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Massive EU Program To Study Three-legged Dogs

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-I-really-need-to-know-I-learned-from-a-three-legged-dog dept.

DMandPenfold writes "A multi-billion dollar European Union IT research fund will help study the behavior of three-legged dogs, it has been revealed. The fund will support extensive studies into how three-legged dogs move. There is a particular focus on how the dogs balance and function, given their missing limb."

13 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Did they hear about the three legged dog... by boristdog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Did they hear about the three legged dog that walked into a saloon?

    The barkeep asked him what he wanted.

    He said: "I'm lookin' for the man that shot my paw!"

  2. It's for locomotion research by jfoobaz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Towards the bottom of the article, it mentions that the purpose of the study is "... to develop advanced robots that can help animals and even humans cope with function after the loss of a limb."

    The headline and summary make it sound like utterly frivolous bullshit, when it's actually important research into motion and balance techniques in living creatures that can be applied to robotics.

    Typical Slashdot.

    1. Re:It's for locomotion research by starfishsystems · · Score: 3, Interesting

      From the perspective of cognition this is very interesting stuff, in fact. As everyone knows, four-legged animals make use of multiple gaits: walking and cantering for example. These gaits are dynamic, and there is no such thing as an intermediate gait. Halfway between walking and cantering is called falling down. So an animal has to know how to accomplish a shift between gaits in mid-stride.

      So there's already lots going on cognitively here, just with ordinary gaits. Now imagine that misfortune has struck and there is one less limb. What happens, not just kinematically but cognitively? Is the pattern for a preexisting gait reconfigured, or is there some degree of latent capability that wakes up?

      --
      Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
    2. Re:It's for locomotion research by Flea+of+Pain · · Score: 4, Funny

      Giving it a robotic leg is just plane silly.

      Which, for those of you not in the know, is less than car silly, but more than boat silly. Still, I think that method of comparing silly levels is plain silly.

      --
      Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
    3. Re:It's for locomotion research by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A robot might lose a leg. What if you have an all-terrain robot, rock climbing... it's useful to have 4 limbs, maybe 6 or 8. And then it loses random limbs....

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  3. Re:I well wo... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, not billion dollars for 3-legged dogs. They are funded by a fund that hands out a billion dollars in research funds to thousands of projects. So dogs will only get a tiny fraction of it.

  4. actual information by mattdm · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's the actual project site: http://locomorph.eu/

    Obviously not all of the 1.3 billion USD (not actually "multi-billion" -- the Euro/Dollar conversion isn't that bad!) is going to research on "three-legged dogs". It's about robotic locomotion in general, of which that may be one component (although the project web site doesn't particularly mention it).

    Also, it's a four-year project split between six universities. That's about $50 million per year for each site, which is still a big grant but doesn't seem so crazy for the field.

  5. Idle or not, very stupid and suggestive article by pjotrb123 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Most of the article focuses on 1 billion vs 3-legged dogs. Only the last paragraph mentions that a total of 16000 researchers will be funded. I'm quite sure some of the remaining 15995 are doing something useful or interesting too, but somehow they neglect to mention this.

    A typical example of modern media hyping things up, a submitter that makes it even worse, and a Slashdot editor who thinks what the heck it's summer lets put it on the front page.

    --
    I liked my next sig a lot better
  6. U.S. falls behind in 3 leg dog research by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It used to be that The U.S. let the world in everything: steel production , electricity production, coal, silly government boondoggle projects, etc. Now we wake up one day and find that the Europeans are pulling ahead of us. leaving us in the dust in 3 leg dog research.
    Another sad note on the decline of our once great country.

  7. Robotics links by Onnimikki · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hi, The Locomorph Group ( http://locomorph.eu/ ) is made up of science and engineering partners. The science partners (University of Antwerp and the University of Jena, where the dogs are being researched) are guiding the robotics research on shape-changing robots at Ryerson University (the only non-EU partner, located in Canada), the University of Zurich, the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne and the University of Southern Denmark. More stories on the project can be found here: http://idw-online.de/de/news379765 (in German) http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS_FP7&ACTION=D&DOC=2&CAT=NEWS&QUERY=0129d6293767:57a8:2486afcf&RCN=32339 (in English), http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-l-ue-octroie-1-2-milliard-d-euros-a-la-recherche-en-robotique-et-dans-les-reseaux-31224.html (in French), http://www.jenapolis.de/69486/nicht-nur-spielzeug-wissenschaftler-demonstrieren-laufroboter/ (in German) There are also some informal photos from our meeting last week: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~jasmith/locomorph/photos/jena_2010/ Other photos can be found here: http://idw-online.de/de/image120758 http://www.jenapolis.de/69486/nicht-nur-spielzeug-wissenschaftler-demonstrieren-laufroboter/

  8. I owned one by LatencyKills · · Score: 2, Informative

    I had a rottweiler mix that lost his front left leg to osteosarcoma. At slow speeds, he would move kind of like an inchworm, hopping his remaining front leg forward, then jumping both back legs forward, wash, rinse, repeat. He could do it while keeping his head on the ground, say following a scent trail. At higher speeds (and even after the amputation he was faster than his brother) he would do a run in which his two right legs would move, then the remaining left rear would move. His head would bob up and down as he ran. Oh, and when he peed, he would lift his left rear leg, and balance on his two right feet. BTW, the cancer came back and got him a year after the amputation - bone cancer of the back left leg, and we didn't want to try him as a two legged dog, though I understand some of those get around as well.

    --
    Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
  9. Make that 2.7 million Euro by Brown · · Score: 4, Informative

    The implication that the EU is spending billions of euros on a program to study 3-legged dogs is completely misleading. The fund in question appears to be FP7 (Wikipedia article), which funds a huge variety of researchers on many differnet topics.

    If you look at what I think is the relevant EU site, the project received EUR 2.7 million from the 'Embodied intelligence' Initiative within the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Thematic area of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

    Which wouldn't make much of a story I guess - "multi-billion" sounds waaay more impressive.

    -Chris

  10. Mod parent up by antientropic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Indeed, the real story here (though not news by any means) is the inability of the British press to report on the EU without being willfully misleading. The headline "European £1bn IT programme to study three-legged dogs" is not strictly speaking false - it just fails to mention that that 1 billion will be used for many other things as well. A more reasonable article is here: European IT Research Gets €1.2 Billion From EU.