Are you tired of dieting alone? No need to worry, because soon there is a robot that can help your diet program. A named Autom Oboth can find out how much exercise and diet undertaken by an individual. Even with the touch of his hand on his screen, Autom can know a person’s mood.

Cory Kidd is as owner and chief executive of Intuitive Automata Inc.. Autom which began when the school creates in the Technology Media Lab Massachusetts Institute, United States (U.S.). Kidd also often visit patients at Boston Medical Center Clinic, USA. This is where he got the inspiration to create something that could be useful for many people.

Dieters who want to use Autom can enter details of diet and exercise patterns on the screen. Autom also be programmed to perform some conversations, like “I know talk to me maybe a little weird, but I hope you’ll get used to this,” said Autom. He could write the words “Thank You”, “OK” or “Let go” on the screen that responds to menu choices.

Quoted from Wall Street Journal, Friday (23/07/2010), this robot can blink and see who is talking to him and then end the conversation with the phrase, “I hope we can talk again about your progress,” he said with a tone of women Autom.

Kidd explained that this diet maid robot priced at U.S. $ 500 plus an additional monthly subscription fee that includes software updates.

Intuitive Automata company based in Hong Kong was selected as a finalist in the Asian Innovation Awards, with a target market of the United States to begin to operate the robot in front of her diet. The plan, robots will be tested in a pilot program in one of the leading insurance company in the country. -detikinet-

Good news for wheelchair users. The robotic legs successfully developed to help users to get up and walk again with both feet. Even able to go up and down the stairs.

Robot leg from New Zealand was named Rex. The robot, will be attached to the side legs to support the user’s body. From her appearance, “robot legs” is similar to the legs of Robocop.

“I’ll never forget what it was like to see my feet walking under me the first time I used Rex,” says Hayden, who is 6’4” (193cm) tall when standing. “People say to me, ‘look up when you’re walking’ but I just can’t stop staring down at my feet moving.”

Being out of his chair and on his feet again allows Hayden many more options on a day to day basis, increasing opportunities for employment and recreational activities by providing access for him to independently go places previously inaccessible to him. For example – up stairs!

Rex users self-transfer from their wheelchair into Rex, strap themselves in and control their movements using a joystick and control pad.

Robot with a weight 84 pounds (about 38 kilograms) was developed by Rex Bionics company based in Auckland. Rex is the brainchild of two childhood friends, Richard Little and Robert Irving – co-founders of Rex Bionics. “Both of our mothers are in wheelchairs so we are aware of some of the obstacles and access issues faced by many wheelchair users,” says Richard.

Robert’s Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis seven years ago was the catalyst for these men to put their engineering skills to use to develop a practical, standing and walking alternative to wheelchairs.

The founders are quick to point out that Rex is not a replacement for a wheelchair, but a complement that offers a range of options not currently available anywhere else in the world. It is potentially suitable for manual wheelchair users who can self-transfer and operate hand controls.

Robot with two hours of endurance of this batteries have several limitations for those who would use it. The user must have height of about 4-6 feet (about 120-180 centimeters), weight less than 220 pounds (less than 100 kilograms) and have a waist circumference of less than 14.9 inches (37.85 centimeters)

Rex is expected to cost approximately US$150,000. The decision to purchase Rex will be a very individual assessment of what Rex allows customers to do. The benefits can be social, for the work place, for home and health related.

Rex will soon be available for purchase in New Zealand, where the price will be a bit lower since it will be easier to supply and support close to the company’s home base on Auckland’s North Shore.

Along with the shrinking population and population growth rates in Japan, the Japanese government to allocate funds even big enough to create a robot child. Noby and Kindy is a two robotic boy who accidentally created for medical reasons.

The research team led by professor Minoru Asada of Osaka University had succeeded in creating robotic children. The robot which deliberately created to study the cognitive development of children, is equipped with artificial intelligence and can be used as research material to view a child’s growth and interaction.

Quoted from Cnet, on Friday (18/06/2010), although its size is said to look like the evil doll Chucky movie character, but both robots are actually funny. Noby behavior which weighs 17 kilograms adjusted like a nine-month-old baby. While the other boy robot named Kindy with weights 60 kilograms, programmed behavior, such as children aged five years.

Noby equipped with 600 sensors placed all over his body while Kindy has 42 motors and more than 100 sensors on its body. Both can recognize speech, facial expressions of people and can crawl or even hold hands with someone. Noby and Kindy also has a synthetic leather, two-ear microphone and two cameras in their eyes to understand the situation around.

Child population in Japan is not much because of the shrinking of the population growth there. The presence of Noby and Kindy expected to be entertainers and treat the nostalgia of the Japanese people against the children.

source: detikinet

Robotics technology – robotics news and tutorial

Japanese electronics company, Hitachi, creating a roller skating robot capable of walking on uneven surfaces. In addition, this robot is also capable of carrying out orders and can work as tourist guides or security guards. Wow, great!

Humanoid robot named EMIEW2 has a complex spring shock absorbers in the legs. Tool that enables the robot to move across the small mound in the floor without tripping over wires.

“This robot can control the position like a man when it stabilizes itself after a jump in line skates,” said Yuji Hosoda, chief researcher at Hitachi’s department of transportation systems.

With a height of 80 cm and weight 14 kg, this robot has 14 pieces of helmet-mounted microphone and can hear a human voice even though the atmosphere around being noisy.

Equipped with wheels on both legs, this robot is also capable of sliding with a maximum speed of six kilometers per hour, equivalent to an adult walking speed.

“Robots that have a red and white colors can be used as receptionists and guides for visitors,” Hosoda said. “In addition, it can be used for such security patrols and find a hiding person, at the point of death from CCTV. EMIEW Robot is a new form of security oversight,” he added.

Quoted from AFP on Monday (6/21/2010), Hitachi itself has not announced when it will sell its products. Despite sounding like a bird from Australia – Emu – EMIEW name apparently stands for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence.

source: detikinet

Play Lego unloading pairs to build a city may already be a regular activity. But a group of Lego fans create a “giant chess robot” using Lego. Uniquely, the whole “Lego pieces” are strung together like a robot that can move.

To finalize the work of such unique needs of a year, and the power of four people to complete these unique works. Quoted from Inhabitat, Tuesday (06/15/2010), required 100 000 lego and field area of 156 meters to show the lego chess robot action.

A team led by master LEGO Steve Hassenplug uses Lego Mindstorms NXT robot to control their chess. This is a sophisticated system that allows someone to build lego robots. Like an ordinary chess game, a robot that is being exhibited at Brickworld, Chicago is controlled by two people who are connected with a remote control.

source: detikinet

Monkey control the robotic arm (cnet)

Andrew Schwartz, a researcher from the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, developed a robotic arm, which try to test controlled by the brain and the mind of a monkey.

Seven-axis robotic arm with sensors and manipulators were implanted in the body of the monkey. This study aimed to develop brain-machine for people with disabilities or paralysis.

In this experiment, Schwartz inserting two implants in the animal’s motor cortex which covers the arm and the hand control. If the monkey successfully control the robot arm when prompted, then he will get a drink as a gift.

Results from this study is not yet published. However, these researchers reported to have successfully developed an experiment that was published in the journal Nature, where the monkey brain implant successfully control a mechanical arm.

source: detikinet

Robot developer from Spain, Francisco Paz created a mini robot that is funny and adorable. Robot Qbot named this, is predicted to act as a home robot that can be bought a lot of people.

Qbot was created without having your arms and legs. Although the robot is seen can not do anything, but Qbot designed with some interesting features. One is designed to be interactive robots.

Qbot development based on open source software and hardware to upgrade DIY (Do It Yourself). With a height of 18 inches and weighs 19-24 pounds, Qbot was deliberately designed for ordinary consumers, to be enjoyed by many people.

Equipped with three wheels, this robot is claimed to be able to avoid obstacles. Plus four infrared sensors, ultrasonic, and eyes that there is a webcam for stereoscopic vision and detect faces. Not to forget, three microphones to identify the sound, the LED to give a facial expression and speakers to enable speech synthesis.

Quoted from Cnet, on Thursday (26/05/2010), Paz wrote in his blog that it took over five years to design Qbot. This project was inspired by a desire to create a home-based robotic pets like cats and dogs.

Quoted Tokyo University engineering professor, Tomomasa Sato, Paz following the invitation of the creators of robots to begin creating a global standard open-source robot, which later became the Ford Model T or the consumer robotics.

Sato believes global standard robot is able to inspire tens of thousands of engineers around the world to realize the dream of having a personal robot that is useful at home.

Source:
image: cnet
news: detikinet

Robot created not only to alleviate human tasks. Robot function from day to day increasingly diverse, from housekeeper to accompany and comfort the lonely master.

Technology companies from China, Shenyang Siasun Robot & Automation designed a house-sitting robot that can talk, send SMS, and report to authorities if there is a dangerous thing in the house.

In the body there are sensors that detect gas leakage. If something is happening and no one was home, the robot will be contacting the owner of the house via SMS or email.

As quoted from Xinhua on Monday (05/03/2010), Siasun, thus the name of the robot can operate for eight hours of rechargeable battery for two hours. Electrical power consumption of any efficient, smaller than the electricity consumption of home computers.

Robot that looks like an alien, has 80 cm tall and weighs 25 kg. Body shape is not too high, makes it easier to move freely in the home using the wheel. With the help of sensors, Siasun too wily to avoid obstacles or furniture that meets when walking.

This robot is also fond of the elderly. He can be relied upon to treat and cheer them up. The old folks will not feel lonely because Siasun clever can interact and chat invites elderly.

A big screen and the camera on Siasun body function to check the health of the elderly on a regular basis. Another addition, Siasun would invite the elderly or patients who are sick, play interactive games to train their physical and mental fitness.

For now, Siasun still produced in limited numbers. But in five years, the family robot can be purchased for 10 000 Siasun Yuan China. The developer Siasun mention, this time they are also developing a rescue robot that can be employed when a disaster occurs.

The usual therapeutic activity of stroke patients no longer have to be guided by a human therapist, the robot was able to take on this role. Results of treatment no less good. Do you believe this?

This has been proven by scientists from Brown University. By using a robot named MIT-Manus, they succeeded in proving that robots could also be a therapist to treat stroke patients.

This experiment itself included 127 patients stroke patients who already suffer from diseases that interfere with the nervous system since five years ago. The patients were initially divided into three groups.

The first group, are handled by the MIT-Manus, the robot therapist. Second, by a real therapist, and the third is not handled specially. That is simply relying on regular medication.

