The Great Geek Manual News

Nasa has developed “toy like” autonomous robots to carry out scientific surveys of treacherous areas of the Arctic and Antarctic.

The SnoMotes robots are designed to operate in terrain deemed too dangerous for scientists.

The devices can record data including barometric pressure, temperature and relative humidity that will help scientists improve climate models.

Ayanna Howard, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, worked with scientists at Pennsylvania State University in State College to create the devices.

Howard is a former member of Nasa’s Mars technology programme team and developed the SmartNav autonomous next-generation Mars rover.

“After working with robots for the Mars technology programme, I thought a similar type of rover could be used to collect multiple science measurements on this planet,” she said.

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Source: iT News

Despite improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics, humans prefer human interactions to those with machines, a study has found.

Researchers measured the brain activity of 20 survey participants, who each played a simple game against four opponents of varying degrees of human-likeness.

Opponents were: a regular computer notebook, a functionally designed Lego-robot, the anthropomorphic robot named BARTHOC Jr., and a human.

Although all opponents were instructed to play in a similar manner, participants reported experiencing the most enjoyment when interacting with a more human-like opponent.

The researchers expect participants’ perceptions to reflect a tendency to attribute rational decision-making abilities and strategy to human-like opponents.

“This is intriguing as intuitively one would never claim that machines find real own decisions,” said Soren Krach, a psychologist at the RWTH Aachen University.

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Source: iT News

Researchers have designed a robot that uses a novel form of electrically activated adhesion to enable it to scale any kind of vertical surface. The robot can even climb surfaces that are dusty or wet, be they concrete, glass, or drywall.

“What’s really unique about this is the technology, not the robot,” says Harsha Prahlad, senior mechanical engineer at SRI International, a nonprofit research organization based in Menlo Park, CA. There are other robots that can climb walls. But these have usually involved using microscopic fibers designed to mimic the function of the hairlike setae that give geckos their remarkable sticking power, Prahlad says.

In contrast, SRI’s robot works by inducing electrostatic charges in the surface of a wall. The advantage here is that the adhesive climbing surfaces of the robot can be turned off, making movement much simpler, says Prahlad. It also makes the robot’s adhesive surfaces self-cleaning, he says, thereby avoiding any gradual buildup of dust and dirt that would ultimately reduce the adhesion.

Tests have shown that the robot is capable of generating 1.5 newtons of sticking force per centimeter square of contact with a wall. Presenting his results at this year’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Pasadena, CA, Prahlad showed that the robot was able to scale walls while carrying weights of up to 75 pounds.

“It’s an interesting and robust approach,” says Metin Sitti, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, who has been working on wall-climbing robots for some time. However, he says, the forces generated are just one-tenth as strong as is currently being seen when the gecko-inspired approach is used.

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Source: Technology Review

Researcher Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft has developed a new, highly-advanced walking robot: Flame. This type of research, for which Hobbelen will receive his PhD on Friday 30 May, is important as it provides insight into how people walk. This can in turn help people with walking difficulties through improved diagnoses, training and rehabilitation equipment.

A member of the Dutch RoboCup team, which is to participate in the 2008 RoboCup Soccer competition in China this summer. If you try to teach a robot to walk, you will discover just how complex an activity it is. Walking robots have been around since the seventies. The applied strategies can roughly be divided into two types.

The first derives from the world of industrial robots, in which everything is fixed in routines, as is the case with factory robots. This approach can, where sufficient time and money are invested, produce excellent results, but there are major restrictions with regard to cost, energy consumption and flexibility.

TU Delft is a pioneer of the other method used for constructing walking robots, based on the way humans walk. This is really very similar to falling forward in a controlled fashion. Adopting this method replaces the cautious, rigid way in which robots walk with the more fluid, energy-efficient movement used by humans.

PhD student Daan Hobbelen has demonstrated for the first time that a robot can be both energy-efficient and highly stable. His breakthrough came in inventing a suitable method for measuring the stability of the way people walk for the first time. This is remarkable, as ‘falling forward’ is traditionally viewed as an unstable movement.

