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One Giant Step for Humanoids
An anonymous reader writes "There are a few robots that do amazing things. Honda's Asimo can walk backward and climb stairs. Sega's idog can dance to music. A tougher nut to crack has been making robots walk like humans. Today, scientists introduce three humanoid striders at the annual AAAS meeting. Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop. Engineers say they'll inform the next generations of humanoids and also improve design of robotic prostheses for people. And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?"
Delft
Cornell
MIT
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
Robotic or semi-robotic prosthesis are going to be more and more in demand because ironically of advances in battlefield armor. Current flak jackets (body armor) and helmets are protecting the vital bits of our soldiers, but often limbs (and necks) are sites of damage from explosions and firearms. Many of these soldiers are undergoing amputations either in Iraq or more commonly in Landstuhl, Germany and coming home with prosthetics of varying sophistication.
There are a couple of interesting recent additions to the Internet that cover these issues. One is an article by Steve Silberman in Wired and the other very interesting site is Stuart Hughes blog. Stuart is a world news producer with the BBC who unfortunately stepped on a landmine covering the Iraq war and now writes fairly frequently about "stumpy" and his prosthetic leg.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"...save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop."
That makes sense, but humans don't really just let their feet "drop." Our steps are actually quite controlled...if we just let gravity pull them down, we'd have pretty heavy footfalls, not to mention an awful lot of shuffling...
Its not about efficiency, its about "Creepy" factor. Robots that *look* or *act* human need all those little things that make us feel comfortable... they need to walk naturally, or blink at a normal rate - or you won't interact with them properly, and they give you a feeling of "Wrongness" .
meh
Oh sure, they can walk like me. But what's their record on Dance Dance Revolution?
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
there are probably better forms to send there. The rovers are interesting, but they can not cover a large amount of terrain at a time. It would probably be better to have some sort of a flyer, so that it can move quickly for long distances.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you speak of the uncanny valley, methinks :)
Humanoid! Fetch me a beer! Nice humanoid.
http://www.theworldiswatching.org
Probably because there are much more efficient ways to locomote. Bipedalism is risky, especially if you want to bend over a lot to pick things up.
I'm in favor of a radially symmetrical spider-like walker that can turn in any direction, or even invert it legs and continue walking if it gets turned upside down. This would make it much more flexible in navigating the Martian environment.
You could have a central ring with legs attatched all around it, and then a rotating body that includes sensors, power supply, and a grappling hand. The single grappling hand descends from the center and pulls samples up into the body for storage/analysis.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What about muppets? They don't have a lot of the details that real people have -- in fact, their facial expressions are downright primitive : no eyebrows, no mouth expressions, etc. For the most part, the only have one hand to emote with. Is it because they are wrangled by humans that they aren't so creepy? Or is it because they are a good enough caracature of people without being too close?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's only creepy if they're made to look human. It seems to me, we'd want to keep our robots looking as much like machines as possible. Then it doesn't matter that they don't move like people, and most importantly, everyone knows that they are in fact machines.
Despite conventional wisdom, I've discovered you can blame a guy for trying. It's called "attempted murder".
Why do we need robots everywhere, interacting with us? Am I the only one out there that doesn't find this idea of a future society appealing?
Hats off to the folks who are working on these robots. They truly are amazing bits of engineering. But are we really so narcissistic that we think something that looks and acts human is a good design? After all, the robots that really are useful to us (mostly in manufacturing) don't look human.
What does this button do...
It still takes a long way to have those robots learn running, crawling, dodging, rolling like Indiana Jones (or Lora Croft, if you prefer your robots feminine). Until then, I won't recommend them for a mission on another planet.
Seriously, insectoid robots are obviously much more suitable for terrain expedition.
Humanoid had to be the worse design as far as robots go. For animals it works because it would be hard for there to be an organic life form with wheels. Maybe something like a self driving segway would work well. They have that other segway wheelchair that climbs stairs and everything. If they spent more time designing the robots to do actual task like identifying objects, picking them up, and operating them, instead of spending the time trying to make them walk, we'd be a lot further along.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I can't help it, but alongside the pride and excitement I feel whenever I see technological progress like this I have this tinge of frustration.
