June 1, 2007 at 12:06 pm - Tags: Korea, Law Enforcement
Many people are talking about it (even in France): a school in South Korea is going to test a robotic guard. The machine, built by Du Robo, is named “OFRO” and had been used previously for other surveillance tasks. It has cameras, GPS system and patrols at 7 km/h.
Quite surprising is this quote, from
Korea Times:
“One possible scenario is that OFRO will alert officials when it detects someone trying to seduce a student,” the firm’s chief executive Kang Jung-Won told the newspaper.
If the test succeeds, the robot could be available at retail stores, at around $US100,000 apiece.
Get used to it. Robots are coming.
May 31, 2007 at 9:13 am - Tags: France, Misc
In what appears to be a world first, Orange and French robot-builder Robosoft announced yesterday that they are working together to allow people visiting the Chateau de Versailles without leaving their own home.
Starting from June, subscribers to the Orange fiber service will be able to drive a mobile robot from their PC, and see what the robot sees. They will also get audio comments on a painting when the robot is in front of it. The robot will allow people to virtually visit rooms of the Chateau that are actually closed to the public (video here).
A really cool application of robotics, although I’m not sure it’s really “scalable”.
May 29, 2007 at 11:22 am - Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Singularity, Quote of the day
Eliezer Yudkowsky, in the newly launched Singularity Institute Blog:
“Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle. Let’s say we invent brain-computer interfaces that substantially improve human intelligence. What might these augmented humans do with their improved intelligence? Well, among other things, they’ll probably design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces.”
May 24, 2007 at 12:41 pm - Tags: France, Events
The “Festival des Robots” is taking place right now in Mantes-la-Jolie, France. It will end next sunday and its a first in the country. The event aims to help people understand robotics and mechatronics, thanks to a wide range of animations, round tables and student competitions.
I was there yesterday and it was quite fun. The event targets a very large audience, especially children, and it succeeds in presenting robotics in an entertaining way. Applications are quite diverse and probably help people understand many aspects of robots.
On the negative side, I am afraid this Festival shows how late France is in this field. If i compare what I saw yesterday to the big robots events I attended four years ago in Japan, the gap is simply… dramatic. I regret the lack of humanoid robots or existing domestic machines from around the world. At least, a few movies, explaining what’s going on in other countries, would have been useful.
Still, this Festival is a very good initiative. I hope it will have success and will become an important, yearly event.
Below are a few pictures I took on Day 1 of the Festival:
Read the rest of this entry »
May 21, 2007 at 1:07 pm - Tags: Humanoid Robots, Domestic Robots, Korea
The Korean start-up Kortech has just announced its Rogun, a humanoid, 1-meter tall robot with advanced skills.
“Rogun is capable of guarding homes around the clock; the camera-eyed robot will give a warning to its owner via cell phone when strangers visit an empty house”, Korntech CEO Lee Dong-hwan said.
Right now, the machine would cost a whopping $100,000, but the company expects that its price could drop to $5,000 in “a near future”.
(Via Engadget)
May 21, 2007 at 12:56 pm - Tags: Misc
Not much time to blog these days, but a few interesting things in the news:
. Carnegie Mellon announced the Robot Hall of Fame 2007 inductees. Strange selection, IMHO.
. Michael Bay, director of the long-awaited Transformers movie, released its first theatrical trailer. Wow. Very promising.
. The Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX), a robotic autonomous submarine, is exploring the world’s deepest known sinkhole, in Mexico. You can follow the mission on this blog.
May 11, 2007 at 10:15 am - Tags: Medical Robots, US, NASA, Space
The 12th mission of NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) has started 2 days ago, and will continue until next week. The main goal of the mission is the test of two remotely-controlled surgical robots, Raven from the University of Washington and the M-7 from SRI International:
The mission takes place in the Aquarius, a 45-foot-long, 13-foot-diameter habitat that rests 62 feet underwater off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. The crew will live underwater for 12 days, conducting various experiments.
“In addition to hands on telesurgery demonstrations, robotic telesurgery technology developed and refined within this mission will help surgeons overcome interplanetary communication lag time. Technologies such as surgeon-guided automatic robot function could improve the care of astronauts on future lunar missions.”
There is nice image gallery and the progress of the mission can be followed on a day-to-day basis on this blog.
May 8, 2007 at 1:00 pm - Tags: Domestic Robots, Japan
A press release from the company presents “PaPeRo Mini”, a droid-like mobile robot. As the name suggests, the machine is smaller than previous versions of PaPeRo (25 cm tall instead of 38 cm).
As before, the PaPero Mini intends to serve as a “conversational robot”: it can move around and is able to perform speech recognition, speech synthesis, sound source detection and face recognition.
I’m not sure they intend to sell it on a short time basis though.
(Image: © Nec)
May 7, 2007 at 1:14 pm - Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Singularity, Quote of the day
Vernor Vinge, who coined the word “Singularity”, interviewed by Computerworld:
It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event — such a singularity — are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.
May 7, 2007 at 9:56 am - Tags: Military Robots, US
The Washington Post has a long and very interesting piece on robots and machines used in today’s battlefields:
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become an unprecedented field study in human relationships with intelligent machines. These conflicts are the first in history to see widespread deployment of thousands of battle bots.
The most surprising aspect of the article is probably the description of the relationship that appears to exist between human soldiers and their robotics allies: they give them nicknames and sometimes seem to consider them as “pet dogs”, which really are “part of the team”. As the Post states it:
What the battle bots are teaching us is how easily we identify our own creations as animate. […] What’s remarkable about the battle bots is that humans bond with them even though their designers have made no attempt to load them with emotional cues.
May 6, 2007 at 7:01 pm - Tags: Domestic Robots, US, MIT, Quote of the day
EPFL got an audio interview with Rodney Brooks, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder of iRobot, in which he speaks about the future of domestic robots:
“The projects I’m really interested in right now are getting robots to manipulate the world. Successful robots that are commercially available are all navigation machines: they navigate around and they do some tasks, like cleaning the floor […]. The real, widespread use robots, is gonna be when robots can touch the world and physically manipulate it.”
(This interview is part of a series of very interesting podcasts conducted by EPFL)
May 4, 2007 at 6:33 pm - Tags: Humanoid Robots, Japan
Don’t miss these images of FT, Tomotaka Takahashi’s latest creation. The small humanoid robot was “specially designed to express a lean, feminine body line” and the result is just great (check the videos here and here). Robots on a catwalk? Yeah.
Image: © Robo-Garage
