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A Piece-By-Piece Guide to the Most Advanced Bots
XopherMV cuts-and-pastes from Wired: "In an article from Wired, 'Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances.'" Reader ptorrone adds: "In Los Angeles, CA at the Century Plaza Hotel for the 4Site conference, our favorite robot vacuum/military supplier, iRobot, showed off the tactical mobile robot! The 'Tactical mobile Robot' has its own brochure and site: www.packbot.com. The rad thing about this platform is its skateboard design, where it appears to support various plug-in modules. Here are some photos of the packbot!"
Machines are getting more and more like the rest of us
Uh, oh.
There are some human behaviors I'd rather robots not emulate, such as warring against each other, spamming, biting their fingernails, and forgetting to put the toilet seat down.
Sigs cause cancer.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
From the article:
ACT HAND: The Anatomically Correct Testbed hand also aims to imitate human anatomy. Its bones mimic ours, the joints provide the same range of motion and stiffness as human joints, and for control it relies on signals that emulate neural commands from the brain. While the goal is to build a full hand, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have completed only one finger. - Xeni Jardin
I wonder which one?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Wait, where is that red pill again? Or is it the blue?
for the fembots.
becoming partners rather than tools
:)
This could get scary... On the other hand, if I buy robosex.com, I could profit!
bash: rtfm: command not found
That's an improvement. The way it is now, most of us have appliances instead of friends, and that looks like a growing trend.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Some rich mogul should setup a $10,000,000 purse for the first company that can make a robot which can walk, understand commands and act them out, and not bump into an item and fall over all for under $2000. ie: go downstairs and get me a soda, go make the bed, whatever...
Maybe something like that would spur some more activity into the robot sector.
GroupShares Inc. - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community
-------
artlu.net
Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can ...tie its shoelaces
The only reason is because velcro is more efficient
"becoming partners"...
And as everyone knows the porn industry will have this technology in widespread use 10.5 microseconds after it becomes commercially available.
Rotate 28 degrees. Engage rotor.
--Kevin
I wonder if it's healthy for humans to get attached to robots "as friends"...
;)
Robots won't be attached to us, and we're setting ourselves up for a one-sided relationship.
Now... if someone's going to invent Sexbots....
do() || do_not();
To most Slashdotters...RealDoll is already a partner and best friend.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Everybody knows chatbots and the Turing-Test.
But what happens, when a chatbot talks to another chatbot? Take a look.
I was hoping this was about AI in FPS's. That said, until the robot can Find Sarah Connor, it's just not good enough.
I do security
Take a look at the difference between ELIZA and ALICE, for example. ALICE is still just a pattern-matching language parser, just as ELIZA was from decades ago. Both qualify as being able to partake in simple conversations. ALICE simply has more comupting power available to it - power that it wastes on XML, I might add. Is there absolutely no chance that, in 5 years, there will be a quantum leap in AI that allows us to go from ALICE to something that can carry on a meaningful conversation? I won't say that, but it won't be more meaningful than give commands.
Hardly qualifies as "friends, not appliances". In plus, if a robot ever figured out that it was smarter, stronger, and better looking than me, it would turn around and kick my ass.
TMR is a DARPA Advanced Technology Office program... other projects in the same office are here.
The Army reading list
we already have Furby. Why keep going? Man, isn't that little guy a riot?
Bart: Don't worry Knock-a-homer, I studied their robot and disoverd one weak spot(sees robot getting spike plate)Uh-oh, now he's weak spot is his strogest point.
Homer: (in robot) OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Bart: that noise sounded almost human.
Homer: (in robot)THE HELL IT DID!!
Harcourt Fenton Mudd! Make this bed this instance, then get downstairs and clean the living room! And no soda for you! You're already too fat!
That's the robot you need.
ACT HAND: The Anatomically Correct Testbed hand also aims to imitate human anatomy. Its bones mimic ours, the joints provide the same range of motion and stiffness as human joints, and for control it relies on signals that emulate neural commands from the brain. While the goal is to build a full hand, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have completed only one finger. - Xeni Jardin
From some of the cities I've drived through that's all the hand signals most motorists need to know.
Isn't 2020 the year a CPU was going to be able to to do the carry out instructions at the same rate as the human brain. 2009 seems abit early for robots as advanced as described. Even then the software developed will be years behind. I'm not getting my hopes up yet.
