Robotic Nation Evidence

Version 3.0 of Evolution Robotics Software Platform (ERSP) is now available for both Windows and Linux. From the press release:

The Windows version features the core navigation and vision technology of the original breakthrough SDK. Patent-pending vSLAM navigation enables robotic devices to operate completely autonomously with knowledge of their environment and surrounding objects using a single low-cost camera. Also included is Evolution Robotics' advanced object recognition technology, which is already being used to support vision functionality in consumer robots such as Sony's (NYSE: SNE) AIBO.

In addition, the Windows version incorporates Microsoft's speech support. This, combined with critical infrastructure and core documentation tailored to the Windows environment, gives companies increased flexibility in developing advanced software tools needed to engineer powerful, autonomous applications quickly and easily.

More information on the capabilites of ESRP 3.0 is available here. See also more info on Aibo.

Remote-Controlled, Throwable Robots Developed At Carnegie Mellon In Conjunction With U.S. Marine Corps Are Being Sent To Iraq For Testing



From the article:

Carnegie Mellon University robotics researchers, in conjunction with the U.S. Marine Corps' Warfighting Laboratory, have developed a small, throwable, remote-controlled prototype robot designed for surveillance in urban settings. Several of the robots are being sent to Iraq for testing.

The robot, known as Dragon Runner, has the ability to see around corners and deliver information to Marines while keeping them out of danger in urban settings where human access is impractical, dangerous or unsustainable.

It is easy to imagine hundreds of these robots providing coverage for large urban areas, using group techniques pioneered by the Centibots.

Why 1.4 million new jobs haven't ended the jobless recovery

The article opens with this:

Since last fall, when the economy finally began adding payroll jobs consistently, the Bush administration has embraced the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics release of the employment situation report as evidence that its economic policies are working. "Nationwide, the economy has posted steady job gains for each of the last nine months—creating more than 1.4 million new jobs since August," the White House crowed in early June, when news came that 248,000 payroll jobs were added in May. That figure, 1.4 million new jobs, has become the default answer given by administration officials when confronted with unpleasant economic questions.

1.4 million new jobs does sound good, doesn't it? But think about this:

Consider the employment–to-population ratio, a broad gauge that measures the percentage of Americans over the age of 16 who have a job. (Data is available going back to 1948. To see the history, go here and click on the box that reads "Civilian-Employment Population Ratio" and then "retrieve data.") The ratio rose steadily in the 1990s, from 61.4 percent in January 1993 to 64.7 in the spring of 2000. In January 2001, it stood at 64.4 percent, very close to an all-time high. Since then, it has deteriorated steadily, even after the recession ended in November 2001. In May 2004, it stood at 62.2 percent, more than 2 percentage points below the rate of January 2001. Two percent may not sound like much. But we're working with very large numbers. The population is greater than 293 million, as the Census Bureau estimates today. If 64.4 percent of Americans had jobs today, as they did in January 2001, there would be nearly 4.8 million more Americans employed.

Why is this happening? The article's conclusion is this:

Something has plainly broken down in the American job creation machine. The supply of new jobs has been nowhere near sufficient to keep up with the supply of new workers—not for the past three years and not for the past 10 months. I don't claim to have a good explanation. Productivity growth, globalization, outsourcing, and widespread excess capacity probably have something to do with it.

And this:

The economic numbers show a persistent underutilization of America's greatest asset—its workforce. The addition of 1.4 million jobs in 10 months is paltry by historical standards, and given the size of today's potential workforce, it's anemic. All the happy talk in the world can't hide that.

What we are seeing today is the tip of the iceberg. We are at the very leading edge of the robotic revolution, with kiosks and self-checkout lines being the first harbingers of things to come in the American workforce. See Robotic Nation for details.

Air Force testing robot guard vehicles

From the article:

The Air Force wants to take away Staff Sgt. Miguel Jimenez's job, and that's just fine by him.

The Miami airman was plucked from his normal security duties at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base to help test whether a robotic vehicle can take the place of humans in guarding air bases and troops.

Also:

Another robot is fashioned from an off-the-shelf, four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, giving it added versatility because a human also can ride it like a normal ATV. Both vehicles can be remotely operated from laptop computers and can be equipped with remotely fired weapons, like an M-16 rifle or pepper spray.

"What we are hoping is the robots will actually detect the enemy first," said Capt. Adolfo Meana Jr., chief of the concepts division for the Force Protection Battlelab at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.

"If you shoot the robot we don't care. We know you're there, you're hostile, and we can keep our forces in reserve to move tactically against the enemy. The robots will save our troops' lives," he said.

The vehicles can be programmed to patrol specific areas and then alert an operator by radio if they find something suspicious. They have loudspeakers and microphones for questioning intruders and the operator can pick from a variety of languages.

See also this post on robotic murder.

This post points out that robotic pilots will replace humans in the cockpit as quickly as possible because human error is such a big problem (also, human pilots are incredibly expensive and they have a nasty habit of striking).

