fare share of booty [they have a soft spot for communications gear] they’re just as likely to ransom an entire ship. In one particularly sobering case, hijackers killed one crew member of a Taiwan-owned vessel each month until their demands were met.
For years now, law enforcement agencies across the high seas have proposed robotic boats, or unmanned surface vessels (USVs), as a way to help deal with 21st-Century Black Beards. The Navy has tested at least two small, armed USV demonstrators designed to patrol harbors and defend vessels. And both the Navy and the Coast Guard have expressed interest in the Protector [pictured above], a 30-ft.-long USV built by BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Israeli defense firm RAFAEL.
The Protector, which comes mounted with a 7.62mm machine gun, wasn’t originally intended for anti-piracy operations. But according to BAE Systems spokesperson Stephanie Moncada, the robot could easily fill that role. “Down the line, it could potentially be modified for commercial use as well,†she says. Instead of being deployed by a warship to intercept and possibly fire on an incoming vessel, a non-lethal variant of the Protector could be used to simply investigate a potential threat.
A favorite tactic of modern-day pirates is to put out a distress call, then ambush any ships that respond. The unmanned Protector could be remote-operated from around 10 miles away, with enough on-board sensors, speakers and microphones to make contact with a vessel before it’s too late.
Shiver me timbers!
Pirates aren’t what they used to be, anyways.
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RoboCup 2007
RoboCup chose to use soccer as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.
In order for a robot team to actually perform a soccer game, various technologies must be incorporated including: design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor-fusion. RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots in a dynamic environment. RoboCup also offers a simulation platform for research on the software aspects of RoboCup.
One major application of RoboCup technologies is search and rescue in large scale disaster situations. RoboCup initiated RoboCupRescue project to specifically promote research in socially significant issues. RoboCupRescue includes real robot and simulation leagues.
In the Rescue Robot league, robots explore a specially constructed disaster site about the size of a small house. The disaster site includes mannequins with various signs of life, such as waving hands, shouting noises and heat, hidden amongst stairs, platforms and building rubble. The robots, some under human control, must find and approach the victims, identify their signs of life and produce a map of the site showing where the victims are located. The aim is to provide human rescuers with enough information to safely perform a rescue. Each team is scored based on the quality of its maps, the accuracy of the victim information and the number of victims found.
The Virtual Robots competition expands the disaster site to a city block-sized disaster area. To explore such a large area, teams of cooperative robots must now be deployed. These robots will face similar challenges and scoring metrics to those in the physical league. In addition, the simulated environment allows for additional hazards and challenges that would not be possible in a physical competition environment.
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More jobs for robots
As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn’t complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it.
Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
Of course, i wonder what will happen to our poor migrant labor when they’re stripped of the shitty jobs they come back to season after season…
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