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Robots Do The Darndest Things
alito writes "15 years ago they couldn't get them to walk, now they are rollerskating (video). Read more about the 2004 Intelligent Robotics and Systems conference in this New Scientist article, and at the conference's site. Also shown at IROS, a childbirth simulator for obstetricians, a capsule that crawls through your intestines, and a 3-mm long swimming robot. (No, I don't get paid by New Scientist.)"
actually it's a pracitce in balance
if you ever have tried rollerskating then you should know that it requires quite good balance and body control
I think you may be missing the point. Rollerskating, running, walking, what have you, are important fundamental tasks that must be worked out before you will *have* a robot that can do something advanced like wash your dishes or walk you dog. If it can't rollerskate with perfection how do you expect a robot to perfrom a mundane task competently. I for one welcome rollerskating robots.
In my opinion, it is not a question of *when* we'll get trouble from the robots we're going to create, but what we're going to do about it.
We might as well start planning right now. The article in the posting, as well as numerous other reports, show that the robot mechanics is getting better and better. What is lacking, is some real AI. I think that within 30-50 years, if not before, this "problem" will also be solved.
That's when trouble starts. As Isaac Asimov shows in his literary "experiments" with the three laws of robotics, even *with* benign top priority imperatives NOT TO HARM humans, we may not be safe.
Given the mechanics and the AI, how will robots become a threat to us? Imagine a scientist in a robot laboratory sometime in the future. He/she has all the parts needed to produce the ultimate robot: agile and completely autonomous. I think the temptation will be too much for *any* person. It will be impossible to refrain from releasing a completely free and autonomous robot into society to see what happens. Imagine the excitement: This is comparable to a second creation; it is almost like being God.
Naturally, the robot will have a strong need for self preservation. So it will start to secure land, natural resources, labour, spare parts, factories, and so on, and build other robots and societies to fulfill these and other purposes.
This is when conflicts will start. Wars often start as a result of a disagreement over natural resources or land.
Ideas, anyone?
The attraction for androids is only skin deep. Today's androids are just a mass of wires. Getting a robot to walk, shake hands, play chess, etc. is substantially different from a sentient machine.
Sentience impresses me, but a mechanical shaking hand does not.
Its walking akwardly while wearing wheels on its feet.
Which, to anybody who's learned to skate, is of course remembered fondly as those first steps before you learned why they made you wear those uncomfortable wrist guards.
Its a nice little robotic achievement, but its not skating.
Actual skating would involve a phase of sliding along between "steps".
You can't take the sky from me...
Making the QRIO skate is not really a big technological achievement considering that the leg motions have already been pre-programmed to get the robot to walk. It is really a matter of calculating the weights and trying to balance the robot while moving the legs to propel the robot.
Now, if they can program a neural network that changes the leg and arm movements in relation to a physics model, and have the robot learn how to walk and skate by trail-and-error, then I'd be more impressed. THAT is what we should aim for nowadays.
but what about making ones that can help ALL people?
I disagree. We don't want robots to go the way of cellphones, where they can make calls, take photos, play mp3s, etc, all in a mediocre way. I'd prefer to have an army of small robot each specializing in a handful of tasks. This way, each robot can be built well by a specialist in the area, and when the shopping robots breaks I can still use the cleaning robot, or upgrade the sex robot without upgrading my singing robot...
The point is to demonstrate advancements in balanced mobility. Its very difficult to get a robot to walk well with anything resembling 'legs'. Roller skates introduce lots of unpredictable uncertainty into walking, and to have a control system fast enough to detect and adapt to the changes is very impressive.
As most things in our world are built around our type of mobility (legs), an autonomous real world robot will interact with us and our world far better if it emulates our system of mobility.
Thats the point.
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Look at all the computer virii, worms, etc. released over the past 20 years. None of these were an "accident". Every single mallicous program ever created has been an intentional act.
So considering robots and AI, if intelligent robots decide to start killing and take over the world it will be by human design before it's ever a result of robotic nature and/or independant decision. Some mallicious person will attempt to build a robot that has the skills necessary to reproduce and cause as much damange as possible.
Sounds very similar to the function of a computer virus today right?