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Students from Yangzhou University and Shanghai Jiaotong University developed a robot that can prepare more than six hundred different kinds of Chinese dishes. All that’s necessary is to insert the necessary ingredients and push a few buttons. More pictures at the link.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: Xinhua/Zhao Jun
Many people find spiders terrifying, but they have a convenient shape for a robot as many legs radiating from a central core gives a mobile robot stability. Wired has a gallery of 13 robotic spiders built for all kinds of purposes from art to war to toys. Pictured is the Military Micro-Spider Bot, created for spying on the enemy. Link
Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab at Tokyo University has developed a robot that performs basic journalistic functions:
The robot detects changes in its surroundings, decides if they are relevant, and then takes pictures with its on board camera. It can query nearby people for information, and it uses internet searches to further round out its understanding. If something appears newsworthy, the robot will even write a short article and publish it to the web.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Charlie Catlett
Photo: GM/NASA
This week’s developments in technological advances, like General Motors and NASA’s Robonaut2 (cleverly and deviously nicknamed R2), and Google’s decision to team up with the NSA got GeekDad‘s Curtis Silver wondering about truth mirroring the best of science fiction- and its predictions of an eventual machine takeover that will plunge humanity into mass enslavement.
While I was writing this I read an article about how Google has teamed with the NSA in order to help tighten up Google’s infrastructure when it comes to cyber-security. The layman would view that partnership as a natural evolutionary response to fight off the ever increasing cyber-attacks on companies such as Google. The slightly paranoid individual might view that as a sure sign big brother is looking over your shoulder. The slightly paranoid geeky individual simply views that as Skynet in the making.
Curtis cites the sci-fi classics Hyperion by Dan Simmons, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and The Ship Who Sang by Anne McAffrey as prime examples “to uncover what other possible technological threats we might face in the future.” Read the article, and tell us what other stories might become reality soon.
The Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, UK has built a robot that senses obstacles not with cameras, but sensitive whiskers at the front end:
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England hope to deploy the poodle-size ‘bot in search-and-rescue missions where vision is impaired, like in mines or smoky rooms. Its 18 whiskers move back and forth five times per second. When a whisker bends, a sensor on its shaft signals software to orient the ’bot toward the object. Whiskers close to an object move less, while those farther away make wide, sweeping motions to establish the object’s exact edges.
Link | Bristol Robotics Laboratory
Botropolis (a robot-themed blog) has pictures of 10 Jack-O-Lanterns modeled to look like robots. Pictured above is Punk-O-Tron, a work by flickr user Ang & Nick. Others are inspired by Transformers, Star Wars, and Short Circuit.
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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.
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Great Video Explaining How A Vehicle’s Differential Works
It’s an old documentary- and it explains how it works so well with models and simple examples. I’m left feeling that how-to videos were somehow better before the advent of CGI. |
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Ultra High Speed Robot Reflexes
There’s really something kind of spooky about watching a robot doing something that a human would do, like bounce a ball, only 100 times faster. Brace yourself for the singularity. |
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Colliding smoke rings produce multiple mini-vortices
Only 11 seconds long- still shows some very neat vortices. |
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Extreme Vortex Cannon
And while we are on the topic of vortices, check out the Extreme Vortex Canon. Do you think it’s possible to knock over a brick “house” with a vapor ring? Find out. |
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Shooting Clay Pigeons… with a Bow
Here’s a neat video of a guy who shoots traps with a bow and arrow- deadly accurate and a lot less noise than a gun. If you like accurate shooting, then you should also check out the incredible “Sling Shot Man” |
Lastly, just a quick note to tell you that VideoSift has upgraded to a brand new version of our software and we’ve got a new logo! If you’d like to check out all of the new features in VideoSift 4.0, drop in here. Thanks!
Robots that served in Afghanistan by remotely detonating explosives are now repurposed as “firebots” in London. These machines can safely get much closer to the source of the fire than human firefighters, which is particularly useful for gas fires.
The three robots are the Talon, a small, manoeuvrable machine with thermal-image cameras; the Black Max, which is similar to a quad bike and has a high-pressure hose, and the Brokk 90, which is a heavy-duty digger that removes debris.
The robots, manufactured by QinetiQ, went into service in London yesterday. Link -via Unique Daily
Since scientists are out to kill us again, what with flesh-eating robots, ethicists and roboticists have called for revisions to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:
A human-robot co-existence society could emerge by 2030, says Chen in his paper. Already iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba floor cleaner are a part of more than 3 million American households. The next generation robots will be more sophisticated and are expected to provide services such as nursing, security, housework and education.
These machines will have the ability to make independent decisions and work reasonably unsupervised. That’s why, says Chen, it may be time to decide who regulates robots.
If it was up to you, what laws would you program into robots?
This start-up proposes to use robots to carve the lunar surface dust into patterns that could serve as advertisements. I’m skeptical due to the sheer scale of the task — the number of robots necessary over a very long period of time. Still, people said that we’d never have bacon flavored vodka, but scientists and engineers overcame the obstacles. Anyway, we know from an episode of The Tick that it can be done.
Link via Popular Science
Although I approve of striking a blow against our would-be overlords, this move seems to be needlessly antagonistic:
Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets. At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair. They could be out of work for a long time. Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.
It’s only a matter of time before rioting, unemployed robots kill us off, or take over and enslave us to work in their mines. Better go get some insurance now.
Link via Geekologie
Artist Brian Despain is a fantastic painter with a unique subject – robots. In this video, Roq La Rue Gallery’s Kristen Anderson and Kenny Montana interview Despain about his art, his inspiration and why he’s so passionate about robots.
– via boingboing
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by whitespace.
In the “AnnaTheRed’s Bento Factory” blog you can find instructions on how to make your own Wall-E sandwich using wheat bread, turkey, mayonnaise, cheese and blueberries.
Link – Botropolis via Gizmodo
Are you tired of recycling without any real pay off? Perhaps you just need a new method of recycling. The Tin Can Robot kit can turn any old 12 ounce beverage can into an awesomely adorable robot. I don’t know about you, but as soon as I’m done with my 6 pack of Dr. Peppers, I’ll soon have a new collection of best friends.
What do robot programmers do when they get bored? Apparently this one decided to transform the robot into a fun(?) ride.
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