How much money is spent every year on perfume? how many great mechanical engineers are working for sea-doo?
I mean, we could have so much more! Not just in robotics but chemisty, physics, space exploration...
But, alas, I know that all work and no play makes humans a dull animal and that that perfume makes ladies smell very nice. Nevertheless, I cannot help this tinge of disapointment which inevitably follows my rush of happiness.
Remember that C3PO is actually a person. There was a guy inside of him that gave him all of his movements. Yeah, his face was frozen, but he still had the body language of a human being, albeit a bit stiff. Add to that the langauge, and you've got a stroke sufferer, not a robot.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
PhysOrg.com has an article on the same subject, in which it describes how these 3 robots walk, for instance: "The Cornell robot supplies power to the ankles to push off. When the forward foot hits the ground, a simple microchip controller tells the rear foot to push off. During the forward swing of each leg, a small motor stretches a spring, which is finally released to provide the push." Fascinating stuff. I have the link to the article on my blog: http://sundroid.blogspot.com/, if anyone's interested.
Sun and Fun
Rest assured there are entire industries who make specialized robotics for the likes of the fast food industry, etc. What we need is more research into general robotic functions, such as walking, recognition, etc.
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Hey!
Once these nice female-humanoids become more human like, they will stop going out with geeks or even be near them.
I just got my wife a Roomba robot vacum cleaner, and I have to say its one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It makes us feel like we're finally in the 2000's to have this little robot rolling around picking up cat hair while you are free to do other things.
I get really excited about the prospects of putting robotics to use in the home. Sure their use in science is great, but its pretty cool to have "Rosie" cleaning up!
Sound waves should be free!
There certainly are - they can walk like an egyptian
Armchairgenius.com - Where everyone is a genius.
What if their skin is gold, their eyes gold, and they like to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes?
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
Do it while chewing gum? I think not!
Armchairgenius.com - Where everyone is a genius.
Bothers me a little bit. Looks like the corporate need to reduce labor costs will over time bring on the robotic nation.
Asimo does not solve the problem, it merely over-engineers it into oblivion. Linearizing every joint and making it look somewhat realistic does not solve the problem, that's why it can only run 30 minutes or so on a charge (pun intended).
Since they can't chew gum at all, I'm going to have to agree with you.
The Immortality Institute
We see YABLT because bi-pedal walking is a "research area". It's seen as something that students can study so they do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The MIT robot normally walks properly like a human. For the "after the game" demo they wanted to make it look like an "after the game" human. Took a lot of effort to get that right!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This website has a neat video of dancing robots on it. It obviously doesn't carry the same implications
that a low-energy walking robot does, but the motor control and balance gyros and the what-have-you
needed for this act are still pretty impressive.
Video
Source page
I, for one, welcome our three-law abiding new bipedal robot overlords.
I'm still a little skeptical about this whole humans creating robots thing. I mean, I saw Terminator 2 and the outcome was not pretty.
It is *far* from solved.
There was an article not so long ago about a robot that can stand up from lying on the floor. That was some pretty big progress. However, even that robot is still very far from a human. It needs almost two minutes for that!
Current robots barely walk properly. They still have a long way to go until they can do things like jumping on one leg, which are trivial for humans.
These 'bots are great but they're still kids toys compared to advanced Westinghouse designs from the 1930's. When this robot finishes a task he even takes a smoke break !!
I don't understand why they try to make human robots. If you think about it humans are not very specialized creatures, we can do a little bit of everything. run, swim, jumb, crawl, etc. They should make robots specific that way they can do a few tasks great as opposed to all tasks decently. For instance, if you want a robot that will take beer from your fridge, why would you make a humanoid robot that walks perfectly?? Just make two wheels and an arm that can open the fridge and pick up beer (or other items from your kitchen). Specialized robots would be cheaper, smaller, and more efficient. You could afford more of them and more people could afford them.
One king doesn't like the other king so he goes beats him up. Unfortunately he also gets hurt in the process.
Hey instead of **me** being hurt I'll send some blokes (==soldiers) over to beat up the other king.
The other king doesn't like to be beaten up, so he puts his soldiers in the way. We now have two armies beating eachother up.
