Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Survival research labs creates real life battle bots for robot wars that are performed live. SLR’s tagline is ‘Producing the most dangerous shows on earth’.

. . . “He’s trying to create a strong message about fear,” said Dr. Ken Goldberg, an associate professor of robotics at the University of California at Berkeley. “That’s what Mark is doing, igniting fear in the audience, with flying metal.”

While the use of what has become known as “Whitman’s tower” might be offensive to the sensibilities of the locals, what has consistently gotten Pauline in trouble over his 23-year career is his penchant for creating large, potentially lethal robots under the guise of modern performance art.

His group was recently banned from Japan after unveiling the pitching machine — a device with two rotating tires and the end of a funnel, which normally throws baseballs and softballs, that now hurls two-by-fours at 150 mph.

Just hours before the Austin Fire Marshall would run Pauline and his merry group of 60 out of town for violations — such as shooting 20-foot walls of flame toward hundreds of people, setting off rockets, and creating a general disturbance, the man stood silent -– his mission accomplished. . . [ read more Igniting Fear with Flying Metal ]

More information:
SRL
SRL Blog
SRL Flickr Set
Survival Research Labs – tribe.net

Video:
SRL YouTube Video
You Tube: Mark Pauline Show

I don’t know how I missed this story last year. Flying robots that repair satellites are cool. Maybe in time we’ll have robot mechanics patrolling the highways and fixing disabled vehicles?

Boeing Orbital Express system is a DARPA project hoping to demonstrate fully autonomous on orbit satellite servicing capabilities. Which in plain English means robot satellites who service and repair other satellites. These satellite mechanics will fly as high as 7 km.

Last year Boeing successfully demonstrated refueling and battery replacement using autonomous robots. Using robot satellites to refuel and do maintenance on other satellites will greatly drop the cost of using satellites.

Two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Orbital Express
demonstrator spacecraft were launched yesterday at 10:10 p.m. EST, from Space Launch
Complex 41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard an Atlas V 401 booster. The launch
was sponsored by the Department of Defense Space Test Program (STP), as part of the STP-1
mission, which includes, in addition to Orbital Express, the STPSat-1 spacecraft and three other
microsatellites.

Orbital Express consists of a next generation serviceable “client” satellite (NextSat) and a
prototype servicing spacecraft (Autonomous Space Transport Robotic Orbiter or ASTRO). They
were deployed together into a circular, 492-kilometer, low earth orbit with an inclination of 46
degrees. They will spend the next three months in orbit, demonstrating for the first time fully
autonomous rendezvous and capture of client spacecraft, satellite-to-satellite refueling, and
replacement of battery and flight-computer orbital replacement units.

More information:
Boeing Orbital Express
The REal R2D2: ASTRO Takes on Space Rogues
Darpa: Orbital Express ( has videos and photos )

The Japanese are really going to make it much more fun to age. What is really cool is the technology for these glasses is well known and already available.

. . .

Simply tell the glasses what you are looking for and it will play into your eye a video of the last few seconds you saw that item.

Built on to the glasses is a tiny camera which makes a constant record of everything the wearer sees: the tiny display inside the glasses identifies what is being scanned and a small readout instantly announces what the computer thinks the object probably is. For some things that look different from a range of angles, however, the glasses offer only a “best guess” – they are better at identifying a guitar and a chair than a coathanger or battery.
Related Links

The hardware itself is not extraordinary: what has taken Professor Kuniyoshi several years to perfect is the computer algorithm that allows the goggles to know immediately what they are seeing. It is, he says, a problem that has always vexed the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.

But working in a team with Tatsuya Harada, one of Japan’s masters of the science of “fuzzy logic”, Mr Kuniyoshi believes he has cracked the problem. Behind the goggles is possibly the world’s most advanced object recognition software and a computer that can learn the identity of new objects within seconds.

So if the user wanders round the house for about an hour telling the goggles the name of everything from that coathanger to the kitchen sink, they will remember. Then if, at some point in the future, you ask them where you last saw a particular item, they will play the appropriate footage.

. . .

[ read more The glasses that can help you find anything ]

See also:
Robots for old boomers (UMass project aims to assist aging population )

What makes this robot interesting is that it uses touch to find its way around. Biotact is a consortium of researchers from all over the world who are working on this project.

. . .Based on principles of active sensing adopted widely in the animal kingdom, the multinational team is developing innovative touch technologies, including a ‘whiskered’ robotic rat. The whiskered robot will be able to quickly locate, identify and capture moving objects. ‘The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now,’ says Prof. Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department, whose research team is one of the groups participating in the multinational project. . . [ read more Robot rat to lead the way in touch technology ]

. . . What is the whisker’s “secret”? Why is the sense of touch through a rat’s whiskers much more efficient than that of the average person’s fingertips? The consortium’s teams have provided some insights into these questions. One explanation concerns the way in which the sensory system works: Whiskers actively sweep back and forth repetitively, accumulating information about the surrounding environment. The sensing begins in the neurons at the whiskers’ bases, which then fire signals off to the brain. Moreover, experiments have shown that the way in which a rat uses its whiskers is context-dependent. The seemingly simple act of feeling out a three-dimensional object, for example, requires three different types of code, each encoding a different dimension – the horizontal, the vertical, and the radial (distance from the whisker base). The horizontal plane, for instance, is encoded in the precise timing of neural signals relative to the whisking motion. The vertical, i.e., the object height, is encoded by the vertical spacing of the whiskers, which are arranged grid-like on either side of the snout. The radial plane, on the other hand, is encoded in the number of times the neurons fire: The closer an object is to the rat’s snout, the higher the number of neuron-signaling spikes. . . [ read more Global team developing 'Robotic rats' ]

More information:
BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch ( BIOTACT)

Papers:
Whiskerbot: A robotic active touch system modeled on the rat whisker system ( $$$ pdf )
An active artificial whisker array for texture discrimination ( $$$ pdf )

Last month several tech sites ran headlines about “3d Shape Shifting Robot Swarms”. We’ve also seen this begin to appear in many recent science fiction stories.

Goldstein calls the programmable matter claytronics and the tiny robots catoms. And it’s not all out of a sci-fi movie. Goldstein said. Working hand-in-hand with Intel Corp., the research team has made a lot of progress in getting the catoms to bond together and even share power.

Think of each catom as a tiny robot or computer that has computational power, memory and the ability to store and share power. Right now, each catom has 24 electromagnets around its circumference. Based on whether the electromagnets are powered on or off decides how the catoms are moved into position with each other. The robots will harness these forces to achieve their goals.

“They talk to each other all the time and move together or apart,” explained Goldstein. “In the long term, we’ll use electrostatic forces. We’ll create it by putting a voltage on them.” . . [ read more 3d Shape Shifting Robot Swarms ]

This technology is not as far fetched as it might seem at first blush. We’ve seen chairs that fall apart and put themselves back together. and NASA had a pyramid shape shifting robot in 2005 which they hope to miniaturize to nano scale. And a Xerox researcher built a shape shifting robot in 2000.

So shape shifting robots are closer than you think, and are you really sure that lamp on your desk is just a lamp?

More information:
York investigates evolving ‘swarm’ robots
Swarm robotics work hundreds of robots into one