Human Surgeons will not be far behind the pilots in the unemployment line, because they are making mistakes as fast as they can. Look at this:

Not that leg - rules aim to stop surgery mix-ups

From the article:

Starting July 1, operating rooms are supposed to be a little safer: Surgical teams must take new steps to prevent operating on the wrong body part or wrong patient.

Among the requirements: Much as airline pilots go through a safety checklist before takeoff, surgeons and nurses must take what's being dubbed a "timeout" before cutting. It's to double-check that the right patient is on the table, if he's really to lose a kidney and not a gallbladder - and if so, on which side.

Hospital regulators hope the new rules will finally put an end to growing reports of wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgeries.

Robotic surgery is accelerating rapidly -- see this post, this post and this post. Because of human error and the cost of human surgeons, there will be a big push to remove humans from the operating room. Patients, insurers and hospital lawyers will all want human surgeons eliminated as fast as humanly possible. What will all these pilots and surgeons do once they are unemployed? Click here.

Yesterday's post on the pilots landing at the wrong airport deserves this follow-up:

Plane Landing Catches Runway Painters By Surprise

From the article:

Today three runway painters count themselves very lucky to be alive. Mike Palmer was one of the three painters repainting the runway's navigational stripes when they noticed the plane descending. At first they thought it was a fly-over, but when they saw the landing gear come down…they knew there was a problem.

The painters did not receive any advance warning since Ellsworth Air Force Base thought the plane was landing at Rapid City Regional Airport as scheduled.

Of course, in the near future the three men will be unemployed -- robots will be painting navigational stripes instead of people. Those robotic painters won't have to worry about human pilots making mistakes because robots will soon be flying all the planes.

Wireless technology could soon help farms

From the article:

Farms of the not-too-distant future could be managed through wireless computer networks that allow farmers to sit in their pickups with a laptop and drive tractors, monitor soil moisture and even feed the hogs remotely.

Experts in computer-aided farming believe combines such as these could one day be replaced by robotic tractors guided by GPS signals.

Also:

Zhang has conducted extensive research with tractors that a farmer could control through a wireless network. He's also worked with robotic tractors guided by GPS signals.

Pockney plans to demonstrate his lab's robotic creation Wednesday. The boxy contraption has rubber tires, a jumble of wires and hoses, a GPS system and several computers. It can be guided by GPS signals or a human with a joystick through a wireless network.

Already, it is capable of tracking across a field far more accurately than even the most experienced human tractor driver, researchers said.

See also this post and this post.

Israel sees 'remote control' border with Gaza

From the article:

The Israeli army envisions a "remote control" border with the Gaza Strip after a troop withdrawal, including unmanned patrol cars and computerized observation posts that would automatically spot and kill attackers, a military official said Friday.

What we are talking about is a giant robotic cage. Stay inside the cage or you are killed by robots.

This technology is discussed in Manna. In that case, robotic cages keep unemployed people locked inside welfare concentration camps. The main difference in Manna is that the robots do not use lethal force. Instead, they inject offenders to render them unconscious and carry them back to their beds.

Two things make this technology so enticing:

1. It is far easier and cheaper to deploy robots than people. Imagine the cost and discipline/morale problems that come with deploying soldiers every 50 feet along a 100 mile border, 24x7. With robots, it is far easier.
   
   
2. There are no ethical problems when a machine kills someone who tries to break through the perimeter. Think about it this way -- if you put up a highly electrified chain link fence, and a person dies when he walks up and touches it, did the fence kill the person? No. But position a soldier there and have that soldier shoot the person when he touches a fence and there are all sorts of ethical problems both for the soldier personally and for the nation who deploys him. There is no difference in the outcome, but we treat the causes of death completely differently.

In the future, I believe we will also begin seeing larger and larger robotic bubbles. A crude form of bubble can be see in the "gated communities" found in wealthy suburbs. Using secret service agents, we also build a bubble around the president of the United States wherever he goes. Fisher Island is another such bubble. The trend toward robotic bubbles is already starting. One example: Florida Town to Use Surveillance Cameras.

Imagine where this trend takes us in the near future. Wealthy people buy land and build larger and larger bubbles. Eventually these bubbles are as big as small towns, and then cities. Imagine this happening to New York, where only wealthy and "desirable" people are allowed into the city. People fly between the bubbles on their jets. The "unwashed masses" -- what are today known as middle class and low-income people -- are completely locked out.

I predict that Washington DC will be the first city-scale robotic bubble. Small, completely enclosed "tourist zones" will be left open along The Mall to preserve a "feeling" that people can still "visit the capitol", but the rest of the city will be completely protected by a robotic bubble, with no one entering or leaving without proper authorization and clearance. Robotic sentries will protect the entire perimeter with "shoot to kill" instructions for any intruder. The airspace will be protected, the sub-orbital and orbital space will be protected, the waterways will be protected, and ground vehicles will neither enter nor leave without clearance and inspection. This level of lock-down is impossible to consider today, but within 20 years will be easy with robots.