Hey let's not send our soldiers into the battlefield to get hurt, let's send robots. Nobody gets hurt. Soldiers can sit at home and eat pizza.
The enemy then gets pissed that these robots beat up their people and build their own. Now we have robots beating up on robots.
Next, the one army gets pissed that their robots are getting beaten up and start hacking the enemy comms to stop the other robots. The enemy responds by hacking the hackers...
So what's the logical conclusion? Is war going to just end up being a big computer simulation with nobody getting hurt? Perhaps the kings should just go decide over a nice game of chess!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
No, it's not. Humans (and animals) have the sense which is more important than ANYTHING in public situations: general awareness.
what if a little kids runs round it's feet, or a kid runs in front of them? The robot goes NEAAAAAARGH and falls over.
Until they can produce organic robots who use their legs without so much bloody automation, then you can start saying theyre ready.
You can strap the vacuum cleaner you already own to one of these little fellows!
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For those of you looking for more details, here's the research paper published in Science (may need institutional subscription) and videos of all three robots.
Here's the abstract text:
Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers
Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake, Martijn Wisse
Passive-dynamic walkers are simple mechanical devices, composed of solid parts connected by joints, that walk stably down a slope. They have no motors or controllers, yet can have remarkably humanlike motions. This suggests that these machines are useful models of human locomotion; however, they cannot walk on level ground. Here we present three robots based on passive-dynamics, with small active power sources substituted for gravity, which can walk on level ground. These robots use less control and less energy than other powered robots, yet walk more naturally, further suggesting the importance of passive-dynamics in human locomotion.
Wow, the one from Delft is so minimalist it doesn't even look like a real robot, more like a movie prop of a science project. Considering the bulk of some others like Asimo, and that true bipedal walking was big news only a couple years ago, reducing it to such a simple package is pretty amazing!
Send them there to do what? ASIMO can walk and do other movements. That's it. The only way to make it useful to the public at this point would be to stick a lightbulb on it's head and call it a lamp.
It's just for research.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
In my day humanoid robots had to lift their legs uphill in the now both ways. That is if you had legs. My best friend got along fine with a set of wheels.
These modern robots and their "gravity assisted walking". How Dreadful.
Sincerly
Cee Threepio
I have been thinking about the recently anounced cell processor and robots, I think it will be excellent to use it in them. Remember that 2 of the companies involved in the development of the cell are toshiba and sony , and those two companies are developing/sell robots. The parallelism that that the cell will provide will be excellent. Imagine an APU dealing with some pattern recognition algorithms while other deals with voice recognition and so on .... I start to see a future with home robots made by sony, industrial robots by toshiba and business equipment by IBM ....
here some links
to robots
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
wow. i had to look 3 times to read what was actually written there. at first i thought, don't those two words mean the same thing?
it's time to go home. looooong day at work.
Reinard
One of those robots looks like those drones from Star Wars, and another like that robot from Futurama!
Obviously, these top scientists are attempting to appeal to people who watch TV!
The greatest inventors in history likely wouldn't consider themselves "creators" of their inventions so much as "observers" of the natural world. Prior to the past century (thank you Nietzche) inventors and artists played a similar role (look at Da Vinci, who is considered to be both), in that their job wasn't to "create" things, but rather to "mimic" the world they saw, and seek ways to perfect it.
Now, keeping value judgements out of this (I'm not claiming they're better than we are per se), it seems to me to be more effective the way things used to be done. Perhaps our "progressive" mindset has forgotten some important lessons.
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I haven't tried this particular file, but Media Player Classic plays Real stuff ok.
But can Asimo walk up the stairs backward?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Thus, under this classification, most of these technology demonstrators are actually drones. They act as we tell them to act, and that's all they are capable of. Real robotics research, on the other hand, is more about artificial intelligence and autonomous goal achievement. Thus, though they can't walk, talk, and shake our hands, the machines entered in the DARPA Grand Challenge are more robots than these walking contraptions are.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I've told people for years that "AI" has been going the wrong direction. Developments like Deep Blue only helped to feed this (incorrect) belief that "intelligence" very directly equates to "computational ability." This is so wrong, and so obviously wrong.
