VOANews.com: “Robot Challenge: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work

Rosanne Skirble

Several years ago the American Society for Artificial Intelligence issued a challenge: Build a robot that can operate like a conference goer. The robot, dropped off at the meeting site had to make its way to the registration desk, register for the conference, locate a meeting room and deliver a lecture. An autonomous robot named Grace, short for Graduate Robot Attending Conference in Edmonton, met that challenge last year in Canada. Grace will be on the convention circuit again this August in Acapulco, Mexico, where she expects to improve on last year’s performance.”

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Help Net Security

A strange two-wheeled creature was skimming through the halls of the Alexis Park Hotel on Sunday — a robot that sniffs out network vulnerabilities.

Created by two members of a loose association of security experts called the Shmoo Group, the robot is designed to wheel around on its own detecting and reporting the security problems of Wi-Fi wireless networks.

‘The point of the hacker robot is that it can become an autonomous hacker droid,’ said Paul Holman, the robot’s co-designer, who demonstrated it for the first time at the DefCon hacker convention here. ‘It can get in close to the network. On the offensive side, it can be used for corporate or political espionage. On the defensive side, it can be used for network vulnerability assessment.'”

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Demo: Teachable Robots

Like any proud parent, Michigan State University computer scientist Juyang Weng has a lot to say about what sets his little ones apart from their peers. Traditional robots, he explains, must be specially programmed for new tasks. And you just can’t teach them much. Sure, they can acquire data—but only within narrowly defined parameters set ahead of time by their programmers. “But human learning is not like that,” Weng says. “Human learning is real-time, online, on the fly.” And that kind of learning, Weng says, is essential if you want a machine to be able to cope with the unexpected—unpredictable terrain, new people or objects, noisy settings—which will surely confront robotic household assistants and military machines alike.

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Robots … start your engines!

The mission: to get a vehicle from Los Angeles to Las Vegas over a grueling off-road course. The contestants: a bunch of amateur/professionally built robot-controlled vehicles.

This forms the basis of the coming DARPA Grand Challenge, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The competition will see vehicles, which must be completely autonomous and cannot be controlled by any living thing, fighting it out for the coveted prize. The course will be 250 miles long and must be completed in 10 hours or less, with the winner receiving US$1 million. The race takes place on March 13, 2004.

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Wired News: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Listening to Marshall Brain explain the future as he sees it, it’s relatively easy to suspend disbelief and agree how plausible it is that over the next 40 years most of our jobs will be displaced by robots.

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According to Brain’s projections, laid out in an essay, ‘Robotic Nation,’ humanoid robots will be widely available by the year 2030, and able to replace jobs currently filled by people in areas such as fast-food service, housecleaning and retail. Unless ways are found to compensate for these lost jobs, Brain estimates that more than half of Americans could be unemployed by 2055. ”

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I, Robot

Release Date: July 16, 2004

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Director: Alex Proyas

Screenwriter: Jeff Vintar, Hillary Seitz, Akiva Goldsman

Starring: Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Chi McBride, Alan Tudyk, Aaron Douglas

Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller

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Plot Summary: Based on the classic story collection by famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “I, Robot” will concentrate on Detective Del Spooner, who, with the aid of psychologist, Dr. Susan Calvin, will investigate the death of Dr. Miles Hogenmiller, a brilliant scientist who worked at US Robotics. Initially labeled a suicide, Spooner has other ideas, convinced that a robot may have taken the doctor’s life. Isolated and eccentric, Dr. Hogenmiller appears as a hologram of himself, summoning Spooner to his side after his death. He was working on a very special project when his life was cut short. He had created something quite extraordinary – a robot with a living brain, code named “Sonny.” Spooner goes to Hogenmiller’s boss, Dr. Lance Robertson, with his suspicions. Incensed that Spooner wants to charge one of his robots with murder, Dr. Robertson maintains Dr. Hogenmiller took his own life. Terribly weary, Robertson knows full well that the future of his company would be snuffed out should the press get wind of the idea that a robot would, under any circumstances, kill a human being.

Japanese scientists invent dancing robot

Japanese scientists have developed a dancing robot that can follow a human dancer’s lead.

Professor Kazuhiro Kosuge, leader of the Tohoku University team that developed the robot, says future versions will be able to move in sync with humans.

The MS DanceR (Mobile Smart Dance Robot) predicts the dancer’s next move through hand pressure applied to its arms and back.

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Robot shark gives aquarium a buzz

The robot shark is operated by remote control

The world’s only robotic swimming shark is moving into an aquarium in Devon, along with four live sharks.

The two metre (6 ft 6 in) long creature, called Roboshark2, will spend up to three years alongside sand tiger sharks at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth.

Modelled on the Pacific Grey reef shark, the robot swims using a combination of sensors and thrusters.

Aquarium staff will monitor the sharks’ reaction to their robotic companion to learn more about their behaviour and intelligence.

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Wired News: The New Pet Craze: Robovacs

Just as owners of robot pets like Sony’s Aibo develop emotional attachments to their mechanical companions, people are acquiring similar feelings for their robot vacuum cleaners.

The two leading robovac manufacturers — iRobot and Electrolux — report that owners treat their robovacs somewhat like pets.

More than half the owners of iRobot’s Roomba name their device, claims the Burlington, Massachussetts, company. Owners often talk to their machines, and many treat them as though they were alive, or semi-sentient, anyway. Some even take them on holiday, unwilling to leave them at home alone.

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CBC News: Prototype robots on display in Halifax

HALIFAX – Researchers at a Canadian conference on artificial intelligence showed off a moody robot on Monday that is able to learn simple tasks and interact with humans.

ERIC has an animated “face” that looks upset when a bright light on him, but he quickly recovers. The robot’s two-cameras act like eyes and it has specialized hardware for speech.

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