Korean start-up rocks fledgling robotics industry



From the article:

Korean robotics start-up Mostitech has rocked the fledgling personal robotics marketplace by announcing the mid-year availability of a home security robot that will sell for around AUD$1100.

Prior to the announcement, the home security robotics marketplace had seemed likely to become the domain of the Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers which already have several such robots available on the Japanese domestic market for prices in the AUD$15,000+ area.

A number of good links at the bottom of the article.

Airliner lands at wrong airport

From the article:

Passengers on Northwest Flight 1152, an Airbus A-319 from St. Paul, expected to be welcomed to Rapid City Regional Airport on Saturday, but after about five minutes they were told to close their window shades and not look out, said passenger Robert Morrell.

"He (the pilot) hemmed and he hawed and he said 'We have landed at an Air Force base a few miles from the Rapid City airport and now we are going to figure out how we're going to get from here to there,"' Morrell told the St. Paul Pioneer Press by cell phone during the delay Saturday.

Oops. The pilot landed at the wrong airport.

Pilot error is a big problem in today's aviation industry, just as human drivers are the leading cause of death on our highways. As soon as robotic intelligence is available to replace pilots, truck drivers, taxi drivers, Fedex drivers and postal workers, those jobs will be automated out of existance and 5 million people will be out of work. It will happen sooner rather than later, for both economic and safety reasons. Pilots and truck drivers are incredibly expensive. 40,000 deaths per year on our highways will be eliminated once human's are removed from the driver's seat.

What will those 5 million workers do when their jobs evaporate? See this post, this post and Robotic Nation for details.

The "conventional wisdom" says that, as more and more robots enter the American economy and eliminate millions of jobs at every level (from pilots and truck drivers to burger flippers and janitors), what workers need to do is to constantly upgrade their skills to stay ahead of the robots. A big part of that upgrade process is "going to college". Most people agree that the only way to get a "good job" in America today is to go to college, and that pressure to go to college will only increase as robots start to invade the economy.

Therefore, this quote from this article on the GI Bill is fascinating:

"In 1940, only 5 percent of the adult population had four-year degrees. A college education was too expensive for most Americans. The GI Bill changed all that. It made college possible for every veteran, regardless of economic class, ethnicity or religious background. Today, nearly 25 percent of the adult population has a bachelor's degree, and the GI Bill has a lot to do with that vast societal improvement."

The article also states the reason why college is important in today's economy:

According to the Census Bureau, over their lifetimes college grads earn $1 million more than high school graduates.

Here is something to consider: If it took us 60 years to go from 5 percent college attendance to 25 percent college attendance, and if it will take only 30 to 40 years for robots to take half of the jobs in our economy, how, exactly, are we going to suddenly start providing college educations for the majority of Americans? What, exactly, is going to get us to 50 percent college attendance, or more realistically 75 percent, in the matter of two to three decades?

Getting to 75 percent college attendance represents a massive societal shift, as well as a massive investment. Yet, at this moment, public universities and community colleges are being hammered by declining state support because of the concentration of wealth occuring in America today. Tuitions at both public and private universities are rising rapidly. We are heading in the wrong direction.

See Robotic Nation and Robotic Freedom for details. See also this post on the percentage of non-wealthy people going to college.

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[Postscript -- This post was originally published on Saturday morning. By Sunday morning I had received several emails saying, approximately, "There are lots of old people in the population who do not have degrees. Far more than 25% of today's students are going to college." I investigated, and here is what I found.

According to the 2004 World Almanac, 67.3% of today's students graduate from high school. That is, 67.3% of today's ninth graders make it to graduation. It is probably not the case that 100% of students make it from Kindergarten to 9th grade, but let's assume it is and go with that 67% number.

An article entitled Immediate Transition From High School to College published by Educational Statistics Quarterly indicates that 65 percent of "high school completers" go to college.

A CNN article entitled College graduation rate below 50 percent says that "Less than 50 percent of U.S. college students entering four-year colleges or universities actually graduate."

So, if 100 students enter 9th grade, only 67 of them will graduate from high school. 65 percent of the 67, or 44 students, will start college. Half of them drop out of college -- either they cannot handle the work, or they run out of money, or they get side-tracked. Only 22 students out of the original 100 ninth graders actually graduate from college.

22% of today's students are earning college degrees. That's what the statistics seem to indicate.]

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Postscript 2 - By lunch on Sunday several people had sent in this article by Ariana Huffington: Graduation 2004: Pomp and Crummy Circumstances. It offers another perspective on the college situation.

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Postscript 3 - One other thing that is important to keep in mind is the fact that the people losing their jobs to robots in the coming years are not going to be "kids" who are just getting out of high school. They are going to be pilots, truck drivers, pharmacists, and so on. Millions of people. Real people. They will have spouses, children and mortgages.

While these people are spending two years retraining, they are going to need a minimum of $40,000 per year to keep the family afloat, plus the money for tuition. It is a large national investment to retrain one milion workers displaced by robots, never mind 10 million or 50 million.