Look at your average toddler (I have one at home to study - get your own). Does this child compute the millions of different parameters required to negotiate a different path up, down, around, through, under their environment every time they want to go play with their train set? Nope. The kid throws his foot in front of him, in a basically "informed guess" that's partially learned, partially innate. He learns to then simply go along with whatever comes out. Swing your center of gravity to one side, and your body figures out how to deal with it in real time, based on an "informed guess" - no laborious computation as to trajectories or kinetics. Just some general goals and a shove in the right direction.
I call this concept "profoundly intuitive logic." Yes, we can be extremely rational about every motion, every activity, every human endeavour, but you'll find it's a lot easier to "just wing it." That's true intelligence.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Try: mplayer -playlist rtsp://nsfvideo.nomex.net/press_releases/bipedal.s mi
Thank you. So i'm not the only one who thought that.
DDR might be fun, but I say watching it freestyle to Snaps' "The Power" would be FAR cooler.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
You haven't met the guy who lives upstairs from me, have you?
Muppets don't have eyebrow and mouth expressions ? - Tell Fozzie, Gonzo or Animal that !
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...one giant leap towards human enslavement.
We now have a use for 'Track Humanoids.' *Snickers*
And it's a research area because it's interesting, and it hasn't been solved to satisfaction, or even close yet. I think you'll find most "research areas" are like that.
Until a cat runs in front of it and the robot dumps the tray of food directly on the customer.
Problem not solved.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
" I haven't tried this particular file, but Media Player Classic plays Real stuff ok"
You didn't read his post. he said: "And when I try the link in MPlayer, it immediately says "Stream EOF detected"."
MPlayer is a linux only app, suggesting he uses linux. Media Player Classic is windows only.
It won't work in linux.
and that would be different to a McDonalds employee how? BTW - what ass-end of the world are you in where there's cats in McDonalds.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My bad.
Silly Walks Director: Mr. Stagback, the very real problem is what I find out. You see, there's defense, education, housing, health, social security, silly walks. They're all supposed to get the same. But last year the government spent less on Silly Walks than they did on industrial organisation. We're supposed to get 348 millions pounds a year to cover our entire Silly Walks proposal. Coffee?
Silly Walks Applicant: Yes, please.
Silly Walks Director: Hello, uh, Mrs. Twolumps, uhm, could we have two cups of coffee, please.
Mrs. Twolumps: Yes, Mr. Teabag.
Silly Walks Director: Mad as a hatter. You see, the Israelis they have a man who can take his own left leg off and swallow it with every alternate step, whereas the Japanese, cunning electronically obsessed little...
What robot meant originally? You mean "worker" in Czech? From the play?
In the robotics lab where I worked, the generally accepted definition for robot was "a programmable source of work," where work is in the physics sense of forces and movement. This definition will include most things you would think of as robots, but would also include devices such as automatic breadmakers. I find this a useful, if broad, definition.
Industrial robots have a long history and are generally accepted to be robots (at least by people who call themselves roboticists). Industrial robots are often autonomous, but rarely make decisions or have AI of any kind. (An industrial robot is a more general device than special purpose automation. The manufacturing line for pampers will be automated, but does not necessarily contain robots.)
Under the above definition, the passive walkers described in the Science paper would not be considered robots because they are not programmable. But the powered walkers (basically a passive walker with an actuator or two added somewhere) would indeed be considered robots.
Okay, how about R2D2. If you buy into the uncanny valley thing, then there is a point where most of the fundamental points can be covered adequately without having people be revolted with the robot. The questions are where is that point, and can we give robots the functional capabilities while compensating for their overall creep factor in other areas.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
"...as little energy as one-half the wattage of a standard compact fluorescent light bulb."
Would it have been so hard to just put in a frickin' number!?
Geez!!
This reminds me of a book I read, The Regiment, I believe (certainly by Dalmas). When describing the intercom system, he notes that there is the slightest distortion in the sound, not because they can't make it more realistic, but to give people a cue that the voice they're hearing is not from a person in the room. It's a related idea. If there is no benefit from having robots look human, and it makes it easy for people to diffirentiate between people and robots, we may be better off using lesser technology in that area. Which is not to say that we wouldn't want at least locomotion to be comparable with humans.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I wonder which of these would win in a fight?