...that army of self-aware robots that destroyed our previous planet? I'm suprised that we didn't learn our lesson from that experience, especially since it was only 16 years ago: We had to quickly build giant spaceships, load everyone on them, and evacuate the planet and colonize earth before our home planet was destroyed. The government decided not to tell any of the stupid people what was going on for fear they.... Oh wait. Sorry, never mind...
considering the human race is on the edge of an energy crisis of significant proportion (north sea strike may close 3rd largest world supplier/ 3mbpd off the market, saudi fields using bottle brush techniques to drive oil production/last gasp measures for dying fields, iraq, zero reasonable replacements) the likelyhood of significant, independant robotic use will be left to a select few and likely developed for military use. i look forward to being killed by our new mecha masters.
One thing I've noticed is that while lots of universities are doing research in this area, there's very little actual code out there - or at least very little that I've found. Does anyone know of a repository someplace that collects AI and motor control source code, and all that other good stuff relevent to making a robot?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances.'
There's been a Cynthia Beazreahal, or counterpart thereof, saying this since the 50s.
You all hold out for your robot friends, but it's a friday night and I plan to go out drinking with some live human ones.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You mean the 'real' kind?
No true feminist would demand that the seat be put down. Only hypocrytical 'feminists' who are actually female supremacists (and just as bad as the men they criticize so much) demand that.
Real feminist demand that women register for the selective service, and that men get paternitiy leave. In other words they demand equality.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I think this is one of those things that's going to stay '5 years away' for the next 30 or so.
Algorithmic functions like balance have improved, sure. But how much real progress have we seen in fields like speach recognition and machine vision? Just look at the results of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Or my stupid cellphone with its voice dialing. It's only got half a dozen samples to compare against, and yet it takes about three seconds and never manages to distinguish between 'Keri' and 'Debbie', and won't ever accept 'Lee' (or any other one-syllable names, for that matter) at all.
It was true 30 years ago, and it's true today. AI is bogus.
The only branch of AI that I have any faith in is neural networks. We've got pretty good evidence that they WILL work if we figure out how, but I don't see that we've gotten much closer to that point in the last 30 years either.
As for working with machines as partners, STOP TRYING TO MAKE MY TOOLS SMART! They're tools. Make them do what I tell them to do, not what they THINK I'm trying to do. Hell, working with dogs is a challenge sometimes, and they're orders of magnitude smarter than any software that's out there now.
All the 12 year-olds from 1987 called--they want their word back!
Until we can breed an AI that is self aware robots will continue to be the sum of their programming. Nothing wrong with that but it's hardly anything new. all that's happening is that hardware is getting better.
I mean, we've all seen the ED-209 and the T1000 go nuts, but I haven't seen any movies about model rockets going nuts yet.
I, personally, cannot stand people from MIT keep saying things like "robots will do this and that in so many years" Rodney Brooks (the current Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp) came up with his infamous "subsumption architecture" in late 1980s and claim at that time that it was solution to legged locomotion control. Though, as far as I know he and his group has failed to show anything more than several slow and limited robotic implementations in the last 2 decades. This and similar approaches that claim to design controllers based on primitives (CNNs or Area, et al., or BMPs of Kirchner et al) all lack analytic framework. Hence ,the design process has a big hole in the middle which needs to be filled up by the intuition of the designer. The resulting controllers tend to be very complex and offer no basic understanding.
So, I find it rather comical to hear them keep saying "robots will roam the world in so many years." We are barely scratching the issues.
As far as I know the only thing MIT offers these days seems to be a robot that demonstrates some facial expressions(Cynthia Breazeal's Kismet). Big deal. [I know they are doing other things like COG but that project doesn't even address the locomotion issue] Without legs it wont be happy anyways. There are even some MIT people who critize these projects as waste of time.
If anybody it is Mark Raibert of MIT leg lab who made a siginificant contribution to legged locomotion back in early 1980s. I don't remeber him going around in publicity rounds and say robots will conquer the world. Such ungrounded comments can ultimately hurt the field. People are already quite edgy when it comes to technology.
Anyways, just my 2 cents...
I remember bumping into him/her numerous times in wean hall.
Something frightening when iRobot starts violating the 3 laws of robotics before it's even built.
(Military application would violate "Cause harm" and "alow harm by inaction")
(Not exact quotes of course I'm being lazy)
Robot friend? So I finnally get to have a happy chearful elevator that thanks me every time I enter it? Or better yet a paranoid android.
I don't actually exist.
If you like humanoid robots, you should check out HRP-2.
