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Robot Demonstrates Self-awareness

Posted by samzenpus on from the why-did-you-program-me-to-feel-pain dept.

shinyplasticbag writes "A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. ... The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."

1 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Not a New Robot. Not a New Algorithm. by RJSIII · · Score: 5, Informative

    First off, this is NOT a new robot. The robot pictured is a commercially available mobile robot called Khepera II. These robots are fairly stupid, but are easily tethered to more capable machines via a 19200 baud serial link. Mostly, they're used in research (usually undergraduate) because there are whole hosts of Matlab libraries available to interface to these buggers.

    bot=kopen([0,19200,1]); % open a connection to tethered robot on /dev/ttyS0 at 19200 baud with one second timeout

    And so on and so forth. The Khepera robots have been available for many years, along with the k-team matlab resources. That aside, what the robot in question seems to be doing is using the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox to recognize and classify behavior by observation. Sorry folks, but kids at underfunded state schools do this as undergraduate work in AI. This is nothing new.