Slashdot Mirror
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
for the fembots.
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
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.
becoming partners rather than tools
We don't even consider our current spouses this way let alone a robot...
Tool!
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
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!!!!
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.
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, 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...
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.
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."
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!