This robot can apparently, as far as I can tell from these pictures, climb stairs, bend over without falling, get on its hands and knees to crawl under something, and climb into and crawl through a tunnel or shaft.
There is even a video showing it installing a plywood panel to a wall.
Neat stuff.
From http://www.packbot.com/trackRecord/history.asp
;-) )
(.asp, hmm...
iRobot's Aware(TM) operating system, running on Linux, allows our developers to add new functionality, add behaviors that reduce the load on the operators, and add new payloads.
And those are definitely not toys, actually they've been used (according to the same page) in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, they were patched on the fly:
We were able to gather user feedback and change the robot and controller software to reflect input from the preceding missions, before the mission the next day. This gave the soldier direct input into the design.
Paul B.
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of these "military devices" would sell really well at Christmastime? I'm sure a lot of us wouldn't mind having a packbot to play with! Maybe even that guy who was trying to build a robotic autonomous lawnmower!
The government is sitting on piles of potential playtime products. After all, look at the success of the Hummer!
I cannot help but notice that people anthropomorhpise what will always be an object or an animal based on nothing more than interaction. As robotics progress to the level that we might even close on the true definition of self awareness, we must be careful in suggesting that a "smart" machine is something more than a smart machine.
We might someday have to face the challenge of dealing with the implications of sentient artificial intelligence, or the hybrid between organic and mechanical (i.e.- cyborg), but we certainly need to resist efforts in not distinguishing between a machine and a person just because it speaks your language (using your voice perhaps) or can follow you around the house on two legs.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
http://www.geocities.com/James_Sager2/
I could code it, but I don't want to spend my whole life on it.
Some other things I knew would happen in 1993 are: MMORPGS, online auctions, online personals, and instant messaging
I tried coding a MMORPG, but I spent 2000 hours then Ultima Online came out so I gave up.
God spoke to me
where it appears to support various plug-in modules
Ultimately, this is where robots will have to go. One of the great things about the PC platform is that we could stick new expansion cards into it, upgrade existing capabilities, add new capabilities, etc.
We need to be in the same position with robots within a few years. The "modules" will be a lot different, though, and will be as much software based as hardware. We need a module for general processing, vision processing, other sensory perceptions (smell, touch, heat, etc.) as well as more physical items such as arms, tools, weapons, etc.
I believe that at some point we'll have stores offering items like that in the same way I can go to Best Buy and pick up a new hard drive.
It has to be open specifications all around. That way, we'll end up getting a lot of people involved just to hack around on it and expand the platform.
There are some serious possibilities if it's done right.
Do you have ESP?
hmmm... u mean advanced RC Cars?
I would think there'd be a useful distinction between "robot" and "bot" -- robots would be something with a physical presence (e.g., an industrial robot or a toy robot), whereas a bot is a software thing that does things autonomously in some fashion. For instance, based on the headline, I thought that this article was about FPS game bots.
I don't want my fridge to be my friend, partner, or something I can talk to. The only thing I want it doing besides keeping my suds cold is turning on a light inside when I open the door, and maybe spitting out ice cubes, but only when I press the button. I feel perfectly well with myself about trashing it when it no longer works to my satisfaction. You can't that with a "friend" or "partner". Anybody who needs his toilet to be a friend, to greet him in the morning and wish him good night is already dead. And don't forget viruses. Am I going to have to talk to some guy in India on the phone when my oven starts misbehaving? Download and install software patches to my toaster? This is clearly a prime example of solutions looking for problems to solve. We're better off without, thank you.
Goooo Marvin!
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
How about a robot that reads the United States Consitution and then goes out and enforces it?
becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances.
Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
http://www.packbot.com/products/packbotEOD/feature s.asp
Gimme a robot that swallows instead of spits and I'll be happy =O)
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
Geeks around the world unite! In five years time we'll have "friends not robots". And who is to say that I can't make my new robo-friend my new piece of robo-ass?! Goodbye pron and vegetable oil*! *another story.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Am I the only one who read that as Tactical Missle Robot? I guess I'm just thinking of the LOCAAS system I saw at Lockheed Martin. They had a realtime simulation setup where a swarm of these devices took out targets. The targets are preloaded into the system so that the device looks for say, a scud missle truck or a tank, and it could have several targets. Several LOCAAS are launched from aircraft and fly about autonomously until it IDs a target. Then it homes in and destroys it w/ a shaped warhead. It has a really neat mode called swarm, where if one LOCAAS IDs a target, it calls the other ones to come attack the target - they'll keep swarming until the target is so destroyed it can't be recognized as a target. In the simulation, they took out almost all 10 targets without any user input other than the original targeting from a simulated aircraft flyover. The simulation is nondeterministic, so every time they run it, the outcome is different - just like real life. After seeing this simulation, I'd hate to be on the recieving end of these things!
