Robots making robots, with some help.(Brief Article)
Author/s: P.W.
Issue: Sept 16, 2000
To remind themselves how much better their final products could be, robot designers need only look in the mirror. Yet the exquisite biological machines they’ll see there emerge from a blind self-replication process, called evolution, and not from a deliberate design effort. In the latter, an engineer devises a robot for welding metal or baking cookies, for instance.
Betting what works for life may also work for artificial life, researchers in Massachusetts have demonstrated the first robotic system that designs and builds robotic offspring from scratch with minimal human intervention.
“The idea that a robotic system can make another robot is not self-reproduction, but it’s a step along the way,” says Jordan Pollack of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He and Hod Lipson, also of Brandeis, describe their automated robot maker in the Aug. 31 NATURE.
Last year, Pollack and another colleague set a computer to designing simple structures by a hit-or-miss process that mimics evolution (SN: 9/4/99, p. 156). After many generations, the researchers used Lego blocks to build the computer’s designs.[…]
Battlebot: The future of sports?
By Patricia Jacobus
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
February 15, 2001, 1:50 p.m. PT
Battlebot, billed as the next smash-hit geek sport, has launched a Web site featuring animation robots designed to, um, kick each other’s bots.
The Web site seems ideal for the geek, macho crowd that can’t afford to build giant steel machines with kill saws, pulverizers or ramrod spears. Instead, with a few clicks of the mouse, enthusiasts of the sport can paste together a virtual robot and engage in virtual combat.
“It’s crazy how popular the sport is,” said Deb McCain, spokeswoman for Iguana Studios, a New York-based Web design company that helped build the Battlebot site.
A key component of the virtual combat element involves an emerging animation technology called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is under recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium to become a standard in online graphic designs.
According to backers of the standard, vector graphics are more flexible than other available animation technology, able to make computer images fit into any screen–from cell phone displays to monitors. SVG renders more easily because it is written in pure XML (Extensible Markup Language), a programming language that makes it as simple as tapping a computer key to exchange large amounts of information over the Web. Vector graphics can then easily move through tight bandwidth connections that typically choke on bulky bulky files, such as animation.
SVG competes directly with Macromedia’s Flash, which even designers at Iguana acknowledge has a big head start. The Battlebot project is the first commercial use of the technology, which is still in a “beta,” or testing, phase.
[…]The sport attracts mostly a crowd of engineers, special effects experts and mechanics who build robots weighing as much as 400 pounds that then are either reduced to tiny pieces of scrap metal after combat or emerge victorious.
Free Newsroom EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
MOBILE ROBOT SALES EXPECTED TO REACH $17 BILLION BY 2005
February 6, 2001
ActivMedia Research, LLC (www.ActivMediaResearch.com) – Today Mobile Robotics are where personal computers were in the early 1980s, poised for proliferation, with more than 1600% growth in units and nearly 2500% growth in dollars expected over the next five years. Sales are expected to soar from $665 million in 2000 to more than $17 billion in the same time frame. Technologies are such that decades of labor in artificial intelligence, sensing, navigation, communications and response are beginning to bear fruit in the form of practical mobile robots.
Scientific American: News In Brief: The Smallest Robot Ever: February 5, 2001 ENGINEERING
The Smallest Robot Ever 
Image: Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratory
Imagine a remote-controlled swarm of roach-sized tanks storming into a building through the pipes and vents. Armed with the proper sensors, cameras and communication devices, these tiny tanks could seek out chemical weapons, mines or bombs planted in hard-to-reach places. They could also detect survivors after an accident, or track human movements.
It’s a vision that could become reality thanks to the work of Ed Heller and colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories. The group recently unveiled what may be the world’s smallest robot, which they say “turns on a dime and parks on a nickel” (see image). The new mini-robot is the latest in a series from Sandia. To make it even smaller than its predecessors, the scientists used a new technique to package the electronics, a different wheel design and a change in the body material.
Scientific American: Technology and Business: Enter Robots, Slowly : September 1999 ENTER ROBOTS, SLOWLY
Faster computing means some technological
hurdles are falling
The autonomous robots of science fiction have thus far failed to whir into everyday life: they are too clumsy and expensive for the home, hobbyists aside, and can be tolerated only for the most repetitive tasks in industry. But major development projects are making progress in some of the most difficult areas, thanks to cheaper computing and radio links. “We will begin to see robots more often,” says roboticist Takeo Kanade of Carnegie Mellon University.
Mes données sont stockées en 3D Accueil -> Techno
Mes données sont stockées en 3D
par Eric Lecluyse
mis en ligne le 5 février 2001
Créée par Lucent, la société InPhase Technologies compte développer la prometteuse technologie du stockage holographique des données : les informations sont “imprimées” par des lasers dans un cristal de quelques centimètres de côté.
Lucent
Étudié depuis des années en labo, le stockage holographique (HDS : holographic data storage) se rapproche, doucement, de la concrétisation commerciale. Créée par Lucent et également financée par Imation (spécialiste américain du stockage de données) et trois capital-risqueurs, la société InPhase Technologies compte en effet développer cette technologie révolutionnaire, qui permettrait de stocker plusieurs dizaines de giga-octets (soit 3 fois plus qu’un disque dur standard) dans quelques centimètres cubes à peine. Dès la première génération, le transfert de données entre ce système de stockage et l’ordinateur pourrait atteindre plusieurs dizaines de méga-octets par seconde, soit l’équivalent des disques durs haut de gamme actuels qui utilisent plusieurs têtes de lecture pour atteindre ce score.
E4 : Engineering
From Design Engineering, 02 February 2001
In recent years, huge advances have been made in the design of androids. Most research has been directed at movement, specifically, walking using two legs.
However, as we all know, there’s a lot more to humans than our ability to walk around, and, while Honda’s P3 (and more recently ASIMO) clearly represent the cutting edge of research, plenty of experts are addressing other, more esoteric areas of robot design.
ZZZ online | Number 65 Many expect the coming age of robotics to provide us with super-intelligent, sentient robots, capable of making our beds and mixing our drinks. Others, such as Mark Tilden and Solarbotics, believe that such an age will never come, and instead work to simplify the production and function of robots.
Tilden’s designs use no computers and only a small amount of electronics. These minimalist robots rely on solar power to keep them moving. Any “intelligence” these robots develop is gained from interacting with the world around them, rather than analyzing and mapping it. The idea of creating these robots is to mimic the behaviour and learning patterns of wild animals, through a process known as evolutionary biology. AI intelligence has so far lacked the basic animal instinct needed to survive outside a laboratory, because they can’t adapt to an unprogrammed world.
ZZZ online | Number 59 German company called microTEC is manufacturing micro submarines which hull is only 650µm in the diameter and their total length is 4mm. Such submarines became reality after the development of technology called RMPD (Rapid Micro Product Development). It uses a specific, focused UV laser polymerization technique to directly cure various advanced materials at micron levels of detail. By laser exposure structuring and by gradually overlaying several hardened layers of materials, a three-dimensional device can be created in various levels of complexity. For the production of the micro sub, the process had to be capable of integrating different materials into smallest space possible.
The main objective of this submarine is to travel into the human body sending some important data to the researchers. The vessel is driven by external magnetic field, which interacts with mini magnets that are fitted into 10µm in diameter drive shaft. The drive shaft rotates as well as 600µm in diameter marine propeller affixed to it.