McDonald's cuts out the middle man

From the article:

Outside Chicago in St. Charles, Illinois, longtime McDonald's Corp. franchisee John Lardas has reconfigured his restaurant, replacing three ordering stations manned by employees at the front counter with one traditional station and four stand-alone computers, or kiosks.

"You see no lines because people are spreading themselves out," said Lardas, who estimates that 70 percent of customers now opt to use the technology.

McDonald's, which only recently admitted its service problems and vowed to fix them, is ironing the kinks out of technology some believe will transform fast food the way similar systems have revolutionized bank transactions and airport check-ins.

Each kiosk allows a customer to place an order directly with the kitchen, using a touch screen with pictures of food, English or Spanish text and verbal prompts.

Have a Big Mac the regular way with special sauce; customize it without cheese or pickles; or, if feeling particularly Atkins-friendly, lose the bun.

Also:

Privately held Burger King Corp., McDonald's largest hamburger-making rival, is also testing kiosks in a handful of stores. A representative for the Miami company declined to provide additional details.

Ordering kiosks have already found a permanent home in convenience stores such as WaWa, an East Coast chain that lets customers use them to order deli sandwiches. Many groceries use similar technology to let customers handle their own checkout.

The article notes several benefits:

• "That's partly because staffing restaurants with well-trained employees willing to work for low wages remains an increasing challenge for fast-food operators who run on tight margins and have seen the price of commodities like beef move steadily higher."
  
  
• "Once perfected, the technology will likely lead to shorter wait times, labor cost savings, and ultimately, higher average checks, analysts said."
  
  
• "The customer perception is that it's a better experience," said Christa Small, the McDonald's director heading the test. "It's the perception that you have control over the process."
  
  
• "Having a machine consistently remember if you want french fries with your sandwich, as the McDonald's kiosks do, can boost the value of a transaction by 10 to 20 percent, said Kate Delhagen, a Forrester Research analyst who has studied kiosk technology."
  
  
• "Customers like Tom Schwagart, a 61-year-old grandfather visiting the McDonald's with his granddaughter, said he's been converted. "I like it because I don't like to stand in line," he said."

The article Robotic Nation opens with a discussion of Kiosks. Kiosks represent the leading edge of the robotic revolution.

This article discusses a first step toward the Vertebrane system:

Mind over video game

From the article:

Using thought alone and with some electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, four volunteers were able to control a video game, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

Simply by thinking the word "move", the volunteers played the simple video game, the researchers reported.

Also:

Other researchers have worked with implanted electrodes in both monkeys and humans, but Leuthardt said this approach does not require putting anything deep into the brain.

"There is the potential for it to be very much less invasive," he said.

Writing in Monday's issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering, Leuthardt and Daniel Moran, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, said the patients learned in minutes how to control a computer cursor.

"It took six minutes of training and they all achieved control in less than 24 minutes," Leuthardt said.

"After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain," added Moran. "They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row."

This is nice, but it has its limits. The human body has hundreds of muscles that the brain controls, and it will not be possible to replicate that type of intricacy with electrodes on the surface of the brain. By tapping right into the spinal cord, the Vertebrane system gets all the data heading for the muscles. In addition, the Vertebrane system allows for data input as well -- touch, smell, vision, hearing, etc.

Once people are controlling video games with their thoughts, they will like it. They will want a richer and richer experience. Eventually they will want a completely seamless experience with the Vertebrane system, where it is impossible to differentiate the game world from real life.

[Power implant aims to run on body heat -- a new way to power implanted devices like Vertebrane.]

The super-fast future of computing

From the article:

One of the scientists who helped pioneer Star Trek-style teleporting in a ground-breaking experiment says he hopes we will see a ultra-fast quantum computer in action by 2035.

"The Moore's Law for computer technology states that in every 18 months, there will be a doubling of computer memory, speed and other performances," Dr Ping Koy Lam explained to BBC News Online.

"In a few years' time, this law will have to confront quantum theory when transistors are shrunk to the size of a few atoms."

This article mentions: "Teleportation between atoms could someday lie at the heart of powerful quantum computers, which are probably at least a decade away from development." It also says: "Basically, researchers can use lab techniques to create a weird relationship between pairs of tiny particles. After that, the fate of one particle instantly affects the other; if one particle is made to take on a certain set of properties, the other immediately takes on identical or opposite properties, no matter how far away it is and without any apparent physical connection to the first particle." This sounds like an excellent communication technique for interstellar distances.

Here's an easy way to give people the money described in the Robotic Freedom article: Give everyone a debit card that accesses the Central Account.

Oregon offers unemployment benefits via prepaid card

From the article:

Jobless Oregonians can now obtain their money with a first-in-the-nation debit card for unemployment benefits launched this month by the state and U.S. Bank.

According to a report in the Oregonian, the state pays $16 million a week to 80,000 unemployed citizens. Eleven percent have their benefits deposited directly into bank accounts; the rest get their benefits mailed in the form of paper checks.