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Source: Phys Org

A computer program smart enough to fool someone into thinking they’re interacting with another person — the traditional Holy Grail for AI researchers — has been elusive. One huge problem is getting computers to understand concepts imparted in language, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in Second Life. A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out Second Life is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

Source: News Factor

Bill Thompson doesn’t think he is going to fall for a robot anytime soon. Much as I adore my MacBook I have no desire to form a life-long union with it or attempt to interface in any way that doesn’t involve keys, trackpad and my fingers.

Others seem to feel differently about the matter, like David Levy, who reckons that by the middle of the century our relationships with the machines that currently service our social lives will have grown significantly, and that intelligent robots will be sexual partners too.

He even thinks that human/machine marriages will be taking place, as people find the companionship they are looking for in ultra-realistic robots who never tire of them, never get bored with their jokes and never leave the toilet seat up. Mostly because they never go to the toilet, being robots.

Levy knows what he’s talking about, as an International Master who was closely involved in the development of chess-playing programs and a former winner of the Loebner Prize for programs that can have human-like conversations.

His recent book, ‘Love + Sex with Robots’, has attracted a lot of attention from computer scientists, psychologists and those just interested in the idea of having sex with a machine, so it was a real pleasure to have the chance to chair a discussion with him in front of a lively audience at London’s ICA.

In the end, however, I came away unconvinced.

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Source: The BBC

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in grayingJapan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Japan could save 2.1 trillion yen ($21 billion) of elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don’t have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said in its report.

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Source: Reuters

Robots of the future may able to climb up and down walls and zigzag across ceilings — and the cockroach will be the one we should thank.

One of the most reviled species in the book of life, the cockroach is also one of the most successful. Its design, honed by 300 million years of evolution, enables it to exploit a huge range of habitat niches, and its locomotion is notoriously fast and versatile.

In a study published on Wednesday, University of Cambridge zoologists Walter Federle and Christofer Clemente say they can explain how the roach (Nauphoeta cinerea) is able to effortlessly perform gravity-defying tricks.

Two tiny pads on the insect’s feet are able to pull or push, enabling the critter to skip around on surfaces that are vertical or upside-down, they found.

Previous research has found that the cockroach’s pads are soft and cushion-like and covered with a very thin film of oily and watery liquid, the exact composition of which remains unclear. The film acts in the same way as a droplet of water between two glass plates, making them stick firmly together through surface tension.

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Source: Phys Org

Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a “monstrous” two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.

Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.

They’re also delivering the first piece of Japan’s massive Kibo space station lab, a float-in closet for storing tools, experiments and spare parts. For the first time, each of the five major international space station partners will own a piece of the real estate.

At 16 days, the mission will be NASA’s longest space station trip ever and will include five spacewalks, the most ever performed while a shuttle is docked there. Three of those spacewalks will feature Dextre, which is sure to steal the show.

With 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet, the Canadian Space Agency’s Dextre — short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter — is more than a little intimidating, at least for astronaut Garrett Reisman.

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Source: Comcast.net News

Three robots finished the DARPA Urban Challenge within the allotted time Saturday, a new milestone in the development of self-driving vehicles.

In the running for the $2 million first prize and $1 million second prize are Stanford University’s robotic VW Passat, Virginia Tech’s modified Ford Escape Hybrid, and Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe. These teams finished the urban challenge’s three missions within the allotted six hours and without significant problems.

Other teams, including the Ben Franklin Racing Team’s robotic Toyota Prius, also completed the course, but it’s uncertain whether it crossed the finish line in time given various stops in the race.

DARPA plans to name the winners Sunday after compiling and evaluating all of its data on the race vehicles, including data on their speed and compliance with basic traffic rules. DARPA officials had said that the fastest car wouldn’t necessarily win if it didn’t pass all of the driving rules.

But DARPA Director Tony Tether said that he hadn’t seen anything egregious among the first three finalists.

“We have a winner,” Tether said in an interview with CNET News.com here at the former George Air Force Base.

Stanford University’s robot car Junior crossed the finish line first, but it’s unclear whether it will take first prize like it did in the 2005 Grand Challenge, a 132-mile race across the Nevada desert.

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Source: Cnet

They give them nicknames, worry when they signal for help and sometimes even treat them like a trusted pet.

A new study shows how deeply some Roomba owners become attached to the robotic vacuums, and suggests there’s a measure of public readiness to accept robots in the house — even flawed ones.