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
it's the same with video games and movies. The more realistic something becomes, the more our brain gets confused. So many people didn't like the final fantasy movie because it bothered them that they looked human, but acted wrong at times. That's why most completely computer generated things are done in quite a comic fashion. They COULD come much closer to approximating people, but then you get bothered by it.
Seeing a bipedal, human size robot would do the same. R2D2 is a moving machine, but not human shaped. However with that comes all of the stigmas. No one converses with their vacuum cleaner, and I've got something down in the basement with a bit of paint would look pretty close to R2D2. So for robots to become a 'natural' part of society, they need to become more like us. For better or for worse.
Plus, it's a neat engineering feat, and interesting psychology to see how people do react to them.
Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop.
Heh, mind your example subjects. Only American's kick their legs when they walk. If you knew that well.. then you knew that. ;)
Speak truth to power.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Last time I changed a diper I got peed; my kid brother cannot solve certain equiations and he cannot program a computer; I'm sure as hell many slashdotters can't fight efficiently.
Is the problem my brother is young, What do you make of a Down Sindrome person? Can the program a computer? will they ever can?
Any way, I'm very good with computers, and I think in that specific area I can serve my society. Hail my queen ant!
set high standards for your projects man!
Do you understand what you're asking for? AI advanced enough to understand speech and process/interact with a 3-d enviroment. That's huge.
It doesn't exist man. Despite all the research that's been done in AI, we don't even know what it will take to make such a beast.
I will consider myself lucky if we build a working AI in my lifetime.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Yes, and spending all your time trying to make robo walk better isn't going to get us there either. This is a public company we're talking about, not a university. Honda should be doing research with the aim of making a product.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you are doing a real flyer, you would need huge wings as the atmospere is thiiiinnnn. But, use some helium/hydrogen in a collapsiable wing, combined with small rockets, it is very doable. Think in terms of a vtol aircraft such as the british harrier. Small wings.
Of course, a small number of ballons with small camera might produce some very intersting results. While we would not have good control over where they went, they would be close enough to the surface to take some very good pix that could be relayed from sat. above.. These ballons could then be landed with small amounts of equipment, but obviously, this is more of a serindipity approach to checking the surface.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
without so much bloody automation
One thing to be said for automation - we store a lot of info about basic walking in our nervous system. It's too much work to think about walking when there's nothing special to watch out for. Being able to replicate basic low-energy walking with a machine is therefore quite useful.
Now, on to awareness. Awareness gives us cause to move ourselves about. We somehow gain awareness that we have legs and that they have some ability to move us. We learn that they are strong and flexible to some degree, that they have some responsiveness, feeling, speed, durability, geometry, control, etc. etc. Even if the robot never attains walking but still reports with some accuracy a discovery of these attributes, it would raise eyebrows.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Your comments in this thread are so astoundingly shortsighted that I wonder if I'm just feeding trolls by replying. But in the event that I'm not...
Engineering problems are rarely a matter of simply finding a solution. There are always tradeoffs between costs, efficiencies, and results, and improvements to be made in each. The new locomotive method is vastly more energy efficient than the old, which in itself easily justifies keeping a test robot around.
And on the general topic of usefulness, even if their results lately had been lackluster, they don't justify sending the robot to be "productive" any more than physicists should be sent to do manual labor if they can't manage to crank a theory out. Their potential ultimate benefit to society is much greater in their ivory tower, even if they don't produce immediate results, because the rewards of a success are orders of magnitude larger.
Now then, if you can attempt to actually comprehend the general meaning of my post rather than choosing a sentence or two to snipe at as you seem to have done with the other posters, you might find yourself more enlightened.
I was pondering robotics the other day, and came to the conclusion that, for the most part, we're going at it all wrong.
I was thinking that we should instead build each limb as a seperate subsystem, with the nessesary computing equipment built into the limb, along with the power supply.
One thing about all ambulatory animals, is that the weight is equally distributed throughout the body. It isn't about figuring out how to balance all the weight in a torso, it's about using weight to act as counterweights, along with sensing the nessesary force needed to move each of those weights.
Another part of it is reflex movement. We think of it as simple because we learned how to do it with almost no effort long before basic skills. For a computer, this is something that requires a huge amount of processing time.