After three months earlier, apparently the result of these trials concluded that therapeutic results obtained by the patient is handled by a robot and a professional therapist is not much different. That is, they both managed to increase the ability of motor nerves and sensors from the patient’s arm.

Quoted from Tonic, Wednesday (21/04/2010), MIT-Manus work by providing a kind of exercise (exercise movement) to the hand of stroke patients. Hands are given various instructions that point to provide stimulation to the nerves and sensors on the patient’s arm.

“We can see that with this therapy, patients can improve their movement abilities,” said Dr. Albert Lo, head of research at Brown University.

Innovation from Brown University was apparently also encouraged the Institute of Neurology in London to conduct similar projects. They hope that similar robots could be developed in the State of Queen Elizabeth and then the stroke patients can benefit from this machine in their home.

Japanese electronics companies, NEC, to develop a robot that is destined to work as a cashier. This robot named PaPeRo, its funny and cute.

Unlike the robots in general, PaPeRo is not equipped with hand. Then how it serves the consumer? Well that’s where the strengths, he simply relies on his voice to guide consumers to make payments.

Quoted from Cnet News, PaPeRo did not work alone. But it’s also equipped with payment device called “E-Money Twinpos Self-Checkout System” made by NEC.

Through this machine consumers make payments. Any easy way of payment, the customer scans the barcode of each product and then make payments via e-money card or via mobile payment.

With only 15 inches high, PaPeRo are funny. He was able to speak in Japanese and English to give instructions to the consumer. PaPeRo recently exhibited at the event RetailTech Japan in 2010.

Want to give a special gift for your child? This camera seems to be the right choice. Besides can be used to take pictures, with this camera, the creativity of your child can also more sharply through the lego game.

Lego Digital Camera, so the name of the gadget itself. There are two advantages to be gained from this colorful camera. First, sharpen the creativity of children through the game loading tide. Second, children can learn photography by taking pictures of interesting objects in the vicinity.

Quoted from Gather, Monday (1/3/2010), the specifications presented 3MP camera are:

• 4x digital zoom
• Built-in flash and fixed focus
• 1.5-inch LCD screen
• Capacity of 128MB which can contain up to 80 photos
• USB cable to transfer photos to PC
• Lithium-ion rechargeable battery
• Lego blocks on the top and bottom of the camera
• Has a size of 4″x2, 5″ x1, 5″

This camera can be purchased at a price of 49.99 pound sterling, or about U.S. $ 76.

Note: Lego is one of the companies in the field of robotics and a leader in robotics innovation. Lego often conducted robotics training and robot competitions.

The South Korean government is planning to build “Robot Land”, a research center and recreation, all with robots. That said, this is the first robot park in the world.

Quoted from Cnet, Friday (19/2/2010), this robot island, will be opened in the area of Incheon, one of the largest cities in South Korea. Manufacturing cost is said to reach U.S. $ 560 million.

According to the website “Robot Land”, this robot park will display all forms of entertainment robots nuanced. Eg exhibition famous robots or reconstruction of such a robot movie ‘Minority Report’ or ‘I, Robot’.

Cashier waitress had planned to be a robot. There is also a research center of the robot and robot competition arena. The visitors seemed to be feeling like being on the planet of robots, when entering this “Robot Land”.

Construction of “Robot Land” will begin this year and is expected to be completed in 2013. There will target 2.8 million visitors per year and create 18 thousand jobs because of the “Robot Land”.

“Robot Land” may be one of the event showing off South Korean robot technology. Besides Japan and the United States, this country is one of the leading robot makers.

Recently, Toyota Motor Corp. “attacked” by “storm recall cars” in America, which would make trouble. Not wanting to go on in the problem, Toyota makes a useful pair of robots as human personal assistant.

As reported by Autoevolution, Thursday (28/1/2010), the Japanese car manufacturer announced, if they have created a couple of robots are not just one, but four types of robots!

First is the walking robot, a robot that can walk and is ready to help the parents. The streets were his duty. With two feet and be able to use his hands to perform various tasks. Remarkably, she also can play the trumpet.

Second, the rolling robot. Which can be employed in the factory assembly centers, may eventually be able to help make Toyota cars free recall. He worked very quickly, without requiring much space. He also plays the trumpet.

Third, the transport robot, which can carry passengers anywhere they want to go. But unfortunately, this robot does not have hands and mouth, so it can not play the trumpet.

Last robot is a combination of the three previous robots. He was shorter than the first, has legs, but did not wear a dress like the second, and not like human beings such as the third. This robot was built for a Toyota research.

Interesting, is not it? If later we’ll see and hang out with robots that can walk and drove himself, with trumpet in hand. Is this the future state?

NASA space center diligently to create a humanoid robot astronaut. This sophisticated robot may one day, would replace human tasks when running dangerous missions in space.

Working closely with the General Motors car company, a robot called Robonaut 2 is designed to work side by side with humans. In addition to helping the human astronauts in outer space, Robonaut 2 also would be helped to make cars in the factory.

NASA previously had made the first generation of Robonaut. Robonaut 2 course will be more sophisticated than its predecessor, is designed to work faster, more skilled and stronger construction.

“This sophisticated robotic technology promising something big, not only for NASA but also for the nation,” said Doug Cooke of NASA as detikINET quotes from Computerworld, Friday (5/2/2010).

The United States Government has approved a budget of U.S. $ 3 billion for NASA to develop a variety of robots, especially robots for pioneering space mission. For example a robot that can land on the moon to gather information before humans arrived.

Currently, various types of robots have hired NASA. Robot vehicle called the Phoenix Lander for example, was sent to Mars to conduct research.

Japanese people’s interest against one species of fish were realized by making the recycling robot fish.

Called “recycling” because produced from a number of secondhand items such as raincoats and glass wipers. A researcher and educator in the field of marine named Masamichi Hayashi is the figure behind the robot that called ‘robo-fish’.

Robots that operated with a remote control can perform some activities such as opening and closing the mouth and eat the clone of ‘prey’. In fact, this robot can take the trash out of the water and give it to people who were on the beach.

Hayashi here not only to make a robot fish, but also create a replica other of water animals, such as a turtle with a length of 5 feet and Prehistoric fish coelacanth. And to share knowledge for students, Hayashi has made a series of video documentation of the findings, thus quoted detikInet from the Telegraph.

Offering unusually good philanthropic returns — meaning greater odds of a positive Singularity and lesser odds of human extinction — the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI’s 2010 activities.

For almost a decade, the Singularity Institute has been asking questions on the future of human civilization: How can we benefit from increasingly powerful technology without succumbing to the risks, up to and including human extinction? What is the best way to handle artificial general intelligence (AGI): programs as smart as humans, or smarter?

Among SIAI’s core aims is to continue studying “Friendly AI”: AI that acts benevolently because it holds goals aligned with human values. This involves drawing on and contributing to fields like decision theory, computer science, cognitive and moral psychology, and technology forecasting.

Creating AI, especially the Friendly kind, is a difficult undertaking. We’re in it for as long as it takes, but we’ve been doing more than laying the groundwork for Friendly AI. We’ve been raising the profile of AI risk and Singularity issues in academia and elsewhere, forming communities around enhancing human rationality, and researching other avenues that promise to reduce the most severe risks the most effectively.

If you make a donation to the Singularity Institute, you can choose which grant proposal your donation should help to fill. Any time a grant proposal is fully funded, it goes into our “active projects” file: it becomes a project that we have money enough to fund, and that we are publicly committed to funding. (Some of the projects will go forward even without earmarked donations, with money from the general fund — but many won’t, and since our work is limited by how much money we have available to support skilled staff and Visiting Fellows, more money allows more total projects to go forward.)

Donate now, and seize a better than usual chance to move our work forward.

2009 has been a year of growth and new horizons for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). We achieved a number of milestones relevant to our mission — pursuing dialogue, research, and activism to promote a beneficial Singularity. The response we’ve received has been considerable — SIAI is more high-profile and frequently-mentioned now than it has ever been.

Our key accomplishments in 2009 were holding the Singularity Summit in New York, hiring three new employees (Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov, and Amy Willey), establishing a continuous SIAI Visiting Fellows Program, delivering eight presentations across four conferences, improving cooperation with allied organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute, and establishing the Less Wrong web community, which receives thousands of visitors per day and fosters many high-quality discussions on philosophical and practical issues related to decision theory and rationality. The Uncertain Future, an interactive web application for quantitatively modeling future possibilities such as human-level AI, human intelligence enhancement, and global catastrophic risk, was also released as a beta version in December.

In April, Eliezer Yudkowsky completed two years of posting sequences on Less Wrong (which will be edited into a book on rationality and Singularity-relevant topics like reductionism and decision theory), drafting strategy documents for improving internal organization and long-term planning. Throughout the year, we continued consolidating SIAI staff, Visiting Fellows, volunteers, and interns in the San Francisco Bay Area. SIAI Visiting Fellow Peter de Blanc revised a paper on unbounded utility functions. The Singularity Institute received media coverage for its work in The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other venues. An article by SIAI President Michael Vassar, “Machine Minds”, made it into the Forbes special “The AI Report”.

The Singularity Institute’s long-term mission is to maximize the probability of a beneficial Singularity, through dialogue, research, and activism. All of our activities are ultimately chosen to further this purpose. The Singularity Institute particularly focuses on the possibility of a Singularity through artificial general intelligence, but also analyzes other potential pathways, including whole brain emulation and human cognitive enhancement.

To summarize our major accomplishments over the past year:

1. Singularity Summit 2009 in New York. Our fourth annual Singularity Summit was the first Singularity-focused conference ever held on the East Coast. Held October 3-4, the Singularity Summit featured 25 excellent speakers on topics including biotechnology, futurism, decision theory, artificial intelligence, quantum computing. the scientific method, cognitive ability, philosophy, computer science, and even synthetic neurobiology. Over 800 people attended, and the conference attracted reporters from over two dozen news organizations, including the New York Times. Coverage was provided by Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other media venues. Speakers this year included venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Wired magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf, AI researchers Juergen Schmidhuber, Marcus Hutter, and Itamar Arel, SIAI employees Anna Salamon, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, philosopher David Chalmers, futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame, and many others. Videos from the Summit are online at Vimeo. After the Summit, SIAI held an in-depth workshop, which allowed the speakers and SIAI staff to share ideas and brainstorm about the risks and benefits of a possible Singularity.

2. Hiring of new employees. Early in the year, Executive Director Tyler Emerson departed the Singularity Institute and his role was filled by a new President, Michael Vassar. Mr. Vassar holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State and an MBA from Drexel University, and was previously Founder and Chief Strategist at Sir Groovy, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Throughout the year, he participated in numerous interviews and podcasts on behalf of SIAI, including interviews at Accelerating Future, The Futurist, Future Blogger, and h+ magazine.