“They’re more willing to work with a robot that does have issues because they really, really like it,” said Beki Grinter, an associate professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “It sort of begins to address more concerns: If we can design things that are somewhat emotionally engaging, it doesn’t have to be as reliable.”

Grinter decided to study the devices after she saw online pictures of people dressing up their Roombas, the disc-shaped, self-directed vacuums made by Burlington, Mass-based iRobot Corp.

“This sort of notion that someone would dress a vacuum cleaner seemed strange,” she said. “A lot more was going on.”

She enlisted Ph.D. student Ja Young Sung, who studies “emotional design” — the theory that certain types of design can influence consumers to become emotionally attached.

The Roomba seems to have earned quite a following. More than 2 million of the robots have been sold, although some earlier versions suffered from motor failure and other problems after intensive use. The company says its latest model — the fifth generation — has been “reinvented” for improved performance.

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Source: The Associated Press via Google News

Junior, the robot Volkswagen, passed its basic driver’s test here Thursday.

Now comes the hard part: a race on mock city streets that will raise the bar for artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot here next to Google headquarters to test Stanford University’s autonomous passenger car, Junior, in what was its first big qualifying test for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA’s third Grand Challenge competition for driverless vehicles.

DARPA will make so-called “site visits” this summer to evaluate all 53 prospective Urban Challenge contestants, homing in on whether the robots can perform basic driving skills, including navigating a four-way stop with live traffic, passing a stationary car and executing a U-turn.

“It’s a steep ladder to get up to the Urban Challenge. What you saw today was the first rung of the ladder,” Norm Whitaker, program manager for DARPA, said to a crowd of people following a two-and-a-half-hour test of Stanford Racing Team’s Junior.

Driving just 15 miles per hour, Junior passed with flying colors in three of four “missions” on a parking-lot course, including a three-point U-turn and successful navigation of a four-way stop with human-driver cars. But it got stuck on a course passing a car.

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Source: CNet

In a bid to understand the evolutionary aspects behind the transition of primitive swim-only animals to modern land-walkers, researchers at a Swiss University have developed an amphibious robotic model. The model which simulates the movements of a salamander could swim as effectively as an eel in water and walk as soon as it was moved to land.

“We hypothesize that the evolutionary transition was made by reusing and extending a previous circuit designed for swimming, rather than developing a completely new locomotion circuit,” Auke Jan Ijspeert, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, told the Discovery News.

Working on the hypothesis, Ijspeert and team first designed a basic nervous system modeled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like animal. They then moved to add on limb functions to the same robotic nervous system and used a laptop and a wireless signal to control its movements.

The researchers noted that although the spinal circuitry that controlled locomotion was complex, the stimulations needed to switch the robot from walking to swimming mode or vice-versa were fairly simple, according to the Discovery News.

A variation in just two simple signals sent from the brain changed the robot’s gait, they report in this week’s issue of journal Science.

“This exactly replicates how gait transitions can be induced by electrical stimulation in a real salamander,” Ijspeert told the channel.

Researchers hope the results of the study could in the future extend to understanding the human nervous system and used to treat patients with spinal cord injuries.

Source: All Headline News

An Israeli defense firm on Thursday unveiled a portable robot billed as being capable of entering most combat zones alone and engaging enemies with an onboard armory that includes a machine-pistol and grenades.

The VIPeR, roughly the size of a small television, was invented as part of Israel’s efforts to develop weaponry that could reduce the risks to its forces from hand-to-hand fighting against Palestinian or Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

The manufacturer, Elbit Systems Ltd., said that the VIPeR’s small size and dual treads enable it to move “undeterred by stairs, rubble, dark alleys, caves or narrow tunnels”.

As well as bomb-sniffing and bomb disposal equipment, the VIPeR can carry an Uzi machine-pistol or plant a grenade. The weapons would be aimed using an onboard video camera.

According to Elbit, which has close links with the Defense Ministry, Israel plans to deploy the VIPeR among its infantry units after field tests. The robot could also be of interest to foreign police units or U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Source: Reuters

Blogger’s Note: WOW! A robot the size of a small television that can independently kill. I can’t see this going wrong! Though a dozen of these unleashed on New York’s Times Square might reduce crime …