The debit card, rolled out last week after a successful pilot program last year, provides a third payment option.

One thing to note: If 80,000 people are receiving $16 million per week, that's $200 per week per person. That's slightly less than minimum wage. And that's the average -- many people would be receiving less than that.

Unless you want to become homeless, you do not want to become unemployed in today's economy. Unfortunately, robots put large numbers of people in jeoprody of becoming unemployed. That is exactly the problem that Robotic Freedom is trying to solve.

Several articles recently on robots and medicine:

1) NANOMEDICINE: It's in your blood. From the article:

John Smith arrives at the doctor’s office with a slight fever, a runny nose and a sore throat; the physician suspects a cold. He inserts a small, handheld device the size of a miniature pocket calculator into the patient’s mouth like a tongue depressor. The built-in molecular assay receptors sense and report the presence of various kinds of bacteria, providing a three-dimensional, color-coded map of Smith’s throat.

Armed with the names of the bacteria, a computer provides programming instructions for billions of nanorobots the doctor has in stock. The finished “prescription” is administered through a spray the patient inhales. The nanorobots move about in Smith’s body—unnoticed by Smith himself—destroying the specified bacteria one by one. Within a few minutes, the pathogen is completely eliminated. Using an acoustic homing device, the doctor guides the nanorobots back into Smith’s mouth and retrieves them.

This scenario, described in nano-researcher Robert A. Freitas Jr.’s article “Say Ah!”, sounds more utopian than it might actually be. By 2020 (only sixteen years from now), scientists say, nanomedicine could become a reality.

2) Spinal repair robot gets FDA nod. From the article:

A miniature robot that helps point surgeons to just the right place for spinal repairs has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, its inventors said.

Called the SpineAssist, the robot was made at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and manufactured by its inventor Moshe Shoham's company, called Mazor Surgical Technologies.

The soft-drink-can-sized device is attached to a patient's body, guiding and positioning tools and implants so that surrounding nerves are not damaged. [See also this post on another specialized surgical robot for prostate surgery - soon there will be a specialized surgical assistant for every type of surgery.]

3) Robot Speeds Embryonic Stem Cell Work. From the article:

Robotic technology has been developed to dramatically speed the process of finding materials upon which to grow embryonic stem cells for use in repairing tissue and developing replacement organs.

The system, developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, helps overcome the difficulty of coaxing embryonic stem cells to grow outside the body.

"Until now there has been no quick, easy way to assess how a given material will affect cell behavior," says MIT researcher Robert Langer.

There is so much happening on the medical front -- see also this post on the robotic invasion in hospitals. It simply will not be that long before robots handle all health care.

This article is interesting simply because of the complexity it describes in a single chip:

Cisco and IBM tout world's most complex chip

From the article:

The Cisco Silicon Packet Processor is a 40Gbps application-specific integrated circuit featuring 38 million gates, more than 187 million transistors and 188 high-performance programmable 32-bit Risc processors. The device will be able to execute 47 billion instructions per second.

47 billion instructions per second is about 80 times faster than a typical microporcessor today.

Something like Intel's Pentium chip contains a single general-purpose microprocessor and dedicates all of the transistors to it. For example, the Prescott version of the Pentium contains 125 million transistors, but a majority of them are tied up in highly standardized structures like the cache RAM.

IBM's chip contains about 50% more transistors and distributes them in a very different way. That is why it is possible to fit in 188 RISC processors and lots of other stuff.

It will be fascinating to see this level of customization and performance applied to application-specific robotic functions like vision, touch, speech processing, etc. As robots become more widespread, application-specific chips will become far more common, just like customized graphics processors are now standard equipment on today's PCs.

Robots taking your place

From the article:

Bought the tickets and don’t feel much like going? NTT Communication Science Laboratories have developed a robot with a head modeled on the shape of your own, including microphones just where your ears would be, that will sit in your seat and send an audio picture of a concert back to your headphones. A sensor in your headset measures the tilt of your head and has the robot follow suit. There are plans to develop a version with cameras, too.

This would seem like a logical extension to television. You get a feed that provides binocular hearing and binocular vision from the concert hall, sporting event, etc. You could get the "standard feed", or a personal feed where you control the head yourself.

The other way to do this is to reconstruct virtual images of the sporting event from any angle in real time. It is made possible by using dozens of cameras, processing all of the images and figuring out where everything is so that any viewpoint can be created computationally. This article and this one describe the process in some detail. Instead of a robot sitting in a specific (not necessarily good) seat and providing you with a view from there, you can choose any viewpoint (including on the field, in the huddle, etc.) at any time.

There are several NASA robotics projects getting recycled into the news feed right now because of all of the discussion about the Hubble repair robot.

For example, the NASA info droid was announced as early as July 2001 and is now being discussed again in this Wired story because it is just about ready for deployment. From the article:

The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day's tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right.

After six years of development, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center say they now have a version of the Personal Satellite Assistant, or PSA, that's fully mobile, with a sensor suite that's nearly space-ready.