Two new research fellows, Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk, were hired by SIAI in late 2008. Salamon and Rayhawk had previously participated in the 2008 SIAI Summer Program, which was led by Salamon. Salamon holds degrees in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and Great Books from St. John’s, and Rayhawk holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara. Salamon and Rayhawk are both focusing on applying computational Bayesian decision theory to problems in technological forecasting, risk management policy, and social epistemology, and form the core of our Visiting Fellows Program, bringing visiting scholars up to speed on the work that SIAI does. In early 2009, SIAI also hired a Media Director, Michael Anissimov, responsible for compiling, distributing, and promoting SIAI media materials including our writing, websites, and videos, and communicating the activities of SIAI to the public. Anissimov is author of Accelerating Future, a popular blog focused on science and futurism. Most recently, in December, SIAI hired Amy Willey, who holds a law degree from New York University, as Chief Compliance Officer.

With the addition of these new employees, SIAI brought its total full-time employee count to six, including Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has worked for SIAI since he co-founded the organization in 2000.

3. In 2009, SIAI established a Visiting Fellows Program, based in Silicon Valley. The program began with SIAI’s 2009 Summer Fellows, brought together to work on challenging projects in decision theory, philosophy, technological forecasting, heuristics and biases, and planning for the Singularity Summit 2009. Primarily graduate students, the Fellows came from educational backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, and physics, with the remainder ranging from philosophy to economics and biochemistry. They attend or hold degrees from universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Auckland University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Fellows traveled to Silicon Valley from throughout the United States and from Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Some of these researchers stayed on past the summer or joined shortly thereafter to work with SIAI as volunteers or Visiting Fellows on a more extended basis. Some of the work that came out of the Visiting Fellows Program has been presented in papers and talks at venues like the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy, the Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy, and a Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting. The Visiting Fellows Program has been instrumental in fostering a devoted community of Singularity Institute supporters making useful contributions towards SIAI’s ultimate goal, and SIAI recently put out a fresh call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows.

4. SIAI researchers, volunteers, and Visiting Fellows presented the following nine talks and papers throughout 2009:

* “Changing the frame of AI futurism: From storytelling to heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions”, by Steve Rayhawk, Anna Salamon, Tom McCabe, Rolf Nelson, and Michael Anissimov. (Presented at the European Conference of Computing and Philosophy in July ‘09 (ECAP))
* “Arms Control and Intelligence Explosions”, by Carl Shulman (Also presented at ECAP)
* “Machine Ethics and Superintelligence”, by Carl Shulman and Henrik Jonsson (Presented at the Asia-Pacific Conference of Computing and Philosophy in October ‘09 (APCAP))
* “Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence”, by Carl Shulman and Nick Tarleton (Also presented at APCAP);
* “Long-term AI forecasting: Building methodologies that work”, an invited presentation by Anna Salamon at the Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting;
* “Shaping the Intelligence Explosion” and “How much it matters to know what matters: A back of the envelope calculation”, presentations by Anna Salamon at the Singularity Summit 2009 in October;
* “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”, a presentation by SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Cognitive Biases and Giant Risks”, a presentation by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Convergence of Expected Utility for Universal Artificial Intelligence”, a paper by Peter de Blanc, an SIAI Visiting Fellow.

Many more talks and papers are in the works for 2010, including a talk by SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov at the Foresight 2010 conference in January.

5. One of the primary goals of the Singularity Institute in 2009 was to strengthen our ties to academia and allied organizations, which was accomplished through talks, papers, and direct dialogue. SIAI researchers and representatives built closer ties to organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, Santa Fe Institute, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Foresight Institute, and many others. SIAI researcher Anna Salamon was invited to give a talk at an exclusive conference on technological forecasting held by the Santa Fe Institute. The Singularity Institute has been using videoconferencing, blogs, and mailing lists to keep in contact with our supporters and collaborators around the globe. SIAI more than tripled its representatives through the Visiting Fellows program, allowing it to better interface with a larger network.

6. 2009 saw the founding of the Less Wrong web community. Less Wrong was founded as a rationalist community to “systematically improve on the art, craft, and science of human rationality”. Thousands of people visit the site every day, with hundreds participating regularly in the comments sections. Less Wrong grew out of Overcoming Bias, a blog co-authored by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky and George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. Yudkowsky wrote extensively on Overcoming Bias from 2007-2009, and his posts have been ported over to Less Wrong, where they are organized into sequences that address topics such as reductionism, determinism, human rationality, metaethics, mathematics, and many others.

Less Wrong is important to the Singularity Institute’s work towards a beneficial Singularity in providing an introduction to issues of cognitive biases and rationality relevant for careful thinking about optimal philanthropy and many of the problems that must be solved in advance of the creation of provably human-friendly powerful artificial intelligence. At the same time, it has gathered a community that can provide rapid feedback and significant progress on such problems. For instance, Less Wrong participants Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov proposed decision algorithms that can deal with a certain classes of problems where Bayesian updating seems to lead decisionmakers astray. This work was closely related to decision theory work done in-house at SIAI, namely Eliezer Yudkowsky’s timeless decision theory, an algorithm that computes the counterfactual consequences of possible actions using an extension of Judea Pearl’s formalism of causal networks to logical uncertainties, and additional work by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk. These developments have received positive attention from Gary Drescher and philosopher David Chalmers, and will be written up for peer review in the coming year.

Besides providing a home for an intellectual community dialoguing on rationality and decision theory, Less Wrong is also a key venue for SIAI recruitment. Many of the participants in SIAI’s Visiting Fellows Program first discovered the organization through Less Wrong.

7. This year Eliezer Yudkowsky finished his posting sequences on Less Wrong, which attracted thousands of enthusiastic readers and came to serve as the seed of a new community. Yudkowsky used the blogging format to write the substantive content of a book on rationality, enabling that work to be read and receive feedback as it progressed. Throughout the summer, Yudkowsky engaged in Friendly AI research with Marcello Herreshoff, a Stanford mathematics student who previously spent his gap year working for SIAI. Yudkowsky is now converting his blog sequences into the planned rationality book, which he hopes will significantly assist in attracting and inspiring talented individuals to effectively work towards the aims of a beneficial Singularity and reduced existential risk.

8. In December, a subset of SIAI researchers and volunteers finished improving The Uncertain Future web application to officially announce it as a beta version. The Uncertain Future represents a new kind of futurism — futurism with heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions. The purpose is to provide a tool for use by futurists and the informed public to input probability distributions over quantitative questions like, “how much computing power would be necessary to implement neuromorphic AI?”, combining them into a “picture of the future according to you”. Another goal of the project is to provide an alternative to the futurist methodologies of storytelling and scenario building, which dominate the field even though they often cause futurists to overestimate the probability of precise, vivid stories at the expense of a wider space of neglected possibilities.

The Uncertain Future, a web application built by Michael Anissimov, Steve Rayhawk, Anna Salamon, Tom McCabe, and Rolf Nelson during the Singularity Institute Summer 2008 Research Program, with helpful discussions with a few others, is now in beta and ready for public announcement.

The Uncertain Future represents a new kind of futurism — futurism with heavy-tailed, high-dimension probability distributions. In fact, that’s the name of the paper presented at the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy that unveiled the project: “Changing the frame of AI futurism: From storytelling to heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions”.

Most futurism is about telling a story — more like marketing than an honest attempt at uncovering the possible range of what the future may hold. Better than creating a single story is scenario building — but this falls short as well. Scenario building is human nature, but it leaves us susceptible to anchoring effects where we overestimate the probability of vivid scenarios. To quote “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks”, page 6:

      The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts. Two independent sets of professional analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the probability of “A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983″ or “A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983″. The second set of analysts responded with significantly higher probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1983.)

The conjunction fallacy means that people overestimate the probability of vivid, detailed scenarios, even though each additional detail necessarily decreases the probability that the event will occur.

To combat against the conjunction fallacy and storytelling fallacies in our particular area of futurism, which includes intelligence enhancement, AI, and global catastrophic risk, we created an interactive system that allows the user to input their own probability distributions for different variables potentially associated with the future of AI and humanity, including a probability distribution of how much computing power would required to create human-level AI, a probability distribution for the likelihood of global thermonuclear war in the next century, and many other variables. Our model includes variables for the creation of AI, the possible success of intelligence amplification technology, and the potential extinction of the human species by technological mishap before either of these occurs.

Our system is built on the assumption that breaking down a challenging prediction task into its constituent parts can be quite beneficial, because it forces us to think about the task in greater detail, and avoid obvious biases associated with specific scenarios we may be anchoring on. Some people may criticize such a view for being excessively reductionist, but many prediction tasks really can be broken down into component pieces. The alternative is making “expert” guesses based on a holistic evaluation of the prediction task, which leaves us open to many well-documented biases.

Here is the opening blurb for the webapp, by Tom McCabe:

      The Uncertain Future is a future technology and world-modeling project by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Its goal is to allow those interested in future technology to form their own rigorous, mathematically consistent model of how the development of advanced technologies will affect the evolution of civilization over the next hundred years. To facilitate this, we have gathered data on what experts think is going to happen, in such fields as semiconductor development, biotechnology, global security, Artificial Intelligence and neuroscience. We invite you, the user, to read about the opinions of these experts, and then come to your own conclusion about the likely destiny of mankind.

It’s not perfect, but we think that our system might be a seed for looking at futurism in a different way — providing an alternative to storytelling and scenario building. This sort of “probabilistic futurism” encourages would-be seers to widen their confidence bounds when confronted with uncertainty, instead of irrationally making overconfident guesses to seem like “experts”. The particular issues we focus on are controversial — human-equivalent AI, biotechnology used to select gametes with genes associated with intelligence, the probability of planet-ending catastrophe — but we chose these issues specifically because there is disagreement about what degree of uncertainty is warranted from our present position is evaluating these scenarios.

We visualize this tool being used among futurists to specify their quantitative background assumptions regarding the technologies discussed. This might be used to clear aside straw men and zoom in on the core disagreements. It might also be used to evaluate the degree to which respective futurists have considered the technological prerequisites and other assumptions underlying their scenarios.

If you like the system or find it useful, be sure to post a link to it on Facebook, or suggest it to your friends. The system still has quite a few bugs; we used Java applets for the probability distributions, and designed it so that the Java applet makes calls to the surrounding HTML, which may fail on some combinations of OS and browser. If you use a Mac, you should use Safari, and if you use Linux/Windows, use Opera or Firefox.

(From Michael Anissimov’s post).

Peter de Blanc (Temple University), an SIAI Visiting Fellow, has recently published the final version of his most recent paper, titled “Convergence of Expected Utility for Universal Artificial Intelligence“. The paper, based on earlier work in the field of expected utility theory by Marcus Hutter (Australian National University) and SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, proves mathematically that any unbounded, perception determined, computable utility function cannot assign a defined utility to any action, assuming a Solomonoff-like prior. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

“We consider a sequence of repeated interactions between an agent and an environment. Uncertainty about the environment is captured by a probability distribution over a space of hypotheses, which includes all computable functions. Given a utility function, we can evaluate the expected utility of any computational policy for interaction with the environment. After making some plausible assumptions (and maybe one not-so-plausible assumption), we show that if the utility function is unbounded, then the expected utility of any policy is undefined.”

Peter de Blanc has done research with the Singularity Institute since 2006, when he participated in the “Summer of AI” research program along with Nick Hay (UC Berkeley), Marcello Herreshoff (Stanford University) and Eliezer Yudkowsky. During the summer of 2009, he was a Singularity Institute Summer Fellow, helping SIAI researchers work on problems in the fields of Friendly AI, rationality and decision theory. His personal website, Space and Games, can be found at http://www.spaceandgames.com/.

The Singularity Institute is currently looking for beta testers to help us improve our new web application project, The Uncertain Future. The goal of The Uncertain Future is to allow people to input their ideas about the future, and then use them to construct a computer model of what the future will be like. If you’re interested, you can contact us at uncertainfuture@singinst.org. Screenshots of the beta version are available here.

Following is the official press release for promoting the Singularity Summit 2009:

Ray Kurzweil and David Chalmers to Headline Singularity Summit 2009 in New York

New York, NY (PRWEB) July 17, 2009 — The fourth annual Singularity Summit, a conference devoted to the better understanding of increasing intelligence and accelerating change, will be held in New York on October 3-4 in Kaufmann Hall at the historic 92nd St Y. The Summit brings together a visionary community to further dialogue and action on complex, long-term issues that are transforming the world.

Participants will hear talks from cutting-edge researchers and network with strategic business leaders. The world’s most eminent experts on forecasting, venture capital, emerging technologies, consciousness and life extension will present their unique perspectives on the future and how to get there. “The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity,” says Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the CCD flatbed scanner and author of The Singularity is Near. “As we get closer to the Singularity, each year’s conference is better than the last.”

The Singularity Summit has previously been held in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has been featured in numerous publications including the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. It is hosted by the Singularity Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to studying the benefits and risks of advanced technologies.

Select Speakers

* Ray Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity is Near (2005) and co-founder of Singularity University, which is backed by Google and NASA. At the Singularity Summit, he will present his theories on accelerating technological change and the future of humanity.

* Dr. David Chalmers, director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University and one of the world’s foremost philosophers, will discuss mind uploading — the possibility of transferring human consciousness onto a computer network.

* Dr. Ed Boyden is a joint professor of Biological Engineering and of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Discover Magazine named him one of the 20 best brains under 40.

* Peter Thiel is the president of Clarium, seed investor in Facebook, managing partner of Founders Fund, and co-founder of PayPal.

* Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biogerontologist and Director of Research at the SENS Foundation, which seeks to extend the human lifespan. He will present on the ethics of this proposition.

* Dr. Philip Tetlock is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? (2006)

* Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber is co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano, Switzerland. He will discuss the mathematical essence of beauty and creativity.

* Dr. Gary Marcus is director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and professor of psychology at New York University and author of the book Kludge.

Registration details are available at http://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/.

Contact:
Michael Vassar, SIAI President
main@singularitysummit.com
610-213-2487

For the second year, Google is a major sponsor–together with SIAI–of the OpenCog AGI project.

The Google Summer of Code project has begun. Students from around the world are making meaningful improvements to the OpenCog system.

SIAI Director of Open Source David Hart is leading OpenCog. SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is providing scientific guidance, along with a team of mentors including Dr. Joel Pitt, whose work on OpenCog is sponsored by SIAI.

OpenCog/Google Summer of Code 2009 homepage

SIAI President Michael Vassar spoke on hard takeoff in a panel at the “Future of AI” workshop, following the AGI-09 conference.

The video is available online

SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov has issued a formal press release from the SIAI on Michael Vassar’s appointment as President.

Mr. Vassar will manage research and outreach on the promise and peril of advanced AI for the Singularity Institute, including organizing the annual Singularity Summit event. The Singularity Institute is the only non-profit focused exclusively on the potential ramifications of advanced AI.

Sunnyvale, CA (PRWEB) May 11, 2009 — The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) has appointed Michael Vassar to the position of President. Previously, he was a Founder and Chief Strategist at SirGroovy.com, an online music licensing firm, and has held positions with with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In his new role with SIAI, Mr. Vassar will build the organization’s research capabilities and oversee the annual Singularity Summit.

Mr. Vassar has been writing and speaking on topics related to the safe development of disruptive technologies for over a decade. Most recently, he co-authored a paper on the risks of advanced nanotechnology with Robert Freitas, in addition to authoring a paper on the impact of advanced nanotechnology on business. Both papers can be found at Ray Kurzweil’s website, KurzweilAI.net. Mr. Vassar holds an M.B.A. from Drexel University and a B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State.

The Singularity Institute was founded in 2000 to analyze and confront the risk from advanced artificial intelligence. To that end, SIAI has held the annual Singularity Summit since 2006, an event which has drawn attendees including Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Search Quality, Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer at MIT, and Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s foremost inventors/futurists and a Director of SIAI. The SIAI also sponsors a small group of researchers performing mathematical and theoretical basic research on analytically comprehensible and therefore in-principle safe methods for building advanced decision systems.

“Michael has been a major contributor to SIAI and the futurist community in general for many years, and I’m pleased to see him stepping into this new role,” said Ben Goertzel, SIAI Director of Research. “His diverse business and technology experience give him a practical foundation in ‘getting things done’ which should be serve him in good stead as he leads SIAI onward in accordance with its mission.”

Link to Michael Vassar’s bio:
http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/team/#vassar

Link to a recent interview with Michael Vassar:
http://tinyurl.com/c56ca8

About SIAI:
The Singularity Institute is a non-profit devoted to basic research in the analysis and design of artificial intelligence and decision systems with mathematically rigorous underlying foundations. It also sponsors events such as the annual Singularity Summit, which provides an opportunity for thought leaders to come together and discuss the complex issues surrounding the Singularity and associated technologies such as AI, robotics, and nanotechnology.

Contact:
Michael Vassar
610.213.2487
email mvassar @ singinst.org

###

We are happy to announce that the SIAI has been selected again this year to participate in the Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. GSoC is an annual program that awards successful student contributors a 4500 USD summer stipend to work on open source and free software projects for three months. Around one thousand students worldwide participated in GSoC 2008, with eleven students working on OpenCog related projects. Students may apply for GSoC 2009, beginning at the SIAI organization page. The student application period closes on April 3, 2009 at 19:00 UTC.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel reports on the recent AGI-09 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, which he chaired. Link

The Singularity Institute and the Future of Humanity Institute are beta’ing a new site devoted to refining the art of human rationality, LessWrong.com, which will end up as the future home of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s massive repository of essays previously written on Overcoming Bias.  LessWrong is based off the open-source Reddit codebase and written in Python.  The current site is up and running, but there are many features remaining to be added.  Volunteer developers for this open-source project would be much welcome.  (Please note that to prevent topic drift during the establishment of Less Wrong, we’ve banned discussion of the Singularity / AGI / FAI until May 2009 - the goal of this blog is to create an ongoing conversation about human rationality.)

For more information, see this post on Less Wrong.

Many friends of the SIAI will know that I have been a supporter of its mission since its founding, and have rendered my informal assistance, including a major role in arranging matching funds for the Institute’s 2007 Challenge Grant.  I am pleased to take a more direct role in fostering its success as President of the SIAI. I have left my previous role as Founder and Chief Strategist at SirGroovy.com, a growing online music licensing firm, and have been assuming responsibility for the management of the Singularity Institute over the last few weeks.  Prospective volunteers, donors, and aspiring researchers should now make contact with me rather than with Tyler Emerson.

To those who I am greeting for the first time, let me introduce myself. On a professional level, I hold a Master’s of Business Administration from Drexel University, and am coming from a role that combined management, research, analysis, and strategy in a fast-growing music licensing firm from its founding in New York. In that capacity, in a previous role at Aon, and in my academic studies I have been enduringly interested in finance and economics, particular the economics of technology and IP. Scientifically, I earned my undergraduate degree in biochemistry and have worked in several labs, as well as serving at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and have extensively studied the history of science and technology, as well as the potential for biological cognitive enhancement. I have served with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, and am splitting my time between Manhattan, where I live with my wife Aruna, and Silicon Valley.

My interest in the safety of technological development, driven by the potentially grave ethical consequences, is over a decade old. I have been particularly focused on the potential of advanced nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, participating in forums such as Transvision and Foresight conferences, the SL4 mailing list, Overcoming Bias, and organizations such as SIAI and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN). I plan to make my relevant work available at a single site, but in the meantime I will point to a small selection. For instance, I coauthored an analysis of the risks of advanced molecular manufacturing and mitigating strategies with Robert Freitas , and contributed “Corporate Cornucopia” as a member of CRN’s Global Task Force. Those who would like to see more can view Michael Anissimov’s archive of some of my writings at his website, and some of my most recent talks, an Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies presentation on the political implications of different conceptions of willpower and a Convergence08 talk on decision theory for humans, are available on the web.

As President, I plan to build on SIAI’s successes, such as the Singularity Summit, while also working to increase its internal and extramural research capabilities and output. In the course of the latter, I shall pay particular attention to the publication of research that improves the quality of our thinking about the potential and safety of advanced artificial intelligence, such as SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky’s two contributions to the Oxford edited volume, Global Catastrophic Risks, and thus to better communicating internal research progress to our supporters.

Some of this work will involve indirect, meta-level contributions. For instance, recent work at SIAI by Rolf Nelson, Anna Salamon, Steven Rayhawk, Thomas McCabe and others has led to the development of a software tool for combining judgments about particular future scenarios and technological developments to reveal inconsistencies and enable the adoption of a more coherent probability assignment for planning. The content and algorithms of this tool have been completed, and work is now underway to finalize the software’s interface and make it publicly available to improve the quality of reasoning about interrelated technology scenarios, including those involving artificial intelligence.  Another effort involves conducting expert elicitation research to determine the state of academic and non-academic expert opinion regarding timelines and risks for advanced artificial intelligence.  Future research along these lines may explore particular biases and psychological factors affecting attitudes and reasoning related to artificial intelligence.

Other research will be directly focused on object-level problems. I plan to work vigorously to identify more promising extramural scholars whose work can be fruitfully promoted by SIAI grants, work such as SIAI-Canada Academic Prize Recipient Shane Legg’s “Machine Super-Intelligence.” At the same time I will be working to recruit and make best use of talented Research Fellows for SIAI’s internal efforts.

I look forward to describing further directions over the coming months, and invite the advice and opinions of the friends of SIAI at “institute at singinst dot org”.

Yours,

Michael Vassar

In early January we announced the availability of video from the Singularity Summit 2008. Unfortunately, we had to take them down temporarily. We are working on getting them back up.

This news comes from cnn.com about new robotics technology. This is a new project which still under scientists’s research.

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Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (PINKSHEETS: CYPW) has received a contract from Robotic Technologies Inc. (RTI), of Potomac, MD, to develop a beta biomass engine system which will be used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR(TM)), a project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office.

The EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The system is designed to obtain its energy by foraging — engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil and solar) when suitable.

“Cyclone brings to this project one of the most advanced external combustion engine technologies we have seen,” stated Dr. Robert Finkelstein, President of RTI. “In terms of power-to-size ratio, scalability and fuel flexibility, the Cyclone engine is ideal for a self-sustaining, autonomous intelligent robotic vehicle designed for unique military or civil applications.”

This development project is expected to have two phases. In Phase I, Cyclone will build and deliver within six months the engine with a biomass combustion chamber for demonstration purposes. Cyclone believes that its radial six-cylinder, 16HP Waste Heat Engine (WHE) system is ideally suited for this application. In Phase II, Cyclone would build and deliver the biomass trimmer/gatherer and feeder system to work with its engine power source.

According to RTI, the EATR demonstration project can lead to three potential commercialization projects: (1) the development of prototype and operational EATR systems for military and civil applications; (2) new civil and military applications for the autonomous intelligent control system; and, most relevant for Cyclone, (3) development of the hybrid external combustion engine system for civil and military automotive applications, whether for manned or unmanned vehicles.

“This is an exciting, out-of-the-box application for our engine technology,” stated Harry Schoell, CEO of Cyclone. “Working with RTI on this DARPA-sponsored project will allow us to demonstrate the huge advantages of the Cyclone’s power-to-size ratio compared to other external combustion engines, and great fuel flexibility compared with internal combustion engines.”

DARPA is the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. More information about the EATR project can be found at www.robotictechnologyinc.com.

I’ve sought out references on the risks and moral issues associated with recursively self-improving intelligence.

To help improve the bibliography, please mention any other items in the comments.

In addition to the items below, there are Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings on the SIAI site and Overcoming Bias.

• Stuart Armstrong, “Chaining God: A qualitative approach to AI, trust and moral systems,” 2007.
• Nick Bostrom, “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” Cognitive, Emotive and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2, ed. I. Smit et al., Int. Institute of Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 2003.
• Tim Freeman, “Using Compassion and Respect to Motivate an Artificial Intelligence,” 2007-08.
• Ben Goertzel, “Thoughts on AI Morality,” Dynamical Psychology, 2002.
• Ben Goertzel, “The All-Seeing (A)I,” Dynamical Psychology, 2004.
• Ben Goertzel, “Encouraging a Positive Transcension” Dynamical Psychology, 2004.
• Stephan Vladimir Bugaj and Ben Goertzel, Five Ethical Imperatives and their Implications for Human-AGI Interaction.
• J. Storrs Hall, “Engineering Utopia”, Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, Volume 171, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, ed. P. Wang, B. Goertzel and S. Franklin, 2008.
• Bill Hibbard, “Critique of the SIAI Guidelines on Friendly AI,” 2003.
• Bill Hibbard, “Critique of the SIAI Collective Volition Theory,” 2005.
• Shane Legg, “Friendly AI is bunk,” 2006.
• Steve Omohundro, “The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence,” Singularity Summit 2007.
• Steve Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives”, Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, Volume 171, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, ed. P. Wang, B. Goertzel and S. Franklin, 2008.

The news originally come from www.gizmag.com. Posted at December 13, 2008.

Snake-like robots to assist construction work

Researchers at the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech have designed a series of serpentine robots that are able to climb poles and inspect structures too dangerous or inaccessible for humans. The robots coil themselves around a beam and roll upward using an oscillating joint motion, gathering important structural data with cameras and sensors.

A 2006 US Bureau of Labor Statistics report listed 809 fatal falls from raised structures and scaffolding. The RoMeLa team hope that by increasing the use of autonomous robots in construction, humans can work in safer conditions. The HyDRAS models (Hyper-redundant Discrete Robotic Articulated Serpentine for climbing) use electric motors , while the CIRCA (Climbing Inspection Robot with Compressed Air) uses a compressed air muscle. Currently the robots are tethered to laptops, but future designs will incorporate a microprocessor and power source, allowing them to operate independently. All robots in the series are roughly three feet long, though the CIRCA is lighter than the HyDRAS.

Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Tech?s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, said ?The use of compressed air makes this approach feasible by enabling it to be light weight, providing compliant actuation force for generating the gripping force for traction, and allowing it to use a simple discrete control scheme to activate the muscles in a predetermined sequence.?

?These are really wicked cool robots,? Hong said. ?Unlike inchworm type gaits often being developed for serpentine robot locomotion, this novel climbing gait requires the serpentine robot to wrap around the structure in a helical shape, and twist its whole body to climb or descend by rolling up or down the structure.?

The HyDRAS-Ascent, HyDRAS-Ascent II, and CIRCA recently earned recognition at the 2008 International Symposium on Educational Excellence.

Original news from www.marketwatch.com. Said about Robotic Industries Association Safety Training Event 2009 which will be held several times in different place during year 2009.

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ANN ARBOR, Mich., Dec 05, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — As more companies adopt robots the need for safety training is expanding across the U.S. and Robotic Industries Association (RIA) is responding with more training events and locations than ever.

For the first time, Knoxville, Tennessee is host to RIA’s 2009 Spring Robot Safety Conference at the Knoxville Marriott from March 23-25, 2009. This three-day conference features a mix of workshops and conference sessions. Tabletop exhibits also accompany the conference with top companies displaying their latest robots, accessories and safety product innovations.

The RIA continues a twenty-one-year tradition of safety training as the National Robot Safety Conference XXI comes to Detroit at the Hyatt Regency Dearborn October 26-29, 2009. Attendees have four days to receive comprehensive training for their automation safety concerns. Pre- and post- conference workshops accompany the main conference, which features presentations on robot safety, standards, case studies, the latest developments and more. A networking and tabletop trade fair is also included, adding to the event’s value and excitement.

Companies interested in participating in the tabletop exhibits for either conference can call RIA at 734/994-6088.

In addition to its two conferences, RIA offers one-day Robot Safety Standard (R15.06) & Robot Risk Assessment Seminars. These robot safety seminars, modeled after RIA’s popular In-House Training courses, make their inaugural stops in Long Beach, California at host facility DENSO Robotics on February 4, 2009, and in Phoenix on March 30, 2009.

According to RIA’s Standards Development Director, Jeff Fryman, “The addition of the Long Beach and Phoenix seminars highlight the Association’s commitment to reach those interested in industrial safety throughout the West. These seminars extend an opportunity for those in the region to attend and receive training that meets their needs.”

Full seminar, workshop and conference agendas are being developed for all safety events and will be posted on the Association’s website (visit www.robotics.org) along with detailed registration information.

An education news from glendalenewspress.com:

GLENDALE ? Student Boris Aguilar adjusted a robot?s movement using computer codes in preparation for a competition Saturday at the FIRST Lego Robotics Tournament at Roosevelt Middle School.

His team programmed the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot?s movements on a laptop computer, which through a wireless signal sent codes to the robot made out of Legos.

Seeing the robot perform as it was programmed came as a great relief to Boris and his teammates because they had been working on the robot for two months.

?It takes a lot of stress out,? Boris said.

Boris was a member of America?s Next Top Scientists Team, which represents Gage Middle School in Huntington Park.

About 22 teams of elementary and middle school students from Los Angeles County competed in the second annual tournament at the school.

But at least two teams couldn?t make the tournament because California Highway Patrol shut down several freeways due to fires in Sylmar on Saturday, said Teacher Randy Kamiya, who organized the event.

Seven or eight teams also were missing team members who were unable to make it to the tournament because of the freeway closures, he said. One group had only one student on the team, Kamiya said.

No Glendale schools participated in the event.

?Our students thought it wouldn?t be fair to the other teams to participate in the tournament because they were the host school,? he said.

The competition is a qualifying event in which 70% of the teams move on to another competition at Legoland in Carlsbad, he said. Teams that do well in the Legoland competition go to a national championship in Atlanta.

?It?s a blast,? Kamiya said.

Roosevelt Middle School automatically qualifies for the Carlsbad competition because it hosted the event.

But before the teams move on to other competitions, they had to meet qualifications in four categories in Saturday?s competition.

The theme of the robotics competition was climate change, so robots had to perform weather-related tasks, such moving a polar bear or picking up minerals and placing them in a coal mine.

?Robots are required to perform tasks on a 4-by-8-foot table,? Kamiya said. ?They have two minutes and 30 seconds to complete as many tasks as possible.?

The highest score possible is 400 points.

Teams were judged on their presentation related to climate change, robot design, teamwork and performance, Kamiya said.

?All children must be involved in the entire process,? he said.

The Arcadia Girl Scouts Troop 238, who represent the LOL Comets, practiced six hours a week for two months for the event.

?It gives you the opportunity to be creative,? team member Audrey Chen said.

Robotics is growing fast around the world, team from Phillipine. Not just Japan and United States as the leader in robotics, Phillipine is now improving the robotics knowledge…

THREE elementary-school students, who emphasized the urgency of saving the world from environmental degradation, bagged the silver medal in the open category of the World Robot Olympiad held recently in Yokohama, Japan.

Coached by Melanie Tizon and Warren John Ong Pe, Grade 6 student Joseph Aldrin Chua and Grade 5 students Eldrich Chua and Dominique Sy, all from the Grace Christian Elementary School, bagged the silver medal with a certificate and a Lego trophy, beating 21 other schools.

This is the first time that the Philippines garnered a medal in the open category in the elementary level of the competition.

The students? winning entry, entitled ?Green Whiz Community and the G-Tech Robot Engineering a Better World,? features 12 robots doing various tasks to help save the environment.

The wiz kids? robots aimed to show the urgency of saving the environment, emphasizing that technology can be used to stop the destruction of, and save the planet from, environmental degradation.

The featured robots include Next Gen Car, a lightweight hydrogen-powered car which consumes lesser energy; H2O (Water) Treatment Robot, which is designed to filter wastewater from factories for safe disposal; E-Sorter, a robot that sorts biodegradable and nonbiodegradable garbage using color coding of containers; Paper Recycling Area, a factory robot that recycles used paper into usable materials; Iced Sub-Zero Robot that makes melted ice in the polar region back into ice form; and Forest Surveillance Robot, which has a built-in camera that guards forests and waterfalls from illegal loggers and hunters.

Other robots used were AD Robot, which is perched on the top of a mountain and advertises the importance of planting trees in order to save the earth; Air Pollution Monitor Robot, designed to monitor the level of carbon dioxide and other pollutants; CO2 (carbon dioxide) Sequester E3K, designed to sequester carbon dioxide emitted by factories; E-Card, used to switch on and off household appliances; Heliostatic Mirrors are equipped with mirrors that follow sunlight and magnify it as an alternative source of light; and WM 123 are windmill robots that serve as alternative source of energy for the community.

Students from Benigno Aquino High School and the International School of Manila won certificates for winning the sixth place in the open category of the high- school and primary levels, respectively.

Capturing the gold medals for the open category were Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea for the senior high-school, junior high-school and primary levels, respectively. In the regular category, South Korea received gold medals for the primary and junior high-school levels, while Sweden got the top prize for the senior high-school level.

South Korea obtained three gold medals, Singapore got one silver and one bronze, and Malaysia got one gold, one silver and two bronze medals in the entire event.

In the open category, student-contestants were tasked to create robots within the theme ?Saving the Global Environment,? which were judged based on their appearance, uniqueness, interactive behavior, good engineering and stability. Team members showed the quality of the entry through successful demonstration, good explanation and projected high team spirit.

Science Education Institute Director Dr. Ester Ogena said the Philippine team?s triumph was proof that Filipino students are on a par with students around the world.

?Our students have shown their best and given more opportunities like these, we could tap more potential in the field of robotics,? she said.

Ogena vowed to increase more support in robotics as it takes the lead, together with Felta Multi-media, in preparing for the staging of the World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) in the Philippines in 2010.

?Preparations are under way for this grand event and we are very excited with the privilege that we would be hosting the WRO two years from now,? she said.

Ogena said the robotics olympiad is a good training ground for future engineers who would like to improve the way of living in the world through robotics.

?Our end goal in supporting the WRO is to entice our students to venture into science careers and beef up the critical mass of scientists and engineers our country needs,? she said.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-organizing a Workshop on Machine Consciousness, which will be held in Hong Kong in June 2009.

It is colocated with a larger, interdisciplinary conference on consciousness research, Toward a Science of Consciousness 2009.

Note also that the date for submitting papers to AGI-09 has been extended, by popular demand, till November 12. AGI-09 will welcome quality papers on any strong-AI related topics.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel reports on his participation in a recent workshop.

“I just returned from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where I attended a weekend workshop on Evaluation and Metrics for Human-Level AI, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and co-chaired by John Laird from the University of Michigan (who is a leader of the SOAR project, a long-standing project aimed at human-level AI, and pursued both in academia and, via Soartech, in industry) and Pat Langley from Arizona State University (who has a long and diverse history of achievement in the AI field, and has recently introduced the Icarus integrative AI system).

“Rather than a typical academic workshop focused on the presenting of papers, this was a ‘working workshop’ devoted to discussions aimed at collectively generating and filtering ideas regarding appropriate environments and tasks for software systems aimed at human-level AI. There will likely be a followup workshop early next year, focused more tightly on the description of specific environments and tasks; this one was more of a careful exploration of the relevant conceptual landscape, and a review of various requirements to be fulfilled and pitfalls to be avoided.

“Joscha Bach (creater of the MicroPsi AGI system) and I were the most radical optimists present, both of us believing it likely that with sufficient dedication of resources, human-level AI could plausibly be created within a decade. Most of the other participants believed it would take longer — but all considered human-level AI a valid and important area on which to focus current research attention.

“Among many other topics, there was some discussion of my proposal of an ‘AGI Preschool,’ which is summarized in ‘Intelligence Assessment for Early-Stage Software Systems Aimed at Human-Level, Roughly Human-Like AGI.’ Time permitting, some of the workshop participants may write a report of the main conclusions reached and submit it for publication.”

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This news come from www.ntxe-news.com

Austin College became one of 28 high schools, colleges and universities in the nation to receive a grant to enhance computer science curriculum with robotics technology. The grant was provided by the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) and a gift from Microsoft Research.

?Implementing robotics into computer science and other sciences makes the curriculum more interesting and interactive,? said Shellene Kelley, associate professor of computer science, who tested robots for the IPRE and attended a three-day faculty workshop at the Georgia Tech College of Computing during the 2008 spring term. ?Hopefully this will help combat the U.S. trend of declining student interest in math and the sciences,? she said.

Kelley will be implementing the technology at Austin College during her fall 2008 Communication/Inquiry (C/I) course, ?Computing with Robots: It?s all a BOT science,? where each student will explore ways to automate robot behavior through computer programming with their own personal robot. Kelley also will be utilizing the robotic technology in a 2008 Jan Term and in a 2009 spring term course.

?It?s much more fun to teach a robot to navigate around obstacles, perform a dance, or roam the halls taking pictures along the way than to write a program to solve a mathematical equation or search for information in a file,? Kelley said. ?But the same logic and problem solving skills are needed to accomplish all these tasks. Students will not only learn to program robots but also learn to program computers to solve many types of real-world problems.?

Kelley said the C/I course, Austin College?s unique brand of freshman seminars, and Jan Term course utilizing the robots will be a way to attract undecided students and some non-science majors to the science and computer science field, aligning Austin College with the IPRE grant?s goal.

?Robots are a compelling way to stimulate students and spark their imaginations to consider the endless possibilities of careers in computer science,? said Dr. Stewart Tansley, senior program manager at Microsoft Research. ?With these awards, we hope to accelerate the broad development of robotics programs, making computer science more immediate, relevant and significant for students and professors everywhere.?

The 28 recipients will share $250,000 and receive book-sized robots, called Scribblers, which are enhanced with special hardware technology and software. ?IPRE?s efforts in developing this technology over the past two years makes it possible to put a robot in the hands of every student in the class for about the same price as a textbook? said Kelley. ?This is key to encouraging experimentation and learning, both in and out the classroom environment.?

Grants were given to schools that met IPRE?s criteria for the technical quality of academic program, chances for successful implementation and matched IPRE?s mission to reinvigorate undergraduate computer science curriculum by delivering robotics technology tailored to education.

The IPRE applies and evaluates robots as a context for computer science education. IPRE was created in 2006 as a joint effort between Georgia Tech College of Computing and Bryn Mawr College sponsored by Microsoft Research.

A News for MHS Robotics:

The team — one of 50 in the nation and only four in South Carolina — was chosen to participate in a Green Machine competition to retrofit a robotic vehicle engine with a hydrogen fuel cell.

Nancy Zende, the Mauldin High team adviser, said the team’s acceptance into the competition is “a testimony to what we’ve been able to do in the past and to our willingness to take on additional challenges.”

The team has also taken on additional members, she said, almost doubling from last year to this year.

The 40-plus team members also have more adult volunteers and business community mentors because of the project, Zende said.

The project, which began in September and will culminate in May during a competition in Cleveland, hinges on the team’s ability to master hydrogen safety and polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell construction, application and maintenance concepts.

Basically, the team will retrofit one of its battery-operated robots to run on a hydrogen cell, she said.

Most of the work now is research, but game design and construction phases are coming.

In January, the team will launch a six-week build period for its annual competition season.

Team members have an “amazing enthusiasm” for the project, she said.

As well as preparing for the actual competition, the team is focusing on how and how soon the technology can be accessed and used by the individual, particularly in commuter situations, she said.

“There may come a day within the lifetime of these students when they see hydrogen fuel cells as the main means of powering automobiles,” Zende said.

She added she has always viewed the Robotics Team as a means of preparing the students for jobs that don’t exist yet, and that this project emphasizes that opportunity.

This is a “significant opportunity to get in on the ground-floor level on what may turn out to be an important industry in this state,” Zende said.

“South Carolina is positioning itself to be a leader in the hydrogen fuel cell (industry).”

The Mauldin Robotics team will display one of its robots Oct. 11 at the Roper Mountain Science Center.

www.greenvilleonline.com

STMicroelectronics and Waseda University Humanoid Robotics Institute Unveil High-Performance Two-Wheel Inverted Pendulum Robot via R&D Cooperation
STMicroelectronics , one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies, and the Waseda University Humanoid Robotics Institute (HRI), a global leader in state-of-the-art robotics research, today announced the development of a high-performance two-wheel inverted pendulum robot, called WV-1 (Waseda wheeled Vehicle-No.1), which is the first result of an ongoing cooperation for the research and development of technology and solutions for innovative humanoid robots and medical-care robot systems. The WV-1 will be displayed at the ST booth (Booth No. 8K26) at CEATEC JAPAN 2008 to be held at the “Makuhari Messe” in Chiba Prefecture from September 30 to October 4, 2008.
ST and HRI are cooperating to use leading-edge semiconductor know-how to promote the speedier development of innovative ‘humanoids’ and medical-care robotic systems, involving researchers and development engineers from both ST and HRI. ST will become a supplier to HRI for semiconductor products, while also furnishing HRI with the leading-edge semiconductor prototypes on a cost-free basis, making it possible for HRI to conduct advanced evaluations of possible humanoid and medical-care robotic applications. In addition, future cooperation between ST and HRI is expected to include the establishment of an ST-sponsored scholarship system for HRI students.

“With expectations running high for the growth of humanoid and medical-care robotic systems markets, semiconductor-fueled innovation is an extremely important field,” said Marco Cassis, Corporate Vice President and President of STMicroelectronics K.K., ST’s subsidiary in Japan. “By combining HRI’s globally renowned breakthroughs in robotics and ST’s highly advanced know-how in semiconductor technology, we are confident in our ability to accelerate technological innovation in humanoid robotics and medical-care robot systems. We are very pleased to announce the development of this robot, in addition to our cooperative relationship with HRI, the first that ST has established with a Japanese university.”
“Robotics Technology (RT) is expected to be a fundamental technology for the sustainable development of human society in the 21st century and is expected to be widely applied in manufacturing industries as well as in such industries such as nursing care and medical treatment as well as in industries confronted by food and environmental issues,” said Professor Shuji Hashimoto, Director of the Waseda University HRI. “HRI has been researching and developing advanced intelligent robots for the next generation through the integration of machine technology and information technology. The introduction of cutting-edge microelectronics technology is essential to the realization of such robots. We thus have high expectations that our cooperation with ST will accelerate our research. In addition, we will pursue a new model of industrial-academic cooperation through concrete cooperative activities with ST in education and research fields.”
The WV-1 is a two-wheeled robot on which a pole with weights is installed in an inverted fashion on a pedestal. A feedback system, controlled with the STM32, ST’s ARM(R) Cortex(TM)-M3 based 32-bit MCU and the LIS344ALH 3-axis digital acceleration sensor, allows the robot to move while maintaining its balance. The MCU rapidly computes the angle of robot body incline, angular velocity and other sensor data, enabling the motor to constantly generate optimum torque, which allows the robot to continue moving smoothly without tipping over. Potential applications for this inverted pendulum robot control technology include postural control functions for humanoids and other devices, realizing new means of mobility.
HRI received a grant from “the project for reinforcement of development technologies for robotics” from The Robotics Industry Development Council. The grant was used for the development of the WV-1. Additionally, HRI is now working on plans to commercialize the robot.

http://www.marketwatch.com

Robotics news from Alabama, i think robotics center is great idea…

NewsChannel 19’s Barry Hiett Reports:

Planning ahead for the future. It won’t be long before a new Robotics Center will be calling the Calhoun Community College campus home.

And faculty members here want to make sure that students who participate in the program are well trained before they enter the high tech work force.

“This particular facility really highlights robotics and automation software and that is just…what they tell us it’s an absolute have to do. And the governor is responding to that with this facility,” says Ed Castile who is with Alabama Industrial Development Training.

His company recruits, screens and trains employees.

He realizes a lot of college students are well versed with computers which fits in perfectly with the new Robotics Center.

“Very computer savvy. They know how to maneuver a computer and wade through all the issues so how can we take that fun and interest and excitement to the manufacturing sector? This is the pathway,” says Castile.

It was widely believed the new Robotics Center would work hand in hand with the new Volkswagen plant had VW officials decided to build a plant in north Alabama instead of Chattanooga.

Still, Calhoun President Dr. Marilyn Beck is not too concerned.

“We were disappointed about VW.   I think anyone would have been.  It’s such a great company but we have many businesses and industries in our region who use robots,” Beck says.

And that’s what, Beck says, will make graduates of the Robotics Center so attractive to potential employers.

There’s already a big marketplace here in north Alabama for their soon to be talents.

Dr. Beck says more than 100 businesses in north Alabama already use robots.

Calhoun’s Robotic Center should be completed at the end of 2009.

In earlier days, this was the nation’s watercress king. Then Huntsville became the Rocket City. On Monday, Gov. Bob Riley announced that the Huntsville-Decatur metropolitan area will soon be “the robotics capital of the world.”

Allowing for hyperbole, Riley appears to be on target. A 53-acre site on U.S. 31 across from Calhoun Community College, which will oversee the project with help from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, will eventually become a $71 million robotics education and training center like none other.

It will train some 450 students a year in state-of-the-art robotics. It will become a NASA and U.S. Army Missile Command research and development center. It will also serve as an R&D facility for companies to build and adapt commercial robots.

And it may do something else good for this region’s economy that goes beyond its stated mission: It may help lure a massive Volkswagen assembly plant that would further boost growth and prosperity.

State officials are understandably cagey about the latter possibility. Legislators from the area, commenting on the robotics center that Calhoun won over competing state community colleges, sounded more than cautiously optimistic but less than certain that this might be a key part of a package that will convince Volkswagen officials to call Huntsville home.

(more…)

Visitors look at REEM-B, the new humanoid robot unveiled by Pal Technology Robotics, at its launch in Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, June 11, 2008. The 1.47-meter tall robot, which is able to walk dynamically, grasp objects, navigate within buildings, accept voice commands and recognize faces, is one of the most advanced in the world, manufacturers said. Developed by Pal Technology Robotics, REEM-B supercedes the older REEM-A robot, which was launched last year.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan hands a gift to the new humanoid robot REEM-B

Visitors touch the new humanoid robot REEM-B

source:
news.xinhuanet.com

University of Massachusetts Lowell professor Holly Yanco will split her share of the money with seven other research teams, including one fromMIT and one from Yale University.

According to the university?s Web site, Yanco founded the school?s Robotics Lab seven years ago. Her Microsoft-backed project will use tabletop multitouch displays to create an interface for emergency personnel to interact and monitor with robots deployed during the response to a disaster, officials say.

Part of the impetus behind Yanco?s project was the federal government?s slow response to help individuals displaced by Hurricane Katrina three years ago. At that time, emergency responders used hand-drawn paper maps to search for survivors, and robotic cameras were used, but were limited to sending video only to operators at the site, and not immediately to command staff. Yanco has said her research project is designed to find out how to remedy that shortcoming.

(more…)

Members of the Winchester Robotics Team, now in its third year at the high school, have developed the first fully autonomous robot in BotsIQ history.

BotsIQ, an organization which promotes education in technology and engineering by hosting robotic competitions, planned to add an autonomous event this year to the regular bill of events which includes battles between 15-pound robots and 120-pound robots. However, when President Nola Garcia decided to hold off for another year, the Winchester team went ahead with the project anyway.

?When most people think of robots, they think of C-3PO, something that thinks, talks, and walks for itself,? said team president Alex Burka, who is also spearheading the autonomous project. ?The fighting robots are really cool but we wanted to challenge ourselves with something different.?

In preparation for the National BotsIQ Competition in late April, Winchester high school students took the initiative in proposing an autonomous competition for BotsIQ, complete with rules and a course.

(more…)

Another robotics “battle” in Hawaii… it so cool… :D. Here the news from kgmb9.com:

Dozens of teams are getting ready for a battle of the brains at the Stan Sheriff Center. They spent the day practicing for the regional robotics competition.

The event includes 700 students from 37 high schools throughout Hawaii and the mainland. They had six weeks to design and build their robots.

The machines score points in different ways; like knocking balls off the overpass, throwing them over the rack, or picking them up and putting them back in place. (more…)

Become participant of robotics contest or robotics competition is fun. You will get many experience, meet many people who interest in robotics technology. Sometimes, you will get some money..

Today, i read a news from freep.com about FIRST Robotics Competition result in detroit city. I was happy that many students interested in robotics technology.

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Three Detroit Cody High School students were part of a winning team last weekend at Wayne State University.

A three-team alliance — Cody, Utica Community Schools and Bloomfield Hills International Academy — won the FIRST Robotics Detroit regional. (more…)

Because it won last year?s national championship, Cimarron-Memorial High School?s robotics team gets a guaranteed berth in this year?s competition.

But that doesn?t mean the 25-member team isn?t ready to rumble at next week?s regional contest at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Established in 1989 by NASA and a coalition of public agencies and private-sector businesses, the FIRST Robotics Competition draws 20,000 students from 38 countries annually. This year, about 45 teams ? including 14 from local high schools ? are set to compete.

Each team is provided with the same parts and electronics and given six weeks to build a robot that will complete a specific task. Once teams arrive at the competition they are grouped into ?alliances,? each with three schools. The alliances then compete against one another.

As part of this year?s ?Overdrive? theme, the robots must race around a track and be able to move giant inflated balls around a 6-foot-6-inch overpass. Cimarron-Memorial?s entry, nicknamed ?Pit Boss II,? is a successor to last year?s winning entry. Teacher John Berry, the team?s mentor, said the name is an homage to Las Vegas? casino roots and to the nickname for the staging area at competitions where students make last-minute adjustments to their robots. (more…)

MANASSAS, VA.- Employees from Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) recently mentored more than 1,000 students from Prince William County and surrounding area schools during the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition and Tech Challenge events.

The FIRST program is designed to inspire young people to pursue careers in science and technology. FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge teams include engineers and other professionals from some of the world?s most respected companies. Students work closely with and learn from these mentors in engineering and technology fields.
(more…)

In a short article, New Scientist reports that researchers at Virginia Tech University have developed a tripedal experimental robot. With its three legs, this robot, named STriDER — short for ‘Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot’ — is actually more stable than 2- or 4-legged robots. As said another researcher, ‘It’s like a biped with a walking stick.’ This robot is intended to deploy sensors and cameras in difficult-to-access areas.

STriDER has been developed under the supervision of Dennis Hong, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and director of the Robotics and mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa). You can see above the various components of this robot. (Credit: Virginia Tech University) (more…)

TOKYO — At a university lab in a Tokyo suburb, engineering students are wiring a rubbery robot face to simulate six basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and disgust.

Hooked up to a database of words clustered by association, the robot _ dubbed Kansei, or “sensibility” _ responds to the word “war” by quivering in what looks like disgust and fear. It hears “love,” and its pink lips smile.

“To live among people, robots need to handle complex social tasks,” said project leader Junichi Takeno of Meiji University. “Robots will need to work with emotions, to understand and eventually feel them.

While robots are a long way from matching human emotional complexity, the country is perhaps the closest to a future _ once the stuff of science fiction _ where humans and intelligent robots routinely live side by side and interact socially.

Robots are already taken for granted in Japanese factories, so much so that they are sometimes welcomed on their first day at work with Shinto religious ceremonies. Robots make sushi. Robots plant rice and tend paddies. (more…)

TRENTON — Local teams performed strongly at this year’s New Jersey Regional FIRST Robotics Competition at Sovereign Bank Arena, with Trenton Central High School taking top tournament honors and Robbinsville High School’s rookie team coming in second yesterday. Each team’s win was shared with fellow alliance members, teams they cooperated with during the tournament. Trenton Central shared its Regional Competition championship with allies North Brunswick Township High School and Palisades High School of Kintnerville, Pa. Robbinsville High shared its Regional Finalist Award with Mount Olive High School and Aberdeen High School of Aberdeen, Md.

Robbinsville High also took home the Rookie All-Star and Highest Rookie Seed awards.

“We are just very thrilled,” Joy Wolfe, faculty adviser for the Robbinsville team, said. “We’re still finding out what these students can do as a team, and this was very unexpected. They were so excited.” (more…)

Another winter snowstorm struck New Hampshire Saturday, but that couldn’t stop thousands of students from competing in the finals of the sixth annual Granite State Regional FIRST Robotics competition held at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester.

The event brings students and their mentors together in a two-day competition that emphasizes teamwork, innovation and strategy. Forty-eight high school teams from across New England participated in this year’s Granite State Regional, which was sponsored by BAE Systems.

