Cell phone controlled robot unveiled

Japan’s Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new robot for the home, the MARON-1, which can be remotely controlled by a cell phone to operate home electronic appliances or monitor household security. The ambulatory prototype robot is equipped with a wide range of functions, including telephone, camera, remote control, timer and surveillance equipment. With these features, for example, it is envisioned that MARON-1 could be used for monitoring homes or offices at night or for checking up on persons requiring special care and monitoring. Fujitsu will be presenting details on the new robot at the Japan Robot Conference, opening October 12, 2002 at Osaka University.

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Google Search: robots

NEW tool : it’s now possible to search news sites with Google.

After www.moreover.com, www.daypop.com, or www.newsisfree.com, Google provides quite powerfull tool to search very last news (few minutes).

Have a look!

ElectricNews.net:News:Americans turned off by robots

Americans could turn against robots, after it emerged that the machines designed to be low-cost servants are increasingly taking the place of older workers.

These findings are contained in a new report, by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which reports a 17 percent fall in robot investment in the United States in 2001. By contrast, British and Spanish investment in robots increased last year by 26 percent and 22 percent respectively.

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ER1

Evolution Robotics announced that the ER1 personal robot system will be available in retail stores in time for the holidays. In connection, Evolution Robotics has planned over 200 demos of ER1 across the U.S., where curious consumers, robot hobbyists and journalists are welcome to get to know ER1 up close and personal.

If you haven’t heard, ER1 is the first in a line of autonomous personal robots that invite users to transform their laptops into mobile robots by assembling the robot’s aluminum frame and loading easy-to-use software.

Users can instruct their robot to respond to voice commands, take photographs of its environment and send them to an email address, play music from a CD it recognizes, read books from pre-recordings and send reminders to its owner.

For a close encounter with ER1, log on to: http://www.evolution.com, and find out when ER1 is coming to a city near you.

[link to press release (rtf)]

Frequently Asked Questions About the Meaning of Life

What is humanity’s place in the cosmos?

The same place held by all the other technology-using species now briefly living on or around the ten billion trillion (1) stars in this Universe: Our role in the cosmos is to become or create our successors. I don’t think anyone would dispute that something smarter (or otherwise higher) than human might evolve, or be created, in a few million years.  So, once you’ve accepted that possibility, you may as well accept that neurohacking, BCI (Brain-Computer Interfaces), Artificial Intelligence, or some other intelligence-enhancement technology will transcend the human condition, almost certainly within your lifetime (unless we blow ourselves to dust first).

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
        — Vernor Vinge, 1993

The really interesting part about the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is the positive-feedback effect.  Technology is the product of intelligence, so when intelligence is enhanced by technology, you’ve got transhumans who are more effective at creating better transhumans, who are more effective at creating even better transhumans.  Cro-Magnons changed faster than Neanderthals, agricultural society changed faster than hunter-gatherer society, printing-press society changed faster than clay-tablet society, and now we have “Internet time”.  And yet all the difference between an Internet CEO and a hunter-gatherer is a matter of knowledge and culture, of “software”.  Our “hardware”, our minds, emotions, our fundamental level of intelligence, are unchanged from fifty thousand years ago.  Within a couple of decades, for the first time in human history, we will have the ability to modify the hardware.

And it won’t stop there.  The first-stage enhanced humans or artificial minds might only be around for months or even days before creating the next step.  Then it happens again.  Then again.  Whatever the ultimate ends of existence, we might live to see them.

To put it another way:  As of 2000, computing power has doubled every two years, like clockwork, for the past fifty-five years.  This is known as “Moore’s Law”.  However, the computer you’re using to read this Web page still has only one-hundred-millionth the raw power of a human brain – i.e., around a hundred million billion (10^17) operations per second (2).  Estimates on when computers will match the power of a human brain vary widely, but IBM has recently announced the Blue Gene project to achieve petaflops (10^15 ops/sec) computing power by 2005, which would take us within a factor of a hundred.

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In Our Image: Why do we keep making robots that look like us?