But it's unclear whether the red spherical bot will ever make it into orbit. Like so much else at the space agency these days, the fate of the PSA remains uncertain. The drone's makers hope to have an answer from the higher-ups by the end of the summer.

See also this page.

Of course, you don't really need to provide astronauts with PSAs if all the astronauts have been replaced by robots. The Hubble repair robot is a great example of that trend. So is NASA's Robonaut.



NASA offers this page summarizing the Robonaut idea:

Robonaut is a humanoid robot designed by the Robot Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Johnson Space Center in a collaborative effort with DARPA. The Robonaut project seeks to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that can function as an EVA astronaut equivalent.

An "astronaut equivalent" is, of course, an "astronaut replacement". Imagine how much simpler, smaller and lighter the space shuttle or the space station would be if it did not need to house human astronauts or provide them with life support. See Robotic Nation for details.

This article sounds slightly ahead of its time, although inevitable. If it is true in 2004, however, then it is fascinating because it has come so early:

Can software replace a programmer?

From the article:

Care Technologies recently introduced a software which claims to accelerate application development up to 47x and might even be able to replace software developers at some point. To prove its capability, the firm invites firms to a workshop and have a specific application developed within 48 hours.

"Computers can now program themselves," Spain-based Care Technologies says in its press release and describes its invention as first fully automatic programming machine. In fact, the concept of OlivaNova, the name of the application, almost seems scary: Using simple application requirements, developers no longer write code but rather define a model and relations between different and have the software write the program "with the push of a button."

Also:

"In ten years we will laugh about the fact that we still had to write code at the beginning of the 21st century. It is about time to automate the software industry," says Oscar Pastor, who developed the "programming machine".

See Robotic Nation for details.

Virtual fences to herd Wi-Fi cattle

From the article:

Virtual, moving fences controlled from a laptop could one day herd cattle to fresh fields for grazing, a roboticist told the MobiSys 2004 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday.

A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game, said Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Although static virtual fences already keep dogs inside yards in affluent US neighbourhoods, no-one has attempted a moving virtual fence before, nor attempted to apply the idea to large herds of animals. "Basically we download the fences to the cows," says Butler. "We say: 'Today stay here, tomorrow go somewhere else."

A new word is entering the vocabulary: Neurobotics. It means: ’The Fusion of Neuroscience and Robotics for Augmenting Human Capabilities’.

For example, see this article: IST-FET launches Integrated Project:’Neurobotics’

From the article:

The ultimate objective of the NEUROBOTICS project is to introduce a discontinuity in the robot design, thus going literally "Beyond Robotics". This discontinuity will be pursued by a strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics, which will go well beyond present, mostly fragmented, collaborations, and lead to overcome state-of-the-art of robotics worldwide.

More particularly Neurobotics aims at:
1) systematically exploring the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs)
2) deeply investigating the theme of human augmentation
3) developing new integrated robotic artefacts, as much biomorphic as required to be effectively interfaced with the human body and brain

Three robotic platforms featuring different levels of hybridness (i.e. mechanical coupling with the human body) and of connectivity (to the human nervous system) will be developed to be used in experiments on human augmentation: biomimetic scalable artefacts to be remotely controlled by human operator; intelligent wearable artefacts loosely physically coupled with the human body; arm-hand sub-systems tightly physically coupled with the human body.

Let's hope that Vertebrane and body-free living are on the menu.

USATODAY.com - Robotic repair call to Hubble taking shape

From the article:

NASA officials are starting to fill in the blanks on how they might rescue the Hubble Space Telescope with a robot.

In the process, they are defining the kinds of space exploration in which robots would be just as effective as astronauts, eliminating risks to human life in space.

Robots have long been a NASA mainstay — witness the success of the Mars rovers this year. But certain missions have always been set aside for astronauts. Repairs to Hubble have been among those missions — until now.

Right in line with Robotic Nation. One would hope and expect that NASA would be a bit ahead of the curve. In a year or two robots are repairing Hubble, and then 20 years later robots are repairing your car, your house, your other robots, etc. Several million people lose their jobs in the process.

DARPA has upgraded its web site with details of the 2005 Grand Challenge. The new date is October 8, 2005, and the new prize is $2 million.

Here's an example of one of the teams planning to compete: OASIS Autonomous Racing.

Brain-mimicking circuits to run navy robot

From the article:

Researchers in New York City are teaming with the U.S. Navy and scientists in Russia to build electronic circuits that mimic the brain, producing an agile controller that can maneuver robot vehicles with speed and precision.

The devices are based on a circuit in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps organize the body's motions. Specifically, the new technology imitates the olivocerebellar circuit, which controls balance and limb movement.

'It's present in all vertebrates -- it's very much the same from the most simple to the most complex brains,' researcher Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at New York University Medical School, told United Press International.

'The assumption is that it is conserved (in evolution) because it embodies a very intelligent solution,' Llinas said.

