Ready to learn how to run your own brainwave controlled robot? Yes, I know a real robot would have its own self-contained intelligence system rather than being teleoperated, but still this is pretty cool. This report from DigInfo is about a joint French and Japanese robotics project that could grant freedom undreamed of to paraplegics and other physically challenged folks. Of course, it is also the path leading to the kind of world made popular in the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, but every advance comes with a potential dark side attached.
The folks over at Scientific American posted about tomorrow night’s Nova program What Will the Future Be Like, because it is hosted by one of their columnists/scientists. As you can see from the video they shared, Augmented Reality is one of the approaches they investigate. Yes, there are a lot of AR Apps already available, but we have barely scratched the surface on what is possible. I am setting my DVR for the program, just in case they don’t stream it after.
The Darpa Robotics Challenge is all about building robots that can operate in a human environment robust enough to do useful work during emergencies, to aid and supplement first responders. Whether the emergency is man made or natural, the robots need to operate human devices, such as doors, stairs, tools and vehicles, as well as recognize and asses their environments for emergency context. If you have been waiting for your chance to shine as a robotics engineer, this might be your kind of challenge. Tracks A and B have already been selected, Track C for software control systems, and Track D for combined hardware and software, are both still open. The initial work should be developed and submitted with the GFE Simulator package, which is the robot simulation software from the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Even if you don’t think your skill set is quite up to entering a competition of this caliber, if you have any interest in developing your own robots you should download this free software suite and try out your hand at design and development. If you do enter, and you are selected to continue past the entry level, at the next stage you may be eligible for some funding to develop your design. Our next Evil Robot Overlord could be one you made yourself! Thanks to the folks at Popular Mechanics for the heads up on this one, and check out their article for lots more detail. And yes, I did just install Ubuntu 12.04 specifically so I could get the best build of GazeboSim installed and running.
Happy Halloween, Gangnam Style! Psy is out there, and so are many of the folks who have reacted to this song. Next year you should pick a hot song and program your local electrical grid to do this kind of thing to it.
I love living in the world of the future. Dubbed Project Green Brain, the engineering teams at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are writing computer models of the brains of bees, specifically the systems in the brain that interpret a bee’s vision and sense of smell. They intend to link this to robotic sensors designed to perceive the same stimulus and install it into a flying robot. The purpose of the project is to advance understanding of simple non-human brain structures and artificial intelligence, but they already have a number of practical applications in mind, from search and rescue in dangerous environments such as mines or nuclear power plants, to finding the source of gas leaks, to actually pollinating crops in areas where hive collapse has eradicated real bees. As long as they don’t include stingers I think this will be a project worth following, particularly since this is the first Artificial Intelligence project I know of that is being designed to run on desktop PCs rather than supercomputers.
Coming up next year, The Prototype is a film about a dying man who uploads himself into the combat drone he is developing for the military. It seemed like a good idea at the time; he needed a way to escape death, and the drone needed a core intelligence around which to coalesce. Now, it is not so much fun. This one looks very interesting, if you are waiting for the Singularity this is another option to explore.