The Japan Times Online :: 30-year robot project pitched

Researchers see tech windfalls in costly humanoid quest

Japanese researchers in robot technology are advocating a grand project, under which the government would spend 50 billion yen a year over three decades to develop a humanoid robot with the mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old human.

The researchers believe the Atom Project, inspired by the popular robot animation series ‘Tetsuwan Atom’ by the late cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, would help promote scientific and technological advances in Japan, just like the U.S. Apollo Project, which not only succeeded in landing men on the moon but contributed to a broad range of technological breakthroughs.

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TCS: Tech – Robot Economics

Will robots steal all our jobs? Although today’s robots may lack the intelligence God gave ants, robots of the future might perform many ‘human’ tasks. Economics shows, however, that humans needn’t fret over robot-induced redundancies.

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Robots can’t steal all jobs, but to prove this I must, alas, behave like an economist and develop a simple model. Let’s assume that our economy produces only two goods: wine and cake. Each human makes one of these goods and trades it for the other.

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Daily Yomiuri On-LineReport from Silicon Valley / Robots set to invade the household

Some people call opera the grandest of the performing arts. According to these people, opera has it all: music, singing, theatrical performance, and occasionally even some dance.

In the world of technology, the equivalent has to be robotics. Robotics combines the best of mechanical design, sensors, microminiaturization, computer science and artificial intelligence. Robotics too has it all.

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Linux on a mission / SRI teaches robots how to communicate

It took two robots five minutes, more or less, to locate a penguin at Moscone Center on Wednesday.

Granted, any idiot — human or animatronic — could have found a penguin there pretty easily this week, since the bird is a ubiquitous icon featured in the logo of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Conference-goers carry wires with foam penguins bobbing at the ends, inflated and stuffed penguins are piled on most flat surfaces, and two-dimensional penguins adorn shirts and bags all over the trade show.

But these robots are no idiots. They’re part of a government-funded Silicon Valley research project aiming to create a 100-robot swarm that could help rescue hostages, detect chemical attacks or remove people from burning buildings.

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Russia Joins Humanoid Robot Race

A St. Petersburg company last week unveiled ARNE and ARNEA, the only Russian humanoid robots in existence.

The robots are male and female. Each is 123 centimeters tall and weighs 61 kilograms. They are capable of walking independently and avoiding obstacles, can distinguish and remember objects and colors, can follow up to 40 separate commands, and can even talk. The androids run on electrical power, using wireless accumulators, allowing them to work independently for up to one hour.

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VOANews.com: “Robot Challenge: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work

Rosanne Skirble

Several years ago the American Society for Artificial Intelligence issued a challenge: Build a robot that can operate like a conference goer. The robot, dropped off at the meeting site had to make its way to the registration desk, register for the conference, locate a meeting room and deliver a lecture. An autonomous robot named Grace, short for Graduate Robot Attending Conference in Edmonton, met that challenge last year in Canada. Grace will be on the convention circuit again this August in Acapulco, Mexico, where she expects to improve on last year’s performance.”

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Help Net Security

A strange two-wheeled creature was skimming through the halls of the Alexis Park Hotel on Sunday — a robot that sniffs out network vulnerabilities.

Created by two members of a loose association of security experts called the Shmoo Group, the robot is designed to wheel around on its own detecting and reporting the security problems of Wi-Fi wireless networks.

‘The point of the hacker robot is that it can become an autonomous hacker droid,’ said Paul Holman, the robot’s co-designer, who demonstrated it for the first time at the DefCon hacker convention here. ‘It can get in close to the network. On the offensive side, it can be used for corporate or political espionage. On the defensive side, it can be used for network vulnerability assessment.'”

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Demo: Teachable Robots

Like any proud parent, Michigan State University computer scientist Juyang Weng has a lot to say about what sets his little ones apart from their peers. Traditional robots, he explains, must be specially programmed for new tasks. And you just can’t teach them much. Sure, they can acquire data—but only within narrowly defined parameters set ahead of time by their programmers. “But human learning is not like that,” Weng says. “Human learning is real-time, online, on the fly.” And that kind of learning, Weng says, is essential if you want a machine to be able to cope with the unexpected—unpredictable terrain, new people or objects, noisy settings—which will surely confront robotic household assistants and military machines alike.

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Robots … start your engines!

The mission: to get a vehicle from Los Angeles to Las Vegas over a grueling off-road course. The contestants: a bunch of amateur/professionally built robot-controlled vehicles.

This forms the basis of the coming DARPA Grand Challenge, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The competition will see vehicles, which must be completely autonomous and cannot be controlled by any living thing, fighting it out for the coveted prize. The course will be 250 miles long and must be completed in 10 hours or less, with the winner receiving US$1 million. The race takes place on March 13, 2004.

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Wired News: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Listening to Marshall Brain explain the future as he sees it, it’s relatively easy to suspend disbelief and agree how plausible it is that over the next 40 years most of our jobs will be displaced by robots.

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According to Brain’s projections, laid out in an essay, ‘Robotic Nation,’ humanoid robots will be widely available by the year 2030, and able to replace jobs currently filled by people in areas such as fast-food service, housecleaning and retail. Unless ways are found to compensate for these lost jobs, Brain estimates that more than half of Americans could be unemployed by 2055. ”

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