Over the next 20 to 30 years, scientists will figure out more and more cicuits in the brains of animals and humans: vision circuits, balance circuits, memory circuits, reasoning circuits, association circuits and so on. The pace of this kind of research is accelerating. This means that robots will be able to borrow circuits from nature and then improve on them very quickly.

Hotels of the future

From the article:

Glen Hiemstra, founder of www.futurist.com, believes that three things will define the future of hotels: robotics, nanotechnology, and biometric security, such as retina scans.

And:

"I think robotics will be the most significant technology to affect the hotel industry in the future," says Hiemstra. He envisions a hotel where robots can do the majority of the cleaning and check-in and safes will become automated by devices like retina scans. "But the really far-out science fiction scenario is with nanotechnology," he says. (In short, nanotechnology is the ability to manipulate and manufacture things at the molecular level.) "In 2025 or 2030, we might be able to have rooms reconfigure themselves to whatever guests want, whether it's a king-sized bed and a couch, or a single bed and a desk."

In both timeframe and predicted impact, this fits exactly with the predictions in Robotic Nation.

Albuquerque inventor revolutionizes the field of robotics

From the article:

NASA is sponsoring the contest that will pit robotic arms fitted with artificial muscles against a human being, probably a teenager. The space agency is hoping that the artificial limbs will win and that the victory will give a boost to the emerging field of artificial muscles, a field that Shahinpoor says could have wide-ranging medical applications and be worth billions of dollars in the next several years.

Also:

Artificial muscles, or electroactive polymers as they are known, are rubber and plastic-like materials that flex, bend and expand and contract when put in contact with chemicals or electricity. The contracting muscles are made from strands of orlon and other fibers, while the bending muscles are made of gold-plated Teflon. They mimic human muscle movements, and in time, might be used to replace damaged muscles in the human body. They also stand a good chance of revolutionizing the field of robotics.

NASA, for instance, is hoping to build a landing rover with legs fitted with artificial muscles. Such a robot would be able to walk, instead of crawling on wheels, over planetary surfaces.

"We are working on a rover right now with legs. My hope is to have it powered by artificial muscles. My dream is to see it running like a horse, rather than moving slowly like a robot," Bar-Cohen says.

That horse image is interesting. Imagine riding to the store on an artificial horse when you want to try something a little different...

There were several articles this week taking a look at the effects of Moores law. For example:

Thirty years with computers

from the article:

According to Moore's Law, computer power doubles every 18 months, meaning that computers will be a million times more powerful by 2034. According to Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth, connectivity to the home grows by 50 percent per year; by 2034, we'll have 200,000 times more bandwidth. That same year, I'll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of memory, half an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent storage and connects to the Internet with a bandwidth of a quarter terabit (a trillion binary digits) per second.

The specifics may vary: Instead of following current Moore's Law trajectories to speed up a single CPU, it's likely that we'll see multiprocessors, smart dust and other ways of getting the equivalent power through a more advanced computer architecture. But users shouldn't have to care about such implementation details.

By 2034, we'll finally get decent computer displays, with a resolution of about 20,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels (as opposed to the miserly 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels on my current monitor). Although welcomed, my predicted improvement factor of 200 here is relatively small; history shows that display technology has the most dismal improvement curve of any computer technology, except possibly batteries.

How could anyone use petabytes of memory and terabits of bandwidth for personal needs? Hard to imagine now, but I don't think we'll have any trouble putting the coming hardware cornucopia to good use. We'll use half the storage space to index all our information so that we can search it instantly. Good riddance, snoozy Outlook search.

We'll also spend a big percentage of the computer power on defence mechanisms such as self-healing software (to root out bugs and adapt to changing environments) and aggressively defensive virus antibodies. We'll need such software to protect against "social engineering" attacks, such as e-mail that purports to come from your boss and asks you to open an attachment.

Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today. For this new entertainment, the simplest accomplishment we need is artificial actors rendered in real time in high-definition animation. Adapting stories to individual users will be much harder. Once solved, the resulting user interfaces will be much more appealing to a broad market than current computer games, which typically feature convoluted game play and simplified worlds.

Even without full artificial intelligence, computers will exhibit more signs of agency and work to defend their owner's online interests rather than sitting passively, waiting for commands. Richer interaction styles are also likely, both in terms of gestures, physical interfaces, multidevice interfaces and the long-awaited decent high-resolution flat screen.

Certainly, our personal computer will remember anything we've ever seen or done online. A complete HDTV record of every waking hour of your life will consume 2 percent of your hard disk.

Science fiction authors do a better job than I do of speculating on future advances and the implications for human existence. However, one thing is certain: The transition from punched tape to the Web and megapixel displays is merely the first and smallest part of the evolution of user interfaces. If we keep human needs in mind and harness the increased computer power appropriately, there will be great and exciting things ahead in our field.

Deloitte & Touche Predicts Electronic Game Devices To Increase Five-Fold To 2.6 Billion By 2010

From the article:

Moore's Law implies that there will be an eight-fold increase in processing power and memory capacity between now and 2010, greatly impacting the disruptiveness of the electronic game industry. It is expected that 450 million homes worldwide will have broadband connections by 2010, with one billion individuals having access to multimedia mobile phones that could support game downloads and some form of mobile game playing. Storage capacity will likely increase to 1,000 gigabytes of disk storage in a typical home PC by 2010, enabling games to be longer and more complex with enhanced visual detail, sound effects and music.

These technological advances will create new revenue opportunities for sectors related to electronic games and will expand audience reach beyond the traditional electronic game markets.

See Robotic Nation for details.

S'pore team invents prostate biopsy robot

From the article

A TEAM made up of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore General Hospital (SGH) researchers has come up with the first robot that can perform prostate biopsies.

Also:

'So on a good day, the doctor might be able to hit 90 per cent of all the spots, but if he hasn't slept the night before, the results could be affected.''

Using the same computer algorithms, however, the robot can deliver the needle to within 1.5mm of each intended target spot - significantly better than what a human can consistently achieve."

There are three trends visible here:

• Robots can specialize. There can be one robot perfectly suited to prostate biopsies, while another is perfectly designed for heart valve replacement, and so on.
• The robots will be significantly better than human doctors. As the robots proliferate, human doctors will disappear.
• The robots will naturally integrate with other robots. The article states: "But though the location of these spots is identified using computer algorithms, the marks are not always hit: The doctors must manually manipulate the needle based on blurry ultrasound images." Robots are already performing part of the procedure. Now a second robot can follow through on the first robot's analysis and perform the actual surgery.

See this post for more details on robots in hospitals.

In a Road That's All Eyes, the Driver Finds an Ally

From the article:

To that end, Astucia has developed a system that is operating on a highway in Scotland. It employs three embedded cameras to give front, rear and side views of passing vehicles. Other embedded sensors project two infrared beams over the road that are used to time traffic and determine its speed. The images and the speed data travel under the road by cable to a computer. It in turn relays the data by satellite to Astucia's offices.

The system is currently being used to monitor traffic slowdowns. When it detects them, it turns on illuminated markers farther up the road as a warning. Mr. Dicks said that its speed measurements were accurate within 0.5 percent, well within the tolerances demanded for traffic enforcement.

Similarly, he said, the systems can be combined with optical character recognition software to automatically track stolen vehicles or cars believed to be used by suspected criminals or terrorists.

The United States branch of Astucia began demonstrating the camera system - which costs about $50,000 for a package of three cameras, sensors and supporting electronics - to police and highway officials less than a month ago. John Kerridge, the subsidiary's president, reported considerable interest in the system for both traffic and broader law enforcement. But he added that public resistance could be one obstacle to its adoption.

"We all break the law regarding speeding," Mr. Kerridge said. "The system may leave a bad taste in motorists' mouths at the beginning. But when their insurance starts going down and stolen vehicles start getting recovered, the benefits will overcome that."

What this article points out is that robotic surveillance will be able to take many different forms in the near future. It will be far less expensive, and far less obvious, to drill small holes in the pavement to install in-road cameras at every intersection.

Robot tracks rocket in space

From the article:

For the first time ever, an airborne robotic sensor system developed by NASA has tracked a rocket during launch and communicated with its computer without human intervention.

The test is considered a breakthrough in a launch technology that might one day lead to aircraft or orbiting satellites controlling space launches. Such a step might trim the cost of launching rockets by reducing the need for cumbersome, ground-based facilities to track and monitor vehicles as they ascend toward space.

The prototype of the future system, called a Range Systems Transformational Laboratory, or RSTL, flew aboard a small research plane hovering 16,000 feet above the southern coast of California and 85 miles downrange from the ascending rocket.

For the test, NASA used its launch of the Gravity Probe B on April 20 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The satellite payload rode atop a Boeing Delta II space booster. While a lone pilot flew the plane, the robotic sensor system onboard searched for, detected, tracked and "interrogated" the booster and its payload as it rose and sped away from the launching base. The robot tracker kept its sensors aimed at the booster as it flew out over the Pacific Ocean to the horizon, out of the range of the 35-foot dishes arrayed along the coastline, and others carried by the ships and planes that normally are deployed during a launch.

NASA working on integrating robot craft into nation's airspace

From the article:

NASA said Thursday it is launching a program that could have robot planes and conventional piloted aircraft routinely and safely sharing civil airspace by 2008.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are now limited primarily to restricted test or military airspace.

"The fundamental underpinnings of this program are how can we safely introduce this class into the national airspace system?" said Jeff Bauer, manager of the $360 million program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

See also this article

$360 million is a lot of money to spend, and 2008 is a very agressive goal considering that there are no robotic planes flying in commercial airspace right now.

Predictably, the article mentions nothing about robots flying passenger aircraft. Having "robot planes and conventional piloted aircraft routinely and safely sharing civil airspace by 2008" is a necessary step, however, if we are going to eliminate human pilots from airplanes.