Robots need culture says Sony Scientist

“ZDNet”

A researcher says that the next wave of robots will be able to interact with one another, form their own languages and evolve new kinds of intelligence

Luc Steels, a professor at the University of Brussels and director of Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, wants to make robots more like living things by teaching them how to express themselves. It is a concept that has met with resistance from some quarters.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

Robots learn to fly

“New Scientist”

Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error – but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.

Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.

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On Robotics via News Is Free

Farting Robots and Shitting Ducks

I’VE SIGNED THE PETITION, SIGNATURE NUMBER 134,042, so clearly I’m not the only one mourning the passing of Futurama. Though, frankly, and I am sure this is not an irrelevant statistic, I have yet to meet another soul aside from my husband who actually watched the show. Too bad, because Futurama, a hyperkinetic hybrid of The Simpsons and Star Trek, is one of the most brilliant sci-fi parodies ever conceived. If there were any doubts about Matt Groening’s genius, Bender blew them away.

Bender is of course a robot — but one in a class of his own. In classic science fiction, the function of the robot (or its fleshy facsimile) is rational reflection (think Data and Mr. Spock). Though Spock is a Vulcan, his persona is strictly machinic, an android in spirit if not technically in flesh, while his Next Generation counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Data, is unambiguously pure construct. A Mensa Dream Team, cool, calm and calculating at every turn, are the guys you can call on when the dilithium drive melts down and the space-time matrix ruptures. Bender, he’d be down the back of the bus chugging beers. If Data is the silicon sibling of the icy Vulcan Spock, all quiet reason and prim restraint, Bender is the titanium twin of Homer Simpson, belching and farting his way through time and space. With this venal, indulgent sensualist, Groening thumbs his nose at the whole tradition of artificial intelligence: Fuck chess, pass the nachos.

For much of the past half-century, robotics research has focused on tasks requiring concerted mental acuity — navigating a maze, for instance, or precise mechanical assembly — but a new generation of researchers are beginning to turn their attention to more “mundane” corporeal functions such as walking and scuttling. And yes, some of the finest minds in the field are currently trying to make robots that fart and shit and pee.

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Movies and pictures from Robodex 2002 event : have a look here : http://www.robots.org/.

New robot has basic social skills

PITTSBURGH (AP) – A 6-foot-tall robot that courteously steps aside

for people, smiles during conversation and politely asks directions shouldn’t be blamed for being too eager to please.

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The robot, named GRACE (short for Graduate Robot Attending Conference), will wander a symposium on artificial intelligence that begins this weekend, where it will demonstrate basic human social skills.

It will try to sign in at the registration desk, find a conference room, give a speech and answer questions.

GRACE, a drum-shaped contraption with a digitally animated face that appears on a computer display, is the work of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere.

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Democrat & Chronicle: UR robot to strut its stuff

(July 23, 2002) — Toting a food tray, the server came to a stop, stared at Tom Kollar’s face and offered a snack. “Hello, my name is Mabel. Would you like an hors d’oeuvre?”

[…]

Mabel’s small, wheeled base is a robot itself, bought with some research grant money.

Atop that base are a variety of sensors, camera and microphone, a speaker so Mabel can talk back and a Webcam that keeps an eye on how much food is gone from the tray.

The robot is loaded with voice recognition and facial recognition programs. It will look around for what it thinks are people, focuses its camera and microphone on what it believes are faces, and offers food. If the face moves around, the camera will follow.

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Showcase for digital entertainment

Want to know how the characters in Star Wars Episode II were created, find out how computer games will change the way we use computers?

Or how a robot called Lewis could be your wedding photographer? Well, then Siggraph 2002 could be for you.

At one of the world’s largest multimedia conferences in the world, held this year in San Antonio, Texas, US, more than 6,500 international experts will reveal the digital future of the entertainment industry.

Siggraph – Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques – is now in its 29th year.

The annual six-day conference attracts experts in animation, computer graphics, robotics and digital art. It is a meeting of the people who create what we watch on the big screen to the computer screen and how we watch it.