However, a "main brain" that has to interpret data from multiple individual "sub brains" would have an easier time, since the sub brains would process specialized data.
An arm would process just the data for that arm, a leg would process just the data for that leg, etc. Instead of the main brain having to process reams of data from every sensor on the body, it would have to only process the sub brains' inputs. Consider it as a biological analogy for USB.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Passive walkers exist since the 90s (or even before).h p?id=37
h p?id=71
A quick googeling gave me the following:
http://agrosy.informatik.uni-kl.de/wmc/overview.p
And an almost passive construction:
http://agrosy.informatik.uni-kl.de/wmc/overview.p
Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop.
Thinking of martial arts, until now I believed that it requires a lot of practicing to take advantage of the gravitation field indeed.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
They are doing research with the aim of making a product. The product is a walking robot.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
There is a place for pure research, but it's not in a publically listed company. Honda should be making products and thus far their progress with bi-pedal robots has been, well, pedestrian. So no, I'm not being shortsighted, I'm simply saying that Honda should be making more progress than this if they are making a product.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here's the thing about a product, you actually have to have someone to sell it to. A walking robot is not a product, unless you're going to sell it to universities so they can use it as a research platform, in which case why would Honda be doing the research for them?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't see why not. We have a industry of rolling robots, and robots that are immobile.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Likewise, every time we have a science story on slashdot, there's a hundred Monday-morning quarterbacks who know nothing about the field but feel free to criticize the scientists' approach anyway.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
From TFA: "Today, scientists introduce three humanoid striders"
Might I add that these striders are no mere rangers?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
Wow science, that's great, but what if one of these falling robots falls on your dog? Then what?
Avoiding things is the one advantage to calculated robot moving, unless they make them able to avoid things as they fall, but then they potentially will stumble into something else valuable.
"These are generic robotics problems that NEED to be solved if robotics are to evolve into what is today the realm of science fiction."
Of the handful of real-world applications I can think of for robotics, validating Sci-Fi stories isn't really one of them.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
"Spider robots", "Robots using gravity to walk", "Human robots on mars". We really have no clue. In years to come, people will be looking back at discussions like this and laughing. We are just at the beginning of robotics, yet here we are speculating about the future - probably totally incorrectly. Remember in your history class you used to read about people hundreds of years ago talking about science and their predictions of the future? Remember how ridiculous they sounded? This is probably us now.
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And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?
Or if you were held hostage by a deranged supercomputer you could, like, program one to kill you, and leave behind only a series of vague clues in the form of a hologram...
That flick rocks!
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein
If computer intelligence is realized, it can improve itself by writing programs. Now strip away all the baggage like butcher a hog and cook a tasty meal, and reduce the idea to a computer that can program a computer. This is a basic element of intelligence: a being that can formulate and execute a virtually unlimited number of sequences of instructions that take advantage of a fairly powerful machinery or computational mechanism, including the ability to control with some precision and accuracty the being's output of such sequences.
A neural net can be built to exhibit this behavior. With enough nodes the network can produce instructions from an instruction set. Add more neurons and tweak to acquire a machine that outputs a certain useful programs for certain inputs. Use a neural net to perform a feedback function by evaluating programs according to goal achievement, resource usage, timeliness, etc.
Neural networks are useful for handling large inputs such as sensory data as well as information written in a language. So build a feedforward contraption of neural nets that produce programs and a feedback set of neural nets to evaluate programs. This network can be scaled up and adjusted. Add CPUs to execute the programs. Furthermore, allow the programs to access the neural nets via the inputs and the adjustable weights. This is a readily achievable plan for a neural net that has the potential to improve itself via computer programming.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
" MPlayer is a linux only app "
t a/
No, MPlayer isn't a Linux only app, it works on many Unices, MacOS X and MS Windows. Latest version (1.0pre6) is available here for MS Windows : http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-be
I believe that this book is one part of a whole toward a successful AI. I have wrote many times here on /. about the books I have read, and what I believe can come from reading them, understanding them, and relating them to each other. So, look at my past comments, do some searching on /. for the books (ie, things like AKNOS, Linked, Out of Control, etc)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon