Robotic Nation Evidence

India set to tutor Silicon Valley

From the article:

After high-tech industry, outsourcing of educational services is now a growing business with Indian teachers tutoring American school children at a far less cost than their US counterparts.

Also:

Although it is hard to say how many students are spending their money on Indian tutors, a firm estimates that Indian tutors are now working with some 20,000 American students. One big reason for the outsourcing is, of course, cost. Growing Stars, a Bay Area-based small company, with a center with 20 tutors in Kochi, is able to offer one-on-one services for 20 an hour, significantly less than the 45 dollars to 80 dollars an hour charged by US tutoring companies like Sylvan and Kaplan.

Teaching will turn into a minimum wage job through the following process.

Teaching today primarily focuses on end-of-grade tests. We will break down the teaching into modules that cover all of the different sections of end of grade testing, and then create computer-aided-education software and robots to do that teaching. The software will far surpass anything we see in classrooms today. Produced by educational publishers with budgets of millions of dollars, the software will include video, games, remediation, tailored quizes to measure progress, etc.

Students who don't make the grade will be handled by near-minimum-wage or foreign tutors. The traditional "teacher" that we think of today will largely vanish. See also:

• Robotic education
  
• Robots and teachers
  
• Robots grading tests
  
• Robots grading essay questions

Playing It Again - The inventor of Pong and founder of Chuck E. Cheese is getting back into the restaurant game.

From the article:

Ever the dreamer, Bushnell, 62, now wants to get gamers out of the house. This week he will announce a new venture—by his count, the 24th in 33 years. The uWink Media Bistro restaurantchain (strike one: the name) will have screens at every table and bar stool, each piping videogames, media content and interactive menus to a young-adult dining crowd which will, he's convinced, use the shared-gaming experience as a chance to compete, relax and mingle.

There's the "interactive menu" idea again, as mentioned in Robotic Nation.

See also:

• Electronic Menu System.
  
• Kiosks coming to a McDonalds near you
  
• Robotic kiosks proliferate

SpaceShipOne’s White Knight used for X-37 tests

From the article:

Designed by Scaled Composites of Mojave, the White Knight hauled SpaceShipOne to altitude and then released the piloted rocket plane for its record-setting suborbital treks, including the snagging of the high-stakes $10 million Ansari X Prize last year.

In its new role, the White Knight is being readied to carry the X-37, a vehicle supported by the Boeing Co., NASA and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA... The X-37 has been billed as an unpiloted, autonomously operated vehicle designed to conduct on-orbit operations and collect test data in the Mach 25 (re-entry) region of flight.

This is the orbital version of the drones discussed in the previous post

Attack of the Drones

From the article:

Rogers' Predator is one of more than 1,200 UAVs in the US military arsenal; three years ago, there were fewer than 100 in the field. Today drones as small as a crow and as big as a Cessna are searching for roadside bombs, seeking out insurgents, and watching the backs of US troops. They're cheap, they can stay in the air longer than any manned aircraft, and they can see a battlefield better - all without risking a pilot.

See also:

• Robotic airplanes flying in friendly skies
  
• Successful X-45 robotic bomber
  
• Robots in the Middle East

University Of Manchester Develops Vision Chip For New Generation Of 'Human' Robots The eyes have it for 'human' robots

From the article:

"Our basic premise is that nature builds systems very well, and if we can mimic those systems then we hope to be able to build better robots which combine the best of both the computer and the human worlds," says Dr Dudek.

The eyes have it for 'human' robots

From the article:

"Like the human eye, the chip will process very complex images at rapid rates, filtering them through to the robot's 'brain' and enabling it to react in real time."

The Vision Chip will be based on a prototype which Dudek has spent the last seven years developing. It measures one square centimetre and contains 16,384 microprocessors enabling images to be sensed and processed at ultra-high speeds.

The chip will form the integral part of a wider vision system built around a high resolution camera and a lower resolution peripheral camera.

Wired News: Computers No Cure for Dumb Docs

From the article:

Even though the hospital's computers were supposed to protect against dangerous drug interactions, illegible prescriptions and bedside mix-ups, nine of the 937 patients studied died as a result of medication problems, the study found.

Why did they die?

At the Salt Lake City hospital, for instance, health workers ordered the wrong drugs, ordered the wrong doses and failed to monitor patients properly. Ninety-one percent of the 483 mishaps were moderately harmful, and 9 percent were serious, according to the researchers.

In other words, humans are dangerous to other humans. That will provide a strong impetus to go robotic as quickly as possible.

See also Robot surgeons and Pilots and robots for details on other dangerous humans.

This is an interesting article that tries to predict how the world of technology will evolve over the next 50 years of so: Developmental Spiral. From the article:

While my own best current intuition expects a 2060 A.D. singularity, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Richard Coren, James Wesley, Damien Broderick, Robin Hansen, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and a number of other careful thinkers have proposed a range of ETA's between 2020 and 2140, with 2020-2060 presently representing the majority of predictions, clustering around a 2040 mean.

Engadget visits the Intelligent Robotics Research Center at the Korean Institute of Science and Technology

From the article:

"Dr. Yoo focused a great deal on the networked brain KIST has developed for each robot. Each brain actually consists of four to five computer stations connected to a server, one each for voice/speech recognition, face recognition, object recognition, motion and movement, and general AI features such as speech (as Engadget mentioned, one server setup can control both bots). I asked Dr. Yoo whether the robots could do deductive reasoning (for example, if you fed them the information that A=B and B=C, can it figure out that A=C), and he said that they would have that capability by the end of the year. He said that some of the most difficult aspects of developing the robots were related to kinesthetics and movement, but that the hardest of all was creating the ability to adapt to a moving, changing environment, both from the physical response side and from the pattern recognition/AI side."

Nice photo too.

Austria Lawmaker Wants to ID Dog Droppings

This article is fascinating on several different levels. But let's take it at the business level. Here in the U.S. we are doing things like the Grand Challenge. In Vienna, however, the challenge is much smaller, and it seems like it is solvable with today's technology. The article states:

Vienna's sidewalks are littered by dog droppings, and campaigns trying to persuade owners to pick up after their pets have made little difference. The city is home to almost 50,000 registered dogs, but the true number is believed to be much higher as many owners ignore the registration requirement.

Here is the interesting part from a business perspective:

removing just a single dog heap costs the city euro3 (US$3.80) to euro5 (US$6.30), Juraczka said, adding that amounted an "intolerable situation."

If there are 50,000 dogs, and each leaves one pile per day, and it costs about 5 bucks to clean up one pile, that's $250,000 per day. Eight days of poop-scooping equals the total prize package for the Grand Challenge.

Surely Vienna would be willing to pay, what, $50,000, for a robot that can sniff out and clean up this mess. The city would probably need to buy 20 of them to handle the whole city, but that is still a bargain.

Perhaps what Vienna needs to do is have a Grand Challenge of its own and see if robotic creativity can solve this problem.

Shadow Robot Company: Commercial Hand



From the site:

The Hand is driven from a block of Air Muscles mounted behind the Hand on the "forearm". Pneumatic valves and initial control software are provided. Unless otherwise stated, the joints are driven by an opposing pair of muscles, permitting variable compliance at the joint; however, some of the finger joints are driven by a single muscle with return spring.

There are several nice videos available on the home page. Order yours today...

The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

From the article:

Craven's system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab's demonstration plant was generating net power, the world's first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.

"The potential of OTEC is great," says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap."

"enough energy to supply a thousand times the world's needs." sounds like a lot of energy. It also sounds like the end of the fossil fuel economy.

Nano-Grating DVDs could store 100 times more

From the article:

The patent covers a novel technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data in a highly multi-level format. This technology, termed AO-DVD (Articulated Optical - Digital Versatile Disc), allows more data to be stored on a DVD and could allow future optical discs to potentially hold 40-100 times more information with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs, and at similarly low costs.

See also Teraflop performance in the new Xbox and Holographic Storage starts at 300 GB per disc.

A robot in your future?

From the article:

Today, we've got iPods, X-boxes, PDAs, GPS, DVDs, DSL, Wi-Fi, smart phones, hot spots, laptops and TiVo. But where are all the robots? Shouldn't we all have robots mowing our lawns, cleaning our houses and catering to our every need by now?

'I'm surprised and disappointed it hasn't happened,'' said Engelberger last week at the RoboBusiness Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Now retired, 'the father of robotics,'' spoke to an overflow crowd, exhorting the audience of young entrepreneurs to make his dream of an elder-care robot (which he first wrote about in 1989) a reality. 'Please, let's do it,'' he said.

Today, you can count the number of successful consumer products on one robotic hand. There are the robot vacuum cleaners - Roomba is the most popular, with sales of 1.2 million units. And there's Robosapien , a $100 toy humanoid robot made by Hong Kong-based WowWee (not to be confused with Chinese networking vendor Huawei) that walks, dances, burps and moves its arms.

There are a few more home robots than that. See Home robots you can buy (including the comments) for a good list of what is out there.

It sounds very much like Engelberger was just slightly ahead of his time. Back in the 1950s, people were also predicting chess computers. We did not get chess computers able to beat great human chess players until the 1990s (see Inexpensive Chess Computer Holds Its Own Against Grand Master), and that took highly specialized hardware. It took 40 years for there to be enough CPU power to compete with the human brain in the field of chess.

Robots need even more CPU power, especially for tasks like vision processing. That is what has held robots back. However, the needed amount of CPU power will become available within the next 20 years or so. At that point, the floodgates will open. See Robotic Nation and Manna for details.

This SadTech post on Video game controllers is directly related to Manna and Vertebrane.

Remote Detection, Challenge, and Response System (REDCAR)

From the article:

The REDCAR program focuses on the application of mobile unmanned ground systems to support and augment security force personnel in the perimeter defense of Air Force installations and forward deployed units. The AFRL REDCAR system will consist of a network of robotic platforms integrated with existing security force sensors and Tactical, Area Security System (TASS). The REDCAR system will have limited simulation and modeling capabilities to interact with the current AFFPB modeling systems. All components and platforms in the REDCAR system will be capable of communication using JAUS for system interoperability and control.

The robotic platforms for the REDCAR initiative need a wide variety of capabilities. AFRL will develop and integrate technologies for a network of robotic platforms to perform the REDCAR mission. REDCAR will use at least three different robotic platforms: (1) a surveillance platform; (2) an engagement platform, and (3) a small-scale platform for limited access areas.

The article offers details on each of the three platforms. According to this article, the Air Force has started testing the REDCAR system in Wyoming.

Hate mopping? Let a robot do it

Roomba is about to get a friend named Scooba. From the article:

It scrubs the floor with cleaning liquid, rinses it, then sucks up the excess water and stores it to be dumped later. The promise from iRobot is that Scooba will clean better than a mop, which typically redistributes dirty water, iRobot CEO Colin Angle says.

Go-with-you robot sidekick unveiled

From the article:

unveiled robots to help out the elderly and children from the home to the shopping mall by following them and responding to their voices.

The "ApriAttanda" identifies an individual with its visual sensor and high-speed image processing system and follows the person.

When the person moves forward, the robot moves forward. When the person stops, the robot stops — while maintaining a certain distance.

Toshiba welcomes ApriAttenda to robot family

From the article:

The new robots, which way from 10Kgs to 30Kgs, have been designed as life-support partners for humans, able to provide assistance in looking after the elderly or young children when you are at home or out and about.

Toshiba originally announced its ApriAlpha robot back in 2003. Since then it has developed a new prototype robot, the ApriAttenda and updated the technology inside the original ApriAlpha version.

The ApriAlpha V3 can recognise its owners voice from a crowd of talking individuals using omnidirectional voice capture and respond to their command, Understand and respond to several conversations going on at once and connect to the internet an operate networked home appliances.

The idea is to create a robot that can keep up with a child or an adult, carry packages, and generally hang around in case something goes wrong. It is the first step toward the robotic Nanny. If you gave it a gun or a Taser, it might be the first step toward a robotic body guard.

Ashes to ashes, brain to disk

From the article:

Death could become a thing of the past by the mid-21st century as computer technology becomes sophisticated enough for the contents of a brain to be "downloaded" on to a supercomputer, according to a leading British futurologist.

The article leaves out the interesting part -- how this might be done?

Just last night I was watching Shrek 2 with my daughter. There was a little "making of" segment that came with it, and we were watching how the body and face of Shrek are controlled by hundreds of sliders -- on-screen controls that move every little "muscle" in Shrek's body.

We have replaced the bodies of human actors. So I was wondering, "how long until we control the voice in just the same way, and no longer need the voices of human actors either?"

Today I find this article on a robot that mimics the human organs for speech:

Robot Recreates Human Speech

From the article: "The only robot that uses human-like organs to mimic speech was unveiled recently by engineers at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan." It has a nice photo and a short video.

The tag line for this video from Verizon is quite simple:

Jobs suck

And these three jobs do suck.

Jobs suck for two reasons. First, there are many jobs that need to be done in our economy that no one wants to do. No one says to himself or herself at age 9 or 10, "One day I hope to be scrubbing toilets at McDonald's", or emptying portable toilets or whatever. Tens of millions of jobs in the economy are like that -- no one would do them voluntarily.

So why do people fill those jobs? Because of the second reason why jobs suck: people have no choice. Once you turn 18, either you work or you become homeless. The equation is "work for the benefit of someone else, or starve to death." [yes, you do have the option of starting your own business, but not at age 18 -- you have to work for someone else to raise enough capital to start a business.]

So, for example, if you work for Wal-Mart, your efforts help fund nearly two billion dollars per year in dividends for shareholders (and nearly half of that $2B goes to a tiny handful of people). Your efforts help to buy Wal-Mart thousands of acres of real estate that is owned by shareholders. Your efforts fund incredible executive salaries and a fleet of executive jets. And so on. People, in general, do not work at Wal-Mart by choice. They work there because the equation is, "work, or starve to death" and no better job is available. Their work primarily benefits a tiny portion of the population that is concentrating wealth at a remarkable pace.

Now robots move in and take a majority of jobs. The Robotic Wal-Mart becomes a reality and displaces approximately ten million retail employees. Robotic fast food restaurants displace millions more. Robotic truck drivers eliminate a million human truck drivers. Robotic construction workers replace five million human construction workers. And so on. Robots compete with humans in every job category. What do these tens of millions of workers now do to make a living? Traditionally the economy creates new jobs, but never before have robots competed for jobs with humans in every job category.

The question we should be asking ourselves, as robots move in and take all these jobs, should be, "How do we eliminate the need for forced labor in our society?" How, in other words, do we eliminate the "work or starve" equation, so that humans have economic freedom? Robots give us the opportunity to consider this question seriously. See Robotic Freedom for details.

Behind the wheel: nobody

From the article:

Stanford's Stanley is a diesel-powered VW Touareg R5 sport-utility. It has been created by a team of 60 that includes Stanford professors, students and staffers; engineers from Volkswagen of America's Electronics Research Lab in Palo Alto; as well as with money and advice from Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a Menlo Park VC firm with $1.4 billion under management.

``We have gas, brake, steering and shifting that's electronically controllable,'' said Cedric Dupont, a VW research engineer. ``That means our computer, as long as it's intelligent enough, will be able to drive the car.''

The car gets special tires, a grille guard and full-body skid plates. Its cargo area is stuffed with seven Pentium M computers and back-up batteries. Atop, there are GPS satellite units as well as radar units for long-range vision and five laser range-finders that allow the SUV to see what's ahead and go around obstacles, if needed.

Its dusty outside -- much testing is done on a dirt track around a Quonset hut on the Stanford campus -- is plastered with the logos of its sponsors. The message above its rear wheel wells reads: ``Drivers not required.''

The biggest challenge to overcome between now and October is one of the vehicle's long-range perception, Thrun said.

``Right now, we can't drive at 35 mph and safely avoid ruts. We see the ruts too late,'' he said.

QinetiQ achieves world's first automatic landing of a STOVL aircraft onto a ship


From the article:

The ability to land an aircraft automatically onto a ship will enable pilots of JSF to conduct missions by day or night and in weather conditions that would previously have not been possible.

The 'Autoland' technology developed by QinetiQ for JSF also significantly reduces the workload of pilots at the end of a mission and at a point when to land the aircraft onto the moving platform of a ship is a difficult and critical procedure.

It certainly does reduce workload... to the point where the pilot is no longer needed. See Robotic Nation for details. See also: Successful X-45 robotic bomber.

Star Wars, ricercatori italiani creano un "vero" droide R2-D2

This article shows us two things:

• It shows how far translation software needs to advance before it will be truly useful.
  
  
• It talks about an "R2-D2 like" robot in Italy.

The original article is in Italian. When you run the original article through the Goggle "Italian to English" converter you get stuff like this:

Insomma, a barattolone that it walks like the model - with a movement to two or three legs, just like in films of Lucas. And that, second the investigators of Pisa, can be programmed for I use in the museums, or the hospitals. Or even, in future perspective, the houses. Of the rest it is not before the time that in order to create robot-servants is inspired to us, in order to render their aspect more familiar, to succeeding film of: as an example it has been recently introduced a Swiss prototype that, in the advanced part, remembers much Johnny 5, the machine Short Circuit. Therefore like the Japanese, to the vanguard in this field, often they are rifared their tradition of robot-cartoon.

And this:

But we see to describe po' better a this "Italian godson" of the mythical R2-d2. "our scope - Columbus still says - was to understand that it succeeds if to a computer come dates of the ' legs ', that is of the wheels, in order to walk. And therefore we have created this discreetly simple object from the mechanical point of view, that it has in himself a net wireless, an interface blue tooth, and logons standard to a PC to tramire normal taken usb ". And not enough: for being able to interact in the space, the robot has sensors to infrared and ultrasounds in order to understand the atmosphere in which it is found; it has a television camera that allows to analyze it the vision, and to recognize shapes, objects and faces (as an example has been programmed in order to recognize the swords laser of Star Wars ); and it has two microphones for vocal commandos, in order to emit sounds (between the which those, funny and most particular, typical about R2-d2) and in order to localize the position of who it speaks.

The translation is nearly impenetrable, but does indicate that this sounds a lot like a PC-bot.

These may have been around for awhile, but a faithful reader sent in the link this weekend:

Cat robot videos

'Programmable matter' one day could transform itself into all kinds of look-alikes

From the article:

The day when doctors routinely made house calls may be past, but that doesn't mean that someday you won't routinely see your doctor in your home -- with emphasis on "see."

That is to say, your doctor could physically work out of her office. But a three-dimensional lookalike, assembled from perhaps a billion tiny, BB-like robots, could be her stand-in in your home. She could talk with you, touch you, look at you, all under the control of the real, if distant, doc.

After the examination, she could be disassembled, leaving behind a big pile of beads. Or the beads might reassemble into a piece of moving sculpture, or turn into a chair.

What is so amazing about the Robotic Nation is that robots can take so many different forms.

NASA developing human-like robots

From the article:

Researchers at the Ames Research Center, a NASA laboratory in Silicon Valley, California, are envisioning "futuristic robots that 'act' like people, enabling these mechanical helpers to work more efficiently with astronauts," said a press release from the center.

"Human-robot cooperation, in turn, will enable exploration of the moon and Mars, and even large-scale construction in extraterrestrial places," the release said.

See also: Propulsion breakthrough boosts NASA robots

See also: A revolutionary mission to Mars.

Cutting-edge robotics head for battle

From the article:

Robots are changing the way today's military forces fight wars, provide medical attention to soldiers in the field and develop intelligence against the enemy.

Examples of just some of the cutting-edge technologies that are making their way onto today's battlefields were on display Wednesday at Carlisle Barracks. The aerial, ground and bunker-hole devices all have similar missions - to defeat enemy forces while minimizing casualties to American troops.

Nice overview of seberal different trends.

USATODAY.com - Latest buzz words in science: Robot swarms

Gridswarm and Ultraswarm projects put Bluetooth into fleets of unmanned aircraft

See also: Gridswarm robots

Inventing Our Evolution

From the article:

Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment, resulting in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities and airplanes. Now, however, we have started aiming our technologies inward. We are transforming our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny. Serious people, including some at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such modification of what it means to be human to be a radical evolution -- one that we direct ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years.

"The next frontier," says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, "is our own selves."

Here is one way to look at it: In order to compete with the robots in the Robotic Nation, humans will have to get better. Technological enhancements to the human body and mind are the only way to do that.

But there is no way to compete. At some point, you cannot increase the processing power of the brain without increasing the number of neurons, and there comes a point where the number of neurons makes the size/shape of the human head grotesque. On the other hand, robotic intelligence can increase at a rate of 2x every two years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (see for example this post).

Yes, you can graft computers into the human brain, but at some point the computational intelligence dwarfs the human intelligence it is augmenting. At that point, the human body becomes, essentially, a robot, controlled by the computational intelligence.

But robotic bodies will be so much more capable than human bodies in the near future -- stronger, faster, specialized to tasks, etc. -- that there is no point in creating a robotic human body. (see Mission to Mars)

Robots will eventually win. Then what?

Students build police robot

From the article:

A team of four mechanical engineering students showed off a moving, speaking and video-shooting robot to the public in Fountain Square Monday. The 40-pound box-shaped robot, called the "Midwayer," is designed to be used in hostage and other situations that pose high risk to officers.

The UC police department already has a $75,000 robot that can be used for bomb threats, but it weighs 180 pounds and needs a one-ton trailer to move it. Campus police wanted a smaller device with two-way communication system, said Capt. Jeff Corcoran, director of emergency services at the school.

He gave the students a list of features and helped pick the design for robot. They built it for $5,000.

Couple Receive Grant to Develop Robots:

From the article:

'Suppose a terrorist lets out a toxic chemical. You want to send out a swarm of robots to find out where the toxic chemical is and trace it to the source,' Spears said.

A swarm of small robots would cover a larger area more quickly than a single robot, and if one failed, the others could take up the slack.

See also: Gridswarms

IOL: Science & Tech

From the article:

"A Japanese research team has developed a fuel cell that runs on blood without using toxic substances, opening the way for use in artificial hearts and other organs."

The Vertebrane system in Manna is powered by a system like this.

A Robot for the Home, Brains Not Included

See also White Box Robotics.

I know that when I first published Robotic Nation, many people thought that the kiosk system used in McDonalds would not spread. It is true that McDonald's backed away from their kiosk program, at least temporarily. However, the idea is alive and well. Here are three examples:

• MenuVista shows what's on the plate for the evening
  
  
• Automated Restaurant
  
  
• Automated bartender

We will see how long it takes these ideas to spread...

Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Project Overview

From the article:

...consists of a cockroach-controlled mobile robot: a mechanical system that amplifies and tranlates the bodily movement and intelligence of a giant hissing madagascan cockroach into the locomotion of a mobile machine. The hybrid biorobotic system strives to illustrate that the simple embodied intelligence of a living cockroach provides a substantially captivating and novel control center ("central processing unit", CPU) for a mobile robot, producing tounge-in-cheek "emergent" and complex behavior akin to the goals of artificial life and artificial intelligence research.

Thinker

If robots are going to start to "think" in the human sense, this site provides some guidance on what is required.

It is important to note that the other way to achieve "intelligence" is through brute force. See this post for details.

Personal Nuclear Power: New Battery Lasts 12 Years

From the article:

A new type of battery based on the radioactive decay of nuclear material is 10 times more powerful than similar prototypes and should last a decade or more without a charge, scientists announced this week... "For 50 years, people have been investigating converting simple nuclear decay into usable energy, but the yields were always too low," Fauchet explained. "We've found a way to make the interaction much more efficient, and we hope these findings will lead to a new kind of battery that can pump out energy for years.

See also Toshiba's one-minute recharge battery, world's smallest fuel cell and Better battery breakthrough.

Custom PowerPC Drives New Xbox 360 To Teraflop Performance

From the article:

Microsoft Corp. shifted up from the X86 to a custom triple-core, dual-threaded PowerPC for its Xbox 360 which the company claims delivers 1 teraflop of system-level, floating-point performance. The system marks a further step in the evolution of video game consoles into powerful home entertainment servers.

Officially launched Thursday (May 12), the Xbox 360 uses three custom 3.2 GHz PowerPC cores, each handling two threads. Each core includes a 128-bit vector graphics unit sporting a full 128 registers and 1-Mbyte cache.

Moore's law keeps on moving. See also Moore's law and Moore's law and processors.

Where's My Robotic Maid?

From the article:

"A P&G representative sitting in the panel's audience raised his hand and noted that his company could identify at least 20 problems that consumers would like to see addressed around the home. Several panelists nodded their heads. 'We also know about how much money most people are willing to pay for the solution,' he continued. 'It's around $20.'

One approach that several companies are trying is the manufacture of so-called PC bots, which are made from parts of personal computers. 'Because the parts are readily available,' explained Thomas Burik, chairman of White Box Robotics, 'it shouldn't cost much more than a high-quality laptop.'

And what does the PC bot--which looks suspiciously like a bigger, bulkier hard drive--do? 'Oh, anything,' he said. 'We imagine that these will be like PDAs, where the user can write programs to customize them to do whatever they want.'

Other conference attendees weren't so convinced. 'Servers on wheels,' scoffed one. 'They don't even have arms.'

Also:

And arms--and legs--are a key part of the runaway success of Robosapien, a 14-inch humanoid bot made by Hong Kong-based toymaker WowWee.* Robosapien, which does little more than walk, dance and speak 'fluent international 'caveman' ' (it also belches), took $1 million to develop. But since its introduction in early 2004, Robosapien has sold 1.5 million units at a retail price of around $100. The company expects to sell 3 million units by the end of the year."

With Episode 3 about to come out, I decided to re-watch the existing library of Star Wars films to get myself "Mentally Prepared." I was absolutely amazed at the number of anachronisms in the original Star Wars movie, and wrote them up in Watching Star Wars 28 years later.



I am not talking about the obvious things like "space ships make no noise in a vacuum." People have been talking about stuff like that for decades. What I am talking about are things that would be absolutely impossible in a society this advanced -- things that will be impossible even in our own society in just 20 or 30 years. Things like human soldiers wearing cotton cargo pants with matching shirts into battle, or the fact that the princess has to insert physical media into R2-D2:



Click here to read the article.

NASA - High-Tech Robot Skin: "The idea is to develop a 'sensitive skin' that technicians could use to cover a robot. This skin will include more than 1,000 infrared sensors that would detect an object, and send the information to the robot's 'brain.' The brain would digest the information, apply reasoning and react within milliseconds by directing the robot to move. Future skin prototypes likely will have a higher density of sensors on the skin, which will provide the robots with even greater dexterity."

Taking no Chances: Mercedes adds robots, suppliers for M-Class plant as part of quality effort

The article talks about a new Mecedes-Benz plant in the U.S. The new factory has a cost of $600 million and replaces "what already was one of North America's youngest auto plants." From the article:

Inside the new Vance plant, Mercedes has increased robotics ten-fold. Instead of the 80 robots that previously helped turn out the M-Class, Mercedes now uses more than 800. The machines can reach into a parts bin, locate the correct part and weld it into place at tighter tolerances than were possible before.

Obviously the end point for this kind of automation is the eventual extinction of human workers in the factory.

Why the desire to completely eliminate humans? The main reason is the cost, but humans are also mistake-prone, work only eight hours a day and they get sick and pregnant. This article (and hundreds of others right now) point out that: "The world's largest automaker [GM] spent $5.2 billion last year to cover 1.1 million salaried and hourly employees, retirees and family members. GM has said that could grow to $5.8 billion this year." $5.2 billion works out to well over $1,000 per car. Never mind the salaries of the workers. If a car company eliminates the humans, the cost of a car can go way down.

From a consumer standpoint, lower car prices are good. From an employee standpoint, eliminating millions of factory jobs is good if there are better jobs that are waiting to be filled. The problem is that, for most factory workers who get fired, the new job will be worse, not better -- it pays less and has less benefits. The headline for this article says it all:

US real wages fall at fastest rate in 14 years

This is the problem that we face in the Robotic Nation. Robots eliminate jobs so quickly, and take over so many jobs, that job creation cannot keep pace. That, combined with the concentration of wealth means that things get worse, not better, and we begin heading toward Manna.

Iris Scanning To Begin At Orlando International Airport

From the article:

Florida's busiest airport will begin using high-tech iris-scanning technology to filter out possible terrorists and add an additional layer of security, according to Local 6 News.

Workers and other people at Orlando International Airport will have both irises scanned at special computers to determine their identity.

See Manna for details.

Self-replicating robot created

There is a free video to watch. This certainly is not C-3PO sitting down and building a clone of himself (won't that be cool), but it is a start. From the article:

Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.

Each robot consists of several 4-inch (10-centimeter) cubes that have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.

"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

The White House and Capitol in Washington DC were evacuated today because a small Cessna 150 airplane strayed into restricted airspace:

Errant Flight Prompts Capitol Evacuations

In this case it appears to have been a complete accident -- the pilot was a student.

Within 10 years or so, airplanes will start being equipped with a rudimentary form of consciousness that makes this sort of accident, as well as intentional attacks, impossible. The book Manna, chapter 3, describes the progression.

The system will work like this. Airplanes can already detect their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems will be married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace over the ground. The maps will tell the airplane where every single building and structure is on the ground, and mark all areas of restricted airspace. So if a pilot steers a plane toward a building or a restricted area, a "conscious" plane will refuse to fly there. It will be, quite literally, impossible for a conscious plane to fly into a building -- the plane will "know" that flying into a building is "wrong." If all the engines fail, a conscious plane will know what is on the ground in the vicinity and do its best to crash into an unpopulated area.

As this happens, of course, planes are able to fly themselves. Pilots go extinct, and airplanes become completely automatic. Human pilots are eliminated from the cockpit because they cannot be trusted. See Manna and Robotic Nation for details.

nDepth Processor and Cores

From the site:

Focus Robotics nDepth™ vision processor is an excellent solution for adding low cost, real-time depth perception to new and existing products. With integrated depth perception, products can interact with and monitor the environment in ways more similar to humans. Using our processor and a pair of standard camera sensors, products get the depth information needed to measure objects, track objects, and even avoid objects in real-time. Examples of applications include mobile robot navigation, people tracking, gesture recognition, targeting, 3D surface visualization, immersive and interactive gaming, and more.

Many other means of gathering depth information fail to be practical. A laser range finder's price of seven to ten thousand dollars, for example, is too expensive for many products. Worse, those devices generally only yield one horizontal line of depth. Complex systems of mechanical mirrors and servos are then needed in order to cover an entire area. Likewise, even the very best software+camera based depth systems yield less then 3 frames per second on a 752x480 image even on a dedicated 3GHz Pentium class processor. The power usage, size, and cost of a PC that only provides 3 frames of depth is too high for many products. In contrast, with standard camera sensors the nDepth™ processor provides 752x480 pixels of depth information at a rate of up to 60 frames per second all in a low cost, low power FPGA.

As vision systems get better and better, robotic functionality will increase dramatically. See Robotic Nation for details.

Monkeys' brains change to move robotics

From the article:

Researchers said the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows the primate brain is extraordinarily adaptable and holds great potential for brain-operated devices to help handicapped humans.

It seems like it will be true of All humans, not just handicapped ones.

ScanEagle Robot Plane Shows Promise With USMC in Iraq

From the article:

ScanEagle is a relatively low-cost robot aircraft at $100,000 a copy - but then, it was originally designed to find tuna schools not terrorists. The U.S. Marine Corps is currently using an upgraded version of the aircraft in Iraq, where its performance in Fallujah and along the Syrian border has drawn interest from other services and a recent $14.5 contract from the U.S. Navy.


The Marines already use the Pioneer UAV and have access to other UAV information via man-portable Dragon Eye systems et. al. The ScanEagle's combination of range, long loiter time, and small logistical and operational footprints makes it somewhat unique. Unlike the much larger Pioneer, which requires a runway, C-130s to transport the system, and a large logistical 'tail' of technicians, operator, and maintenance, the ScanEagle requires just a few people and the aircraft, launch system, skyhook, et. al. can be carried in just four HMMWV jeeps. Unlike the smaller Dragon Eye, this 4-foot aircraft with a 10 foot wingspan can keep its sensors on target for 10-15 hours without requiring an operator to control it.

Hunting tuna with a robot airplane...

Robot 'zoo' is a class act

From the article:

Five teams of undergraduates were challenged to build robots that could each tackle one aspect of a larger hypothetical scenario: building shelters on Mars. Imagine that you could parachute prefabricated components to Mars, then have robots already there assemble them into a building, explained Daniela L. Rus, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ( EECS ) and one of four instructors for the course.

Whatever happened to machines that think?

From the article:

The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as ever from any of these goals.

But that could soon change. In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced 'psych') will be put online for the world to interact with. And it's only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute.

Crucially, Cyc's creator says it has developed a human trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common sense. 'I believe we are heading towards a singularity and we will see it in less than 10 years,' says Doug Lenat of Cycorp, the system's creator.

Call My Cell - Why GPS tracking is good news for inmates.

From the article:

Four days ago, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law slapping child molesters with a minimum prison sentence of 25 years "followed by probation or community control for the remainder of the person's natural life." During such probation, the offender must "be electronically monitored." Grope a 15-year-old, and you'll be wearing a satellite-linked ankle bracelet that tells the cops where you are every minute until the day you die.

About 120,000 people are being monitored this way currently.

Companies providing the technology include:

• Pro Tech Monitoring
  
• iSECUREtrac
  
• BI Incorporated

The article is interesting at several different levels.

On the Grand Challenge front, I received several messages last week from Team Robo Monster. One indicates that, on May 11, DARPA officials will be visiting for the team's safety briefing. According to the note, "This is a day we all have been working very hard for. It is a crucial qualifier as about 80 teams will be eliminated to leave only 40 in the running."

More detail on the giant exoskeleton being built by Carlos Owens in Alaska:

Don't call it a robot

From the article:

It's not technically a robot. It's a bipedal exoskeletal robotic vehicle, otherwise known as a “mech.” And after nearly two years in the making, the mech now stands 18-feet tall and weighs more than 3,000 pounds.

See also:

Man behind the ‘mech’ brings sci-fi dream to life

Can't Wal-Mart, a Retail Behemoth, Pay More?

From the article:

With most of Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.

A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called 'Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart,' five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

And in a book to be published this fall, a group of scholars will argue that Wal-Mart Stores, having replaced General Motors as the nation's largest company, has an obligation to treat its employees better.

Articles like this demonstrate why companies like Wal-Mart have such a strong desire to go robotic. With robots running the stores instead of humans, all of these pay issues fall away. Plus, the store can stay open 24 hours a day. And customer service will actually get better.

The article Robots in 2015 argues that the robotic Wal-Mart is just not that far away. From the article:

In 2015, at about the same time that the airlines are laying off all of their pilots, Wal-Mart or Target or some other large retailer will be introducing a totally automated inventory management system. Every shelf will be fitted with RFID tags, allowing a mobile pick-and-place robot to find the exact shelf location of every product in the store. Every individual product in the warehouse will also be fitted with an RFID tag, so the robot will be able to pick up and identify every product that it needs to shelve. A relatively simple computer vision system will allow the robot to stack items on the shelves. These inventory management robots will operate 24-hours-a-day shuttling merchandise from the back of the store onto the shelves as items are sold. The robots will also constantly straighten the shelves and re-shelve merchandise. All of the technology needed to do this is nearly in place today.

By 2015, every big box retailer will be using automated checkout lines. Robotic help systems will guide shoppers in the stores. The automated inventory management robots will allow the first retailer to lay off a huge percentage of its employees. Competitive pressure will force Wal-mart, K-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, BJ's, Sam's Club, Toys R Us, Sears, J.C. Penny's, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Kroger's, Winn-Dixie, Pet Depot and so on to adopt the same robotic inventory systems in their stores. The entire transition will happen in just five years or so. Any company that does not automate will be at such a pricing disadvantage that it will go out of business. Ten million unemployed workers dumped onto the job market over the course of five years will have a profound effect on the unemployment statistics in the United States.

The article Robots to help out blind shoppers discusses a new robot for the blind, saying, "Computer scientists in the US have developed a robot that could help blind people to shop or find their way around large buildings. It uses radio frequency identification tags to locate items and a laser range finder to avoid collisions." That very same technology is what will guide the restocking robots in the stores.

At about the same time, the robotic technology being developed in the Grand Challenge will be bearing fruit, and one to two million truck drivers will be becoming unemployed.

At about the same time, Robotic call centers will be eliminating most of the call center jobs that remain in the U.S.

And so on...

See Robots in 2015 and Robotic Nation for details.

New computers make grocery carts smarter

From the article:

New supermarket carts equipped with touch screens will guide you to the tomatoes or toothpicks, let you order deli meat without standing in line and keep a running tally of your purchases.

It is very easy to imagine, in the not-too-distant future, a version of this that talks, and is upselling you as you walk down the aisle. Not too far beyond that will be the device that can listen to you and understand you like any human being would, so you carry on a complete conversation with your grocery cart.

IBM, Cisco link speech products

From the article:

IBM and Cisco Thursday announced plans to link some of their voice products to make it easier for organizations to develop and deploy self-service speech applications. The two vendors have been working to integrate IBM’s WebSphere Voice Server and Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal and expect to deliver a combined offering by midyear.

Organizations increasingly are looking to provide speech-enabled applications that let customers conduct transactions automatically over the phone instead of requiring help from a live customer service agent. One goal is to alleviate traditionally high labor costs in call centers. IBM's Business Consulting Services division estimates labor-related expenses -- such as payroll, staff turnover, training and retention -- can comprise 75% of call center costs.

As with the Robotic Wal-Mart, the robotic call center is just not that far away.

Robots to help out blind shoppers

From the article:

Computer scientists in the US have developed a robot that could help blind people to shop or find their way around large buildings.

It uses radio frequency identification tags to locate items and a laser range finder to avoid collisions.

This same technology will be guiding restocking robots in Wal-Mart and making the robotic Wal-Mart a reality. In the process, million of people will be out of work. See Robots in 2015 for details.

Seoul Machine

From the article:

At Lee's command, the factory's 2,000 employees donned headbands labeled Quality First and assembled in a courtyard. There they found their entire inventory piled in a heap - cell phones, fax machines, nearly $50 million worth of equipment. A banner before them read Quality Is My Pride. Beneath it sat Lee and his board of directors. Ten workers took the products one by one, smashed them with hammers, and threw them into a bonfire. Before it was over, employees were weeping.

Ritual purification at the command of a heroic leader is an ancient and powerful tradition in this part of the world. With a few superficial changes, this whole scene could have played in a Zhang Yimou costume epic. Certainly it had the desired effect: After Lee's visit to Gumi, shoddiness was not an option. Ki-tae Lee, then the Gumi factory manager and now head of Samsung's mobile telecom division, personally tests new models by hurling them against a wall or dropping them from a second-story window. Once he even ran over a handset with his car. It still worked.
Kun-hee Lee's ambition was straightforward: He wanted to transform his company into the world's top consumer electronics brand - the place that makes the coolest stuff.

A decade later, he's just about done it. Samsung is ranked number 21 among the world's top brands by the consulting outfit Interbrand, just one notch below Sony. In sales, Samsung has shot to number three behind Matsushita and Sony in consumer electronics and is fighting Motorola for the number two spot behind Nokia in cell phones. Samsung is also the world's leading manufacturer of flash memory and flat-panel screens, two of the core technologies of the digital era. And it's the most profitable tech enterprise on the planet, with a cool $10 billion in earnings last year - more even than Microsoft.

Now, imagine a company like this moving into robots for the home and office. It is inevitable, and the pace of development will be ferocious once a company like Samsung fully engages.

Getting ready for a May 10th launch:

White Box Robotics

Many people are worried that heat production is going to slow down the progress of microprocessor development and somehow derail Moore's Law. One short-term solution to the problem is Multi-core chips.

Another solution is new technology when fabricating chips. This article shows how that path is paying off:

AMD Athlon64 "Venice" - May Low Power be with you!

From the article:

Die shrinks have long been proclaimed as the way to lower power and higher speed. On the other hand, for about as many years, the issues of leakage currents has been known, that is, with every die shrink, the ratio between leakage and operating currents has gone in the wrong direction at an alarming rate. New process technologies targeting the substrate rather than the actual interconnect process are, therefore, becoming the focus of R&D, from Low-K substrates as used in graphics processors to Silicon-On-Insulator, a technology developed by IBM in the 1950ies.

On the transistor design level, improvements have been made by straining the silicon to physically alter the lattice geometry and thereby optimizing the conductivity between source and drain. Starting out with a relatively simple Silicon-Germanium epitaxy, we are looking at uniaxial compression and stretching for PMOS and NMOS devices, respectively, to speed up the currents and reduce power consumption at the same time. Finally, the concerted efforts in substrate and device technology were supplemented by some functional tweaks on the memory controller and instruction sets to result in a beautiful piece of process engineering and design named "Venice".

We have taken four different cores, that is, ClawHammer, NewCastle, Winchester and Venice for a comparative review of their processing vs. electrical power characteristics and the results pretty much blew us away.

High-end Pentium 4 chips dissipate over 100 watts. This article shows that AMD is able to cut the power requirements by a factor of two to four.

I, football-playing humanoid

From the article:

It can, without human help, assess the location of the ball, judge how far away it is and then give it a good thump with either foot. 'That's easy for humans to do,' says Shu Ishiguro, one of the brains behind Japan's Robo Cup-winning team. 'But for a robot it is very difficult. The technology is very sophisticated.'

VisiON's creators say his skills will be honed before the next tournament, in July in Osaka, when he will be up against robots from 35 countries. Their aim is to put together a team of robots capable of beating the human world football champions by 2050.

Also:

Although a fully domesticated robot is about 40 years away, Mr Ishiguro said: "It will be only several years before you can have a system that can call you on your mobile and ask you what time you'll be home, what you want for dinner, whether you want a bath. It'll be just like having a wife."

See also Sony's QRIO Robots.

Robots Will Search for Lunar Water Deposits

From the article:

Before the first human steps foot on the Moon again, robots will have already done the ground work, searching out sources of water ice that could be used for fuel, air, and growing plants. The first will be the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2008. It will carry 6 different instruments, and map out the surface of the Moon in high detail. Approximately one new mission will launch each year after that, until humans arrive on the Moon, no later than 2020.

See also Robots in space

Going up - way, way, way, way up

From the article:

LiftPort Inc. is gearing up to build an elevator to space, with a top-floor altitude of 62,000 miles for delivery of satellites and people... The privately held company's new plant in New Jersey will produce building blocks for the thousands of miles of pure-carbon elevator cable. A new division, LiftPort Nanotech Inc., will begin production of carbon nanotubes in June at the 3,000-square-foot plant in Millville, N.J.

The tiny tubes made of carbon are one 10-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and one one-thousandth a hair's diameter in length. Carbon, about 60 times stronger than steel, is the only substance that could be used to construct the elevator cable, the company said.

The completed cable will be a ribbon about 3 feet wide, company founder and CEO Michael Laine said Wednesday. LiftPort is still working on the carbon formula, but the final product will be as thin as plastic wrap and have ``a plasticky, flexible feel,'' he said.

This may be true in the U.S., but certainly not in Asia:

Robots' future in hobbyists' hands

This is why Japan, Korea, China, etc. are likely to dominate the robotics marketplace. They have a huge head start.

Service gets lost in self-serve world

From the article:

In the last three decades, ATMs have grown from being novel to being commonplace, with more than 371,000 machines in use. The more recent arrivals--self-service ticketing for such things as subways, buses or movies, and do-it-yourself cash registers--racked up $128 billion in North American sales in 2003, up 80 percent from the previous year. Such transactions could reach $1.3 trillion by 2007, according to a study by IHL Consulting Group.

And the Census Bureau reports retail sales over the Internet reached $69.2 billion last year, up 23.5 percent from 2003.

"People want this," said Dennis Galletta, an information systems professor at Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management. "I think nowadays people are less patient. People not only want this technology, they demand it."

This is straight out of Robotic Nation.

Copycat pets praised as model companions

From the article:

Alexander Libin softly strokes the orange-cream fur of NeCoRo – a semirealistic cat-robot packed with visual, auditory and movement-sensitive sensors and weighing 3.5 pounds – while his wife, Elena, serves tea and cookies.

“She’s like a real pet,” Alex says.

He’s petting a tabby nicknamed Cleo and, by gosh, it does look like a cat – or some come-alive stuffed animal from a high-end horror movie. It is much more lifelike than Sony’s Erector-Set-like robo-dog, Aibo.

Nice photos in the article.

Sony's Qrio robot attending nursery school in California

From the article:

Qrio spends time each day with more than 10 toddlers at the nursery school located in San Diego. Qrio is always accompanied by a researcher, who is in charge of making sure everything goes smoothly. While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. “The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger brother,” researcher Fumihide Tanaka said.

See also More robot teachers.

Gates' sights set on automobiles with his gizmos

From the article:

The device, which can be built into a baseball cap or worn as a visor, contains a tiny piece of translucent plastic that projects the equivalent of a 17-inch computer screen before the wearer's eyes.

Microsoft says mechanics can use the $3,995 device to look simultaneously -- and hands-free -- at, say, a car engine and the computerized image of a wiring diagram... Called the Nomad Expert Technician System and marketed by a Microsoft partner company called Microvision, the device uses the same technology found on Apache attack helicopters.

"This type of heads-up display is a great aid in giving you an informational overlay for complex procedures," Gates said. "It can even be miniaturized further so that you don't have to wear a contraption. The whole thing could fit on, say, a pair of glasses."

This is a precursor to Vertebrane.

Robots in space the next frontier

From the article:

"Within two decades, a Japanese space shuttle will blast off with astronauts working alongside robots to make Japan a brand name in space.
That's the plan the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) pitched to the technology ministry's Space Activities Commission this month. The JAXA long-range vision includes astronauts using robots to probe for resources, conduct research and beam lectures back to Earth-bound students. They would travel in a reusable space vehicle."

See also: Robots and NASA and Robot repair.

Lawman likes eye in sky as monitor

From the article:

The Charles County Sheriff's Office recently monitored a gathering of motorcycle riders by launching a remote-control aerial camera to watch for emergencies or troublemakers.

An official said yesterday the battery-powered spy plane was launched as a test run and that he's not sure whether the agency will buy the craft — but the results were good.

Also

"The concern is, obviously, a privacy issue, but also that the constitutional right to assemble is being chilled," Miss Goering said. "We are fast approaching the time when the government will be monitoring our every move." She also said the issue is of special concern when citizens rally against the government.

See also Cameras in cabs and Robots in teams.

Rolling Camera Eyeballs Danger

From the article:

Imagine being on a SWAT team charged with disarming violent crooks in a meth lab, and knowing that every year, more than 50,000 law enforcement officers are assaulted. It might be comforting to begin your raid by sending in an Eye Ball R1, a remote-controlled, spherical camera about the size of a baseball that can give its users a 360-degree look at the device's surroundings.

Studies recharge Computer Science

From the article:

"AK Watson can tell if your tone of voice is angry or happy, but not what your words mean.

Possessing a 'brain' made up of 16 computers connected over a network, Watson is the latest humanoid robot under development in computer science professor Brian Scassellati's lab.

The robot is designed to evaluate models of social development in children and help diagnose disorders like autism. Scassellati's creation is just one of the many projects researchers in the Computer Science Department intend to develop into practical applications. Others include the creation of realistic computer graphics and a bug-free software development system."