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Digital voyages

Highlights this year include a keynote address from Esther Dyson, often described as the most influential woman in cyberspace, who will explore issues of control and identity on the internet.

Talks and demonstrations promise enlightening voyages into the creation of Middle Earth for the film Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars universe.

Across the hall, Lewis the robotic photographer will try to snap your photograph, while Public Anemone, an organic, sea anemone-like “robot creature” will emotively respond as you tap on its tank.

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(Siggraph facts:

29th conference

20,000 anticipated visitors

6,000 international visitors

300 exhibitors)

At the crossroads of terror: Inside the clandestine operations center where the CIA tries to anticipate what al-Qaeda will do next

CIA scientists are investigating exotic supercomputer programs and artificial intelligence that might help analysts link hundreds of thousands of names, places and bank accounts.

[…]

The Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, as veteran hands call it, has become the CIA’s busiest outfit. Organized in 1986 to coordinate America’s effort to foil terrorists overseas, the center has doubled its manpower since the Sept. 11 attacks to more than 1,100 analysts and clandestine agents. Some 2,500 cables pour into the CTC every day from CIA stations around the world, from interrogators interviewing al-Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and from foreign intelligence services that have tips on terrorists.

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The center is trying to do what it could not do before: pluck obscure bits of information from the flood of often irrelevant or insignificant data and connect the dots to foil a major new attack.

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Robots hardly cricket

Somewhere in cricket-crazed England an electronics company has spent a six-figure sum to invent the game’s version of Cyclops, the beeping robot that makes tennis line calls.

The thinking is the new gadget will intervene when bowlers overstep the crease and deliver a no-ball.

A beep would be heard in the umpire’s ear and he would signal a no-ball.

As is so often the case in technological debates, the logic sounds flawless.

With the electronic eye taking care of no-ball calls, the umpire would not have to look down at the crease for a split second before he looks up for the more important business of deciding what happens at the other end.

It sounds like the breakthrough of the year . . . but is it?

[…]

The International Cricket Council has lit the fuse for an emotion charged debate by letting umpires use technology for any decision they are not certain about, including lbw verdicts, in the Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka in September.

Many cricket people have simply had a gutful of technological intrusions into the ancient game.

It’s worthwhile remembering several years ago tennis officials considered employing a new system where iron fibres were placed in the coating of a tennis ball and a magnetic field used for all line decisions (as opposed to Cyclops which operates exclusively on the service line).

But it was rejected on the basis that tennis still wanted to be a human game.

Someone quipped there were enough robots playing the game. You don’t want them on every sideline as well.

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Robot servants–sooner than you think

Sony’s Aibo robot and Honda’s Asimo robot lines have proven that there is at least some level of acceptance of robots in the home. Now the question becomes when will those robots wash windows and trim hedges?

In the suburbs of Tokyo, researchers from NEC have been working on robots that can “help around the house.” It all started when the researchers realized that several of their ongoing projects, including speech recognition and optical sensing, could come together to allow a robot to see and hear.

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PaPeRo’s “eyes” consist of two CCD cameras, and with them PaPeRo can recognize up to ten faces. Four microphones–three to detect the direction from which a sound came and one for speech recognition of up to 650 words–act as PaPeRo’s “ears.”

[…]

In a demonstration, PaPeRo recognized Fujita, engaged in a bit of small talk, and then accepted the verbal order to take a voice message. When PaPeRo met with the person for whom the message was intended, he would recognize the person’s face, and offer to play the voice message for them (“Obi-Wan, you are our only hope.”). Fujita then asked the robot to turn on the television, which was accomplished via PaPeRo’s infra-red transmitter. PaPeRo was also able to change stations for Fujita, accepting requests by name of the station.

NEC’s vision is “to partner (with) people in their homes with the underlying aim of improving (the) human-machine interface through introducing robots into our everyday lives.” While PaPeRo certainly does not threaten the jobs of butlers and maids just yet, this demonstration was merely a taste of things to come. 70 families in Japan have PaPeRo robots in their homes, doing real-world testing.

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Fujita says a robot builder’s work is never done, as robots will always be compared to humans rather than appliances.