Just like humans, they come in all shapes, sizes, and attitudes. Tall and slender like C3PO; short and squatty like R2D2; evil like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; childlike and playful, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kismet. But as “Tech Live” reports tonight, the robot world has always struggled with one basic concept: “The latent goal of artificial intelligence researchers has always been to build something as intelligent, as human-like, as we are,” said MIT’s Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer.

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MIT’s Kismet is a classic example of where robotics research is headed. Its four cameras help it see. Twenty-one motors in its face and 15 separate computers help the robot convey the illusion of emotions such as happiness, fear, surprise, and disgust.

And more than just reacting emotionally, researchers are working on creating a refined, artificial personality so the robot can provide a kind of companionship.

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“Being able to recognize the difference between a dog and a cat reliably; every 2-year-old kid can do it, no machine can do it,” said author David Stork, who wrote HAL’s Legacy, which is about how robots and artificial intelligence will impact culture in the near future.

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eMuu Project



A salient feature of the ambient intelligent home of the future will be the natural interaction between the home and its inhabitants through speech.

An embodied home character, such as eMuu, could be the social entity necessary to provide natural dialogues. This character would have to be able to utilize the full range of communication channels, including emotional expressions, to give intuitive feedback to the user.

eMuu is based on the robot Muu, that was developed by Michio Okada. Muu focuses on the social bonding with humans. The character also works as an embodied interface that mediates the social bonding that people establish in everyday conversations.

[more in japanese]

Dean Of Invention: A wheelchair that climbs stairs? It’s just one product of Kamen’s idea factory.

You have teenagers thinking they’re going to make millions as NBA stars when that’s not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.”

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“We celebrate the wrong things,” Kamen said.

The motivation for Kamen’s robotics competition was to provide students direct exposure to engineers and scientists while doing a project. With that, FIRST – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology – has enlisted corporations to not only fund school teams but also to provide mentors and advisers so that students have direct exposure to engineers and scientists.

“FIRST is a wonderful sociological experiment that brings people together,” said Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has helped support the competition since the beginning in 1990. And, as he points out, the most coveted prize, the Chairman’s Award, is given to the team that demonstrates the “most exemplary relationship between a team and a community.”

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A new robosoldier goes to war

“Christian Science Monitor“

In Afghanistan, a new robosoldier goes to war

The ‘war on terror’ is a testing ground for new technology

By David Buchbinder

NARIZAH, AFGHANISTAN ? A squad of heavily armed American soldiers lines up single file outside a mud-walled compound in eastern Afghanistan, ready to burst inside.

Just around the corner, technicians boot up Fester, a tank-like robot the size of a suitcase. An order comes over the radio: The soldiers are to hold their positions, but the robot is authorized to enter the building.

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The radio-controlled, reconnaissance robosoldier can climb stairs, turn somersaults and roll along at about 9 m.p.h. Shockproof and waterproof, he has survived a plunge from a second-story window. Most important, Fester won’t die if he’s shot while exploring a cave or poking through a suspicious building.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

TECHSPLOITATION: Artificial Intelligence

“AlterNet.org”

Abnormal technology.

Science fiction writers love to speculate about the abnormal psychology of robots. That’s the pathos of the robot – designed to have the perfect mind, it nevertheless malfunctions and becomes a calm-voiced, sociopathic HAL, or a tragically doomed rebel like the replicants in “Blade Runner,” or the feminist death-bot in “Eve of Destruction.” When Isaac Asimov set out to write the first definitive work of robot S.F., “I, Robot” (1955), he did it by creating a character called a “robopsychologist” whose observations of abnormal robotic psychology formed the meat of the tale.

Researchers haven’t yet invented a robot whose psychology is complicated enough to be equivalent to that of a “normal” person, let alone a neurotic one. It’s safe to say that all these speculations about the insanity of machines are really meditations on our own mental failures and cognitive disasters. Even true tales about the behavior of actually existing robots — like the small “evolving” robot in England named Gaak that managed to escape from its cage and zoom out the doors of a building and into the parking lot — read like allegories of human life. Trapped in a lab, forced to fight for scant resources with its fellow lab-bots, Gaak said, “Fuck this,” and ran away when it had the chance. Just like you would, right?

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On Robotics via News Is Free