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In order to control its population of rebellious human prisoners, South Korea’s Ministry of Justice plans to test robot prison guards:
The robots are designed to patrol the corridors of corrective institutions, monitoring conditions inside the cells. If they detect sudden or unusual activity such as violent behavior they alert human guards.
The government should keep in mind that, with rising energy prices around the world, such a program could be expensive to maintain. There are, however, alternative energy sources.
Link -via Technabob | Photo: Yonhag
“Hey, let’s build a robot modeled after a giant snake from the age of the dinosaurs!” Brilliant idea. Next: give it artificial intelligence and the ability to refuel from biomass. That’s what the team behind the Titanoboa is probably doing. At least, they’re not explicitly denying it. That’s a warning sign.
Project Website -via io9
I know the skeptics among you probably think that this is a bad idea, but you also scoffed when they made a robot that could feed off human flesh. And that’s turned out okay so far, right?
So: no worries. The Punching Pro is designed to help human users learn how to box. That’s all.
Product Site via Geekologie | Previously: Robot Trained to Repeatedly Punch Humans
Until recently, robots have been unable to replace human workers at the task of deboning meat due to the differences between individual pieces of meat. But the HAMDAS-R built by Mayekawa Electric can now debone ham effectively:
HAMDAS-R has made it possible to automate the processing of irregularly shaped, soft foods like meat. Until now, the use of robots for food processing hasn’t progressed very much. That’s because it’s necessary to mechanize the techniques of skilled workers, and it’s hard to mechanize tasks that rely on human hands. Another problem was that the cleaning and hygiene requirements of food processing plants made it difficult to introduce robots into such an environment. Until now, very little progress had been made in that regard, but HAMDAS-R enables those requirements to be met. So we hope this robot will expand the possibilities for automating the processing of irregularly shaped, soft types of food.
Link via Popular Science
If you were hoping that, after the Robopocalypse, you could earn your soylent green by flipping pancakes for our robot overlords, you’re out of luck. Human researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have taught a robot how to do it. No, they didn’t refine it’s programming; the robot learned how to complete the task:
The video shows a Barrett WAM 7 DOFs manipulator learning to flip pancakes by reinforcement learning. The motion is encoded in a mixture of basis force fields through an extension of Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) that represents the synergies across the different variables through stiffness matrices. An Inverse Dynamics controller with variable stiffness is used for reproduction.
The skill is first demonstrated via kinesthetic teaching, and then refined by Policy learning by Weighting Exploration with the Returns (PoWER) algorithm. Compared to policy-gradient approaches, the reward is treated as a pseudo-probability, which allows Reinforcement Learning to use probabilistic estimation methods such as Expectation-Maximization (EM).
After fifty attempts, the robot became a competent pancake-flipper.
via Popular Science | Previously: Rapid Pancake Sorting Robot
Emerging YouTube star Rachel Zylstra responds in song to reader queries for advice. All of her songs and the lyrics to them are posted on her blog. The above video is a response to this conundrum:
Dear Advice Music,
I was thinking about getting a Roomba to help tidy up my apartment. But, according to such hit TV shows as “Battlestar Galactica,” robots like the Roomba are merely setting the stage for a Robot Apocolypse. Am I being too paranoid about emerging technology, or should I have reason to fear our emerging robotic overlords?
-Scared about Being Stalked by a Robot in NY
Here is (in part), her reply:
Robots are the next frontier of
Machines humankind could make a rival of -
Follows perfectly: when we create a thing
We see it turn against us as our enemy.
It’s got religious parallels, I see.But, for real – could be you’re paranoid
To believe a Roomba’d overthrow you
Much less do a single task other than vacuum your room
(And sing a mournful tone when it gets stuck)
Which is a reckless response to the inevitable Robopocalypse. But Zylstra does give sound relationship advice in other songs.
Link via Urlesque | Official Website
Christmas is all about awkward moments at family gatherings. Le Trung, inventor of the robotic woman substitute Aiko, took that principle to a whole new level when he decided that he should celebrate Christmas with both his parents and his fembot:
The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.
Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.
‘Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,’ he said.
‘I loved buying them for her too.’
Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Bancroft Media | Previously on Neatorama: Man Weds Virtual Girlfriend
Artist Brian Kappel creates art from an alternate universe where robot aesthetic needs are respected. Beyond obvious propaganda posters like the one above, you can find advertisements catering to the robot market as well as more heroic depictions. Wynter Holden writes in the Pheonix New Times:
Take Bastard Rat, for example. Modeled after a vintage advertisement, this mock billboard for Tin Man Pest Control depicts an ominous black robot sporting a metal funnel cap, à la The Wizard of Oz, above a rat with Xs for eyes. The slogan reads “no heart, no problem.” I laughed so hard that my eyes watered. But underneath the humor, there’s an insidious message. Kappel has created a robot-dominated world in which the human attribute of compassion is non-existent. Sound familiar? Lefty Lucy, in which a sexy girl-bot poses for the naughty “All Chrome Revue,” and Loose Lips, Kappel’s robot-era take on the Nazi posters (which encouraged silence through intimidation), are two other sardonic standouts.
Link via io9 (where there’s a gallery)
This video by ABB Robotics demonstrates a sorting robot used in a pancake factory. The action starts at about 1:15, when the robot begins sorting 400 pancakes per minute, switching off so that specific sizes are in a specific order. Just imagine how we could benefit if this machine was applied to soylent green production.
Via Make | Company Website
The Bloodbot is a robot that drains you of your blood, thus replacing nursing assistants who previously did that task. It’s a project by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, UK. It’s been around for years now, but as people are waking up the a potential Robopocalypse, the Bloodbot only recently been getting attention in the blogosphere:
The Bloodbot has three powered (linear motion) axes and one unpowered (rotational) axis. All the motors are inexpensive stepper types.
The first axis moves a carriage up and down, so that it goes towards and away from the arm that is strapped in under it. This carriage is used to hold either a blunt probe (for finding a vein) or a syringe and needle. A piezo-resistive force sensor is mounted on the carriage to measure the force on the probe or needle.
The second axis moves the carriage across the width of the arm. This enables the probe to press in a series of places along the width of the arm.
The third axis, which is unpowered, enables a human operator to tilt the robot. This is so that, once a vein has been found, the needle can be inserted into the arm at the correct angle.
The fourth axis moves the whole robot along the length of the arm. This was designed to compensate for the slight difference between where the probe has identified a vein, and where the needle enters the skin, once the robot has been tilted.
Don’t worry about safety — it’s accurate 78% of the time.
Image: Imperial College
Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne programmed robots to move around an area, looking for particular rings designated as food, and avoid others designated as poison. Whenever they found food, they were programmed to flash a light. This light attracted the other robots, leading them toward the food source. When the program was altered to give the robots a measure of autonomy, they gradually ceased to flash their lights and alert their competitors that they had found food. Here’s the abstract of the journal article:
Reliable information is a crucial factor influencing decision-making, and thus fitness in all animals. A common source of information comes from inadvertent cues produced by the behavior of conspecifics. Here we use a system of experimental evolution with robots foraging in an arena containing a food source to study how communication strategies can evolve to regulate information provided by such cues. Robots could produce information by emitting blue light, which other robots could perceive with their cameras. Over the first few generations, robots quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social information allowing other robots to more rapidly find the food. Because robots were competing for food, they were quickly selected to conceal this information. However, they never completely ceased to produce information. Detailed analyses revealed that this somewhat surprising result was due to the strength of selection in suppressing information declining concomitantly with the reduction in information content. Accordingly, a stable equilibrium with low information and considerable variation in communicative behaviors was attained by mutation-selection. Because a similar co-evolutionary process should be common in natural systems, this may explain why communicative strategies are so variable in many animal species.
Although not directly related to the flesh-eating robot program, I’m sure that robots able to use humans for fuel would prefer to lie about their intentions.
A rescue robot that picks up victims and takes them inside of itself. What could possibly go wrong?
The Robocue is operated by the Tokyo Fire Department and used to extract people from areas where rescue workers can’t go safely. It then uses pincers to pull a person on to a conveyor belt and inside its protective walls. Video at the link.