I've discovered a remarkable proof, but this margin is too small to contain it...
I'm not going to update this, I'm just going to let it work for itself.
Guy is sitting in his upper berth in a sleeper car and hears a strange noise below him. He peeks over, and there's a woman down there, unhooking a prosthetic leg.
He watches a little more, as she pops out her false teeth and a glass eye.
She rolls up her sleeve and starts to detach her arm, when she spies him out of her remaining eye.
"What do you want?" she stage-whispers.
"You know what I want," he says, "just unscrew it and throw it up here."
iRobot has had this model and variations out for several years. It's been in military use since before Afganistan, though it saw its heaviest use there.
"The manga version of Star Wars was pretty good, but off the top of my head I can't think of any other comic books that were redone for a completely different culture. Anyone?" Well, all sorts of japanese media has been redone for America. Remember Power Rangers? The whole plot was completley different for the US and Japan versions. In fact, they just used fight scenes and such from the Japanese version of the series, and created a series with a new, completley different plot. Actually, I recall the Japanese version being better (Being relativley young, I remember watching it). Also, anime can sometimes be redone. Following along the lines of young, child fads and franchises, the Pokemon movies had seperate plots. And the series was reformatted to be more US friendly I think. So, while I'm sure the US has done it's share of "outsourcing" of it's pop culture, we're readapting other culture's pop culture to be more US friendly.
..Terminator?
By now an "artificial neural network" is to brain, as "hello world" program to an application development platform with os included.
And when you reach proper level of complexity they just become harder to build and understand (not that we always known how they REALLY work).
So please: keep with tools that we can still understand - they are EASIER TO USE!Barbie 2010 yea baby....
"MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances."
And Isaac Asimov thought we'd have true AI (and that we'd all be flying on spaceships) by 2001.
Yeah whatever, get back to me when I can buy my own bending unit in the store.
Was it good for you? Hope there were no surveillance cameras about...;-)
Ummm... robots will be my friends? No thank you, several of my current friends are most definitely of the robot genre. OK will somebody please laught now?
Cynthia Breazeal's name, before her marriage, was Cynthia Ferrell. As in Cynthia Ferrell, MIT graduate student (and mobile robot lab resident) whose phD project was Attila, the six-legged walking robot shown on dozens of television programs and gracing the cover of Scientific American magazine. She has spent several years working with Prof. Rodney Brooks, implementing systems using Subsumption Architecture. Cynthia Breazeal was also involved with the development of Cog, a humanoid robot that has demonstrated amazing capabilities, but she now focuses her research on emotive systems.
A simple search for publications under her current and former name should demonstrate that, unlike so many in the AI/Robotics field, she actually acheives what she sets out to do. She has advanced the field of AI and robotics by several steps, smartass, and while you're getting intoxicated with your stupid friends, she's changing the world, so show some respect or shut the hell up. I have no patience for ignorant naysayers who spout off just to hear their own voice. You're just one step above the jerk in every concert audience who shouts "freebird" and thinks he's being funny.
I really believe the idea of how robots are going to one day be our friend, but in that sense, I figured they'd look more like us. The photos from that post looks like nothing I'd ever have as a friend. Maybe it could be a friend to some lonely kid in a mental institution...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
That's a problem that is easy to solve, it's just a matter of putting big bumpers on a monster truck. Paying for the damage is the hard part.
packbot was at the 2004 RoboCup american open. its pretty cool. can climb stairs and the cool arm-drive system seems to handle litter on the floor and obstacles really well
its easy to recognize a table from a chair. that statement is meaningless. now when you dont know that its one of the two - thats different
this is someone from cornell robocup speaking. we leave for portugal (international competition) tomorrow. wish us luck.
bah, no one will read this. go build something.
it looks so small that it can be picked up with hands by who ever see's it.
also can be easily runover by cars,or jus get stamped by something.
Why does yahoo do this
"...and forgetting to put the toilet seat down."
:)
I've never understood this upsession with toilet seats not being put down. I mean, a toilet seat doesn't require a technical degree or any knowledge of intricate mechanisms to put down.
If someone left it up, who not just put it down yourself, and stop wasting energy going around being irritated about it?