In Our Image: Why do we keep making robots that look like us?

Just like humans, they come in all shapes, sizes, and attitudes. Tall and slender like C3PO; short and squatty like R2D2; evil like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; childlike and playful, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kismet. But as “Tech Live” reports tonight, the robot world has always struggled with one basic concept: “The latent goal of artificial intelligence researchers has always been to build something as intelligent, as human-like, as we are,” said MIT’s Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer.

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MIT’s Kismet is a classic example of where robotics research is headed. Its four cameras help it see. Twenty-one motors in its face and 15 separate computers help the robot convey the illusion of emotions such as happiness, fear, surprise, and disgust.

And more than just reacting emotionally, researchers are working on creating a refined, artificial personality so the robot can provide a kind of companionship.

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“Being able to recognize the difference between a dog and a cat reliably; every 2-year-old kid can do it, no machine can do it,” said author David Stork, who wrote HAL’s Legacy, which is about how robots and artificial intelligence will impact culture in the near future.

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eMuu Project



A salient feature of the ambient intelligent home of the future will be the natural interaction between the home and its inhabitants through speech.

An embodied home character, such as eMuu, could be the social entity necessary to provide natural dialogues. This character would have to be able to utilize the full range of communication channels, including emotional expressions, to give intuitive feedback to the user.

eMuu is based on the robot Muu, that was developed by Michio Okada. Muu focuses on the social bonding with humans. The character also works as an embodied interface that mediates the social bonding that people establish in everyday conversations.

[more in japanese]

Dean Of Invention: A wheelchair that climbs stairs? It’s just one product of Kamen’s idea factory.

You have teenagers thinking they’re going to make millions as NBA stars when that’s not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.”

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“We celebrate the wrong things,” Kamen said.

The motivation for Kamen’s robotics competition was to provide students direct exposure to engineers and scientists while doing a project. With that, FIRST – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology – has enlisted corporations to not only fund school teams but also to provide mentors and advisers so that students have direct exposure to engineers and scientists.

“FIRST is a wonderful sociological experiment that brings people together,” said Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has helped support the competition since the beginning in 1990. And, as he points out, the most coveted prize, the Chairman’s Award, is given to the team that demonstrates the “most exemplary relationship between a team and a community.”

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A new robosoldier goes to war

“Christian Science Monitor“

In Afghanistan, a new robosoldier goes to war

The ‘war on terror’ is a testing ground for new technology

By David Buchbinder

NARIZAH, AFGHANISTAN ? A squad of heavily armed American soldiers lines up single file outside a mud-walled compound in eastern Afghanistan, ready to burst inside.

Just around the corner, technicians boot up Fester, a tank-like robot the size of a suitcase. An order comes over the radio: The soldiers are to hold their positions, but the robot is authorized to enter the building.

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The radio-controlled, reconnaissance robosoldier can climb stairs, turn somersaults and roll along at about 9 m.p.h. Shockproof and waterproof, he has survived a plunge from a second-story window. Most important, Fester won’t die if he’s shot while exploring a cave or poking through a suspicious building.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

TECHSPLOITATION: Artificial Intelligence

“AlterNet.org”

Abnormal technology.

Science fiction writers love to speculate about the abnormal psychology of robots. That’s the pathos of the robot – designed to have the perfect mind, it nevertheless malfunctions and becomes a calm-voiced, sociopathic HAL, or a tragically doomed rebel like the replicants in “Blade Runner,” or the feminist death-bot in “Eve of Destruction.” When Isaac Asimov set out to write the first definitive work of robot S.F., “I, Robot” (1955), he did it by creating a character called a “robopsychologist” whose observations of abnormal robotic psychology formed the meat of the tale.

Researchers haven’t yet invented a robot whose psychology is complicated enough to be equivalent to that of a “normal” person, let alone a neurotic one. It’s safe to say that all these speculations about the insanity of machines are really meditations on our own mental failures and cognitive disasters. Even true tales about the behavior of actually existing robots — like the small “evolving” robot in England named Gaak that managed to escape from its cage and zoom out the doors of a building and into the parking lot — read like allegories of human life. Trapped in a lab, forced to fight for scant resources with its fellow lab-bots, Gaak said, “Fuck this,” and ran away when it had the chance. Just like you would, right?

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On Robotics via News Is Free

Robots need culture says Sony Scientist

“ZDNet”

A researcher says that the next wave of robots will be able to interact with one another, form their own languages and evolve new kinds of intelligence

Luc Steels, a professor at the University of Brussels and director of Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, wants to make robots more like living things by teaching them how to express themselves. It is a concept that has met with resistance from some quarters.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

Robots learn to fly

“New Scientist”

Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error – but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.

Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

Farting Robots and Shitting Ducks

I’VE SIGNED THE PETITION, SIGNATURE NUMBER 134,042, so clearly I’m not the only one mourning the passing of Futurama. Though, frankly, and I am sure this is not an irrelevant statistic, I have yet to meet another soul aside from my husband who actually watched the show. Too bad, because Futurama, a hyperkinetic hybrid of The Simpsons and Star Trek, is one of the most brilliant sci-fi parodies ever conceived. If there were any doubts about Matt Groening’s genius, Bender blew them away.

Bender is of course a robot — but one in a class of his own. In classic science fiction, the function of the robot (or its fleshy facsimile) is rational reflection (think Data and Mr. Spock). Though Spock is a Vulcan, his persona is strictly machinic, an android in spirit if not technically in flesh, while his Next Generation counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Data, is unambiguously pure construct. A Mensa Dream Team, cool, calm and calculating at every turn, are the guys you can call on when the dilithium drive melts down and the space-time matrix ruptures. Bender, he’d be down the back of the bus chugging beers. If Data is the silicon sibling of the icy Vulcan Spock, all quiet reason and prim restraint, Bender is the titanium twin of Homer Simpson, belching and farting his way through time and space. With this venal, indulgent sensualist, Groening thumbs his nose at the whole tradition of artificial intelligence: Fuck chess, pass the nachos.

For much of the past half-century, robotics research has focused on tasks requiring concerted mental acuity — navigating a maze, for instance, or precise mechanical assembly — but a new generation of researchers are beginning to turn their attention to more “mundane” corporeal functions such as walking and scuttling. And yes, some of the finest minds in the field are currently trying to make robots that fart and shit and pee.

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Movies and pictures from Robodex 2002 event : have a look here : http://www.robots.org/.

New robot has basic social skills

PITTSBURGH (AP) – A 6-foot-tall robot that courteously steps aside

for people, smiles during conversation and politely asks directions shouldn’t be blamed for being too eager to please.

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The robot, named GRACE (short for Graduate Robot Attending Conference), will wander a symposium on artificial intelligence that begins this weekend, where it will demonstrate basic human social skills.

It will try to sign in at the registration desk, find a conference room, give a speech and answer questions.

GRACE, a drum-shaped contraption with a digitally animated face that appears on a computer display, is the work of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere.

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