Archive for US
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 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 6:06 pm - Tags: Events, US
On my right, Robogames, that will take place in San Francisco in June. It will feature no less than 83 competitions, “including 18 different events just for walking humanoids”.
On my left, RoboCup 2007 will take place in Atlanta this July. As usual, it will host many events with robots of all shapes and sizes performing soccer games.
On the one hand, this is no doubt a (good) sign that robots are increasingly popular in the US. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to place two very similar events almost at the same time. When I read that Robogames will host the “12th annual Robot World Cup”, created by “world’s oldest robot soccer organization”, while Robocup’s 7th edition will focus, as usual, on “competitive robotic football”, I wonder if robots fans needed all this confusion. The competition between both events is not new, but maybe now would be a good time to end up this battle, and give birth to a unique, international and huge event?
April 14, 2007 at 10:07 am - Tags: US, Research, Artificial Intelligence, Singularity
In a short and mind-blowing essay published a few days ago, “Artificial General Intelligence: Now is the Time“, Ben Goertzel explains why Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may exist “sooner than you think”. In his introduction, he states that:
“I believe that the creation of a superhumanly intelligent AI system is possible within 10 years, and maybe even within a lesser period of time (3-5 years). Predicting the exact number of years is not possible at this stage. But the point is, I believe that I have arrived at a detailed software design that is capable of giving rise to intelligence at the human level and beyond.”
Giving a few updates on his startup, Novamente, whose goal is to develop advanced AI systems, he suggests that this kind of research could be boosted if more people were pursuing the same objective:
“If the US government created an ‘AI Manhattan Project’—run without a progress-obstructing bureaucracy, and based on gathering together an interdisciplinary team of the greatest AI minds on the planet—then we would have a human-level AI within 5 years. Almost guaranteed, assuming Novamente or some other viable design were adopted. It is a big project, but not nearly as big as building, say, Windows Vista.”
Then he explains the “two paths” that could lead to AGI, details a few noticeable projects as well as the possible risks implied by AGI and concludes:
“One of these years, one of these AGI designs—quite possibly my own Novamente system—is going to pass the critical threshold and recognize the pattern of its own self, an event that will be closely followed by the system developing its own sense of will and reflective awareness. And then, if we’ve done things right and supplied the AGI with an appropriate goal system and a respect for its human parents, we will be in the midst of the event that human society has been pushing toward, in hindsight, since the beginning: a positive Singularity.”
The whole piece is definitely worth reading!
April 12, 2007 at 9:42 am - Tags: Humanoid Robots, US, Research, MIT
This news release from MIT gives details on Domo, an advanced humanoid robot research project. “A robot that can function in a real human environment”, Domo is “an assistive robot which adapts itself to people and new places”.
Many applications are envisioned:
“A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.”
Following researches conducted for years at MIT (namely on Kismet and Cog), Domo has 29 degrees of freedom and incoportaes dozens of sensors that “make it able to sense when a human is touching it”. Additional details and pictures can be found here.
Image: © MIT
April 11, 2007 at 8:40 am - Tags: Humanoid Robots, Japan, US
Very good reading on News.com today: “Baby steps for Dexter the robot“. Its a long piece, mostlty focused on Dexter, a human-sized robot being built by US-based start-up Anybots. The young company is quite ambitious:
“Anybots wants its creations to be all-purpose, not specialized à la Roomba. The goal is nothing less than to create a robot that can be taught to do all the things humans can do.”
The whole article is worth reading and gives a good view on the state of advancement in the humanoid robots fields. Reading this article, one gets the feelling that the US have eventually decided to catch up with Japan in the humanoid race.
Speaking of Japan, there is an interesting interview of Stephen Keeney, North American Asimo project leader at Honda, on Tech Digest. Nothing really new here, but it’s a good summary of the goals (and achieved steps) of the Asimo project, which remains one of the most advanced large size humanoid robot in the world. This quote from Keeney is quite noticeable:
“Asimo is a new technology that will continue to evolve, but we hope in about 10 years we’ll start to see versions working in homes or hospitals. I just hope by the time I retire, I’ll be able to have an Asimo!”
Wow. 10 years!
April 8, 2007 at 8:07 pm - Tags: US, Misc
Discover Magazine has a strange post entitled “20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Robots“. Actually, it could have been “20 Things Everybody knows about robots”, as there is nothing really new here. Yet, their 19th “discovery” is probably the most interesting:
“Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years.”
I do agree with that. Scary as it may sound, “sex bots” are going to be a huge market.
April 7, 2007 at 9:26 pm - Tags: US, Research, DARPA
DARPA is seeking “innovative proposals” to develop “chemical robots”. Accordind to the official solicitation, the goal is to create robots with uncommon characteristics:
“soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversal; carry meaningful payloads; and perform tasks.”
Most bloggers speaking about this state that DARPA is trying to create a “Terminator 2″ kind of robot, but I guess we’ll have to wait a little bit longer for that, as the targeted bot should be about 10 cm in diameter (at least during Phase I of this research). Still, DARPA’s solicitation is quite exciting.
