Infants spend their first few months learning to find their way around and manipulating objects, and they are very flexible about it: Cups can come in different shapes and sizes, but they all have handles. So do pitchers, so we pick them up the same way.
Similarly, your personal robot in the future will need the ability to generalize — for example, to handle your particular set of dishes and put them in your particular dishwasher.
In Cornell’s Personal Robotics Laboratory, a team led by Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, is teaching robots to manipulate objects and find their way around in new environments. They reported two examples of their work at the 2011 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference June 27 at the University of Southern California.
A common thread running through the research is “machine learning” — programming a computer to observe events and find commonalities. With the right programming, for example, a computer can look at a wide array of cups, find their common characteristics and then be able to identify cups in the future. A similar process can teach a robot to find a cup’s handle and grasp it correctly.
Other researchers have gone this far, but Saxena’s team has found that placing objects is harder than picking them up, because there are many options. A cup is placed upright on a table, but upside down in a dishwasher, so the robot must be trained to make those decisions.
“We just show the robot some examples and it learns to generalize the placing strategies and applies them to objects that were not seen before,” Saxena explained. “It learns about stability and other criteria for good placing for plates and cups, and when it sees a new object — a bowl — it applies them.”
In early tests they placed a plate, mug, martini glass, bowl, candy cane, disc, spoon and tuning fork on a flat surface, on a hook, in a stemware holder, in a pen holder and on several different dish racks.
Let’s not be silly here, robots don’t want to kill all humans…they just want to take all their jobs. The accelerating rise in robot labor of the past decade, and its expansion into all areas of production, have led many to worry about the future of human workers. Yet how extensive is the robotic take over of labor? Our friends at Mezzmer Eyeglasses did some impressive research and created an even more impressive infographic explaining the present and future of robots in the workplace. Check out the Singularity Hub exclusive image below. With 9 million robots working in the world, and 4 million+ more scheduled to arrive next year, we’re clearly entering into a new age of automation. But will it bring a new era of unemployment with it?
Australian scientists have invented a new breed of robots called Lingodroids, programmed to make, use, and share language. The bots can coin words to describe places they have been, places they want to go, and plans for getting there. “When they need a new word, they invent one,” says Janet Wiles, a cognitive scientist at the University of Queensland who leads an interdisciplinary team on the project.
The rolling chatterboxes “see” using 360-degree cameras, laser range finders, and sonar. A microphone functions as their ears, and a speaker acts as a voice box, emitting the familiar beeps of a touch-tone phone. As for brains, Wiles outfitted each Lingodroid with an alphabet of beeps that correspond to letters. Then she programmed them to play a series of games in which they paired the letters into nonsensical combinations like “ja” or “ku” and joined those syllables to coin neologisms as needed. For example, in one game two robots roamed through a course and met in an unfamiliar part of it. The meeting triggered one robot to name the spot “jaya” and share the new word with its partner, who then added the word to its lexicon. In this way the robots slowly built a new language to describe their travels [pdf] and eventually even learned to communicate and understand directions.
Wiles notes that although the language may seem simple, for robots, grasping spatial information is incredibly complex. “We don’t realize how sophisticated our use of language to describe the world around us is,” she says. Ultimately, she hopes to teach her robots to chat up humans, paving the way for robotic caregivers, companions, and butlers.
They’re not quite psychic yet, but machines are getting better at reading your mind. Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot. Scientists hope the technology will give "locked in" patients—those too disabled to communicate with the outside world—the ability to interact with others and even give the illusion of being physically present, or "telepresent," with friends and family.
Previous brain-machine interface systems have made it possible for people to control robots, cursors, or prosthetics with conscious thought, but they often take a lot of effort and concentration, says José del R. Millán, a biomedical engineer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, who develops brain-machine interface systems that don’t need to be implanted into the brain. Millán’s goal is to make control as easy as driving a car on a highway. A partially autonomous robot would allow a user to stop concentrating on tasks that he or she would normally do subconsciously, such as following a person or avoiding running into walls. But if the robot encounters an unexpected event and needs to make a split-second decision, the user’s thoughts can override the robot’s artificial intelligence.
Robots have been considered too unpredictable and dangerous to work alongside humans in factories—advances in artificial sensing and motion could change that…
Click here to read the entire report found in MIT’s Technology Review.
NASA’s prolific Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is five Earth years old.
Since settling into orbit around the Red Planet on March 10, 2006, MRO has transmitted more data to Earth — 131 trillion bits and more than 70,000 images so far — than all other interplanetary missions combined…
The Department of Defense’s (DOD) research and development arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has awarded two several million dollar contracts to a Boston-based company to build several life-like robots: one human-like and the other a super-fast robot Cheetah.
Both of these robots exist only in concept, Boston Dynmics president Mark Raibert told PCMag. The Cheetah robot will have four legs, a flexible spine, an articulated head, and could have a tail, too. It will also have the ability to stop on a dime, and will be built with a malleable body, allowing it to zig-zag and turn sharp corners. Raibert said it will eventually reach speeds up to 70 mph, but the goal for the first model, due in 20 months, is a pace of 20-30 mph. The fastest existing robot has been clocked at a record 13 mph, Raibert said.
The steady march of industrial automation continues to envelop the world. Many of us have a quaint early 20th century vision of agriculture, but the truth is that the farmer of the 21st century is a machine. Case in point: lettuce. With new hydroponic techniques, companies are able to grow lettuce in large indoor fields where crops are sorted, planted, and grown automatically. Robots are instrumental to all steps of the process. Don’t believe me? Check out the video below. It shows the day to day automation for a hydroponic farm in Belgium. Those bots seem to have a pretty green thumb.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was established 1958 in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. DARPA reports directly to the Secretary of Defense; however, it operates independently of the rest of military research and development…
An in depth look at the growing use of robotics and technology in war. You will be surprised. Shocked may be more like it. Also, a look at the use of these technologies spreading into law enforcement and elsewhere.
Click here to access this fascinating, amazing and thought provoking video. You really need to watch it to understand what’s going on in the world today.
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Blogging the Singularity Bloggers:
Chris Williamson: Filmmaker, science enthusiast, and futurist concerned with the accelerating nature of technological growth and where it's headed. He is currently studying for his MFA in Film Production.
Frank Whittemore: As an IT professional since 1961, the accelerating change of technology is not news to him but the wonder will never cease! Be sure check out Frank's blog about Life Extension!
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