The following local teams received awards:

? -Team 1058 from Londonderry High School was selected as the winner of this year’s Motorola Quality Award, celebrating machine robustness in concept and fabrication. (more…)

Andrew Chudzik has spent some time building a bumper on his team?s robot.

Covered with white cloth and built with swimming pool tubes, the bumper is a needed accessory for protection against other elements.

?The bumper is in case a smaller robot is in the way or it hits the wall,? the City High freshman said.

Chudzik is a member of the Iowa City Robotics team that is aiming to build the best robot in a regional and national contest this spring. Comprised of students from City High and West High, the team is entering a robot to compete in a series of skill challenges at a regional competition in Milwaukee March 13 to 15 with hopes of competing in the national contest at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta April 17 to 19.

The contests are sponsored by USFIRST, or the Foundation for the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, a program designed to encourage high school students to explore engineering careers, according to Dominic Audia, a technology teacher at City High and West High. Sponsored locally by the University of Iowa engineering department and Rockwell Collins, the group has grown to 22 members this year, Audia said.

?We?ve doubled the amount of kids doing it every year,? he said. ?We try to get the kids to contribute as much as they can.?

The competition has a series of rules each of the 40 high school teams competing in Milwaukee must follow. To score points, the robot must either pick up a 40-inch, 10-pound ball and place it on a six-foot high pedestal, take a lap on a track, or shoot a ball over a balcony. (more…)

High school students from east central Indiana competed, informally, with their robotics projects on Sunday. They were preparing for the 2008 FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Challenge.

“We are here just, you know, comparing the robotics to other robotics. You know, try to get as much done, fine tuning as possible,” Greigh Davis, president of team 829, said. ?You know, do well, and hopefully we will win.”
Students designed robotics by themselves in their workshops. They decided what they wanted to do, and their mentors helped them bring their projects to reality and assisted fixing technical problems. (more…)

Inspired by the excitement of last year?s event, Bishop-Wisecarver, the manufacturer of the original DualVee guide wheel, has returned as a sponsor of the 2008 FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition (FRC).

Since 1989, FIRST has brought the excitement of a sporting event to science and technology via robotics competitions. At the January 5 kickoff, more than 1,500 teams, each consisting of 10 to 20 high school students and a few engineer mentors, received a common kit of parts.

Using this kit?which included Bishop-Wisecarver?s MCS aluminum profile?and working with mentors, teams have six weeks to design and build their robots to meet the season?s engineering challenge, ?FIRST Overdrive.?

According to FIRST, 41 regional competitions will lead up to the FRC Championship scheduled to be held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta April 17-19.

?We are very proud to be a ?Silver Supplier? of this fine group and participate in this year?s game,? says Pamela Kan, president of Bishop-Wisecarver. ?Our involvement gives us the opportunity to promote innovation and encourage and engage the engineers and thinkers of the future.?

Bishop-Wisecarver?s continued support of FRC is part of a long tradition. Nearly 40 years ago, Kan?s father, and Bishop-Wisecarver founder, Bud Wisecarver began a life-long commitment to youth programs related to education, engineering, manufacturing and science. (more…)

(Nanowerk News) We are now living in an era of global competition, which is based on scientific and technological strength. Growth of a country is driven by technological renewal and creativity. To follow this situation, Vietnam?s science and technology service should make complete changes.

Global tendencies
According to top the World Bank?s scientific and educational experts, investment and development orientation for global science and technology in the 21st century will concentrate in the English abbreviation ?GRIN?, in which G stands for Genomics; R, Robotics; I, Information Technology and Communication; and N, Nanotechnology.

In fact, over the last ten years, IT, biotechnology, and new material technology have become priorities in the development of Vietnam?s science and technology.

In addition, changes have been seen in the content and access method in these above mentioned fields.
Nanotechnology has become a huge field, which covers such sciences as physics, chemistry, information technology, telecommunication, and biotechnology. The technology has reached the highest level as the science of the era, having created comparative advantage for many countries.

To catch up with the development of global science and technology, Vietnam should have proper investment plans, prepared for ideas and combining scientists and experts with programmes which have completely new contents, and establishing training and research centres. Apart from traditional laboratories, two National Universities have begun to do this way. (more…)

Adept Technology, Inc , the leading provider of intelligent vision-guided robotics and global robotics services, today announced it will host its Adept Global Conference 2008 event at its corporate offices in Livermore, CA April 2-4, 2008. The automation conference will feature industry leaders, real-world case studies, live automation demonstrations and a chance to network with automation leaders. Speakers will include representatives from such manufacturers and industry experts as Great Lakes Cheese, Evergreen Solar, Pepperidge Farm, Covidien, Robotics Industry Association and Medical Design magazine.”We are very excited to be hosting this event which will give attendees the opportunity to learn about the latest trends and opportunities in robotics, meet with manufacturers and solution providers alike and view live demonstrations,” said John Dulchinos, president and chief operating officer for Adept Technology, Inc. “It will also be an excellent forum to connect with peers and some of the top U.S. manufacturers.” (more…)

Six months after being introduced to robotics, the kids at Public School 21 in Bedford-Stuyvesant have scored big.

They were named the top team in Brooklyn during the FIRST LEGO League robotics competition at Brooklyn Tech last month.

FIRST - For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology - is a group that creates innovative ways to get youngsters interested in science, technology and engineering. And the LEGO company creates and markets the popular multicolored interlocking plastic bricks, and other toys.

“It’s unusual to win a top award the first time out,” said Norman Scott, a retired teacher who serves as contest liaison.

On Jan. 26, the PS 21 kids won a Team Spirit Award during the New York City FIRST LEGO League Championship, a citywide competition held at Riverbank State Park in Manhattan.

Teams from St. Clare Elementary School on Staten Island landed the competition’s top honors, the Champion’s Award. The school’s Transformers 2 Team will represent New York City at an international competition in Atlanta. (more…)

Atlanta ? The College of Computing at Georgia Tech today announced the nation?s first interdisciplinary doctoral degree in robotics, to be offered at Georgia Tech. The program, which starts fall semester of 2008, was developed through Georgia Tech?s new Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM@Georgia Tech), a collaborative research center that combines the educational strength and expertise of the Colleges of Computing and Engineering at Georgia Tech. Reaching across disciplines and drawing from curricula in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, aerospace, biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering, the doctoral degree is designed to educate a new breed of multidisciplinary researchers who will enter the market best prepared to chart a new course for robotics in the United States.

?We are pleased to offer the first truly interdisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program in the country,? said Dr. Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. ?Exposing our students to course work from multiple disciplines early on prepares them to think about robotics from a holistic approach once they enter the workforce. True to our mission in robotics at Georgia Tech, our program will recruit and educate outstanding students who will provide leadership in a world that is increasingly dependent on technology.? (more…)

Dynamic Network Services Incorporated, a world leader in domain, DNS and email technologies, today announced its active participation in the seventeenth edition of the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition started on January 5 and is set to last six weeks, during which over 1,500 teams from around the world will call upon all their scientific and analytical skills to solve a fresh technical challenge, dubbed “Overdrive.”

Staff at Dynamic Network Services will be monitoring students as they build their robots and put their talent into action. Every year, the company heavily invests in the event, which encourages the bright minds of tomorrow to invest in engineering and scientific careers, paving the road for personal achievement and helping the industry move forwards.

“By helping students build their robots, we help them build their future” said Tom Daly, president, highlighting the close relationship the competition entertains with real-world situations and technology.

“We’re all students at heart,” added Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO and CFO, pointing out that “the game helps our staff keep their analytical skills sharp and flexible.” (more…)

The ?ROBAUCO: mobile, autonomous and collaborative robots? project was recently initiated.* The principal objective of the project is the generation of the technologies necessary for the development of mobile robots able to carry out complex tasks with a high degree of autonomy and capacity for collaboration. These robots, moreover, have to share tasks with people in the most friendly and natural way possible.

The technological areas in which solutions are to be developed are:

• The perception of the robots. Using sensors and sensorial systems which, with a holistic approach, are capable of recognising the complex environment (given that the idea is for exterior applications, over unknown terrain and changing situations).
• Communications. Between the robots themselves and with humans, in such a way that mutual collaboration leads to success in the targets set.
• Person-robot interaction Here the idea is that the robot is not limited to just obeying control orders that are formulated electronically, but they are also enabled to interact with their human collaborators and in the most natural manner, including with voice and, above all, with gestures which, for tasks in the exterior and in extreme conditions, may be the most reliable channel of communication.
• Autonomous behaviour. In this case the idea is to resolve complex problems of navigation on surfaces and in spaces that are difficult and equip the robots with self-perception in such a way that they are aware of their state, can undertake self-diagnosis and adopt measures in case of breakdown or limitations to their capacities.
• Mecatronic components. The problem to be tackled in principle is the movement through and overcoming of obstacles in all media, terrestrial, aquatic and aerial.

It is hoped to materialise all these developments in a terrestrial robot prototype which, in all probability, will be a test bank for solutions to emergency situations such as forest fires, rescues, etc. In order to know the peculiarities and skills these tasks require and thereby to orientate the prototype accordingly, contacts have been made with SOS Deia (the Basque Emergency Rescue Service) and it also expected to know other viewpoints from other autonomous emergency services. (more…)

MANHASSET, N.Y. ? Segway inventor Dean Kamen is looking to tap the next generation of students to help develop the “next big thing.”

Kamen is organizing his 17th annual First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition that will culminate at the 2008 First Championship April 17-19 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

The competition is geared to help high schoolers age discover the rewards of science, engineering and technology. Over 37,500 high school students on more than 1,500 teams from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the U.K. and every state in the U.S. are participating in this year’s competition.

Earlier this month, teams were for the first time shown this year’s challenge and received a common kit that includes motors, batteries, a control system and a mix of automation components. Students receive no instructions, but work with mentors to design, build and test their robots over six weeks. The teams then participate in regional competitions that measure the effectiveness of each robot, the power of collaboration, and students’ determination.

“We celebrate sports and entertainment people as hero figures,” said Leo Meire, facilities engineer at chip maker Qimonda and a mentor of Team 384 Robotics at J.R. Tucker High School (Richmond, Va.). “We want to attract future engineers by modeling the competition as a sports event, but for technical knowledge.” Qimonda will provide monetary support, use of a machine shop and necessary parts to the high school team. (more…)

When Dr. Andrew Williams began teaching at Spelman College three years ago, he had a hunch that science and engineering students at the all-female and private historically Black college would flock to the study of robotics not unlike the science and engineering students who gravitate to the growing field at the top research institutions. Not only did Williams guess right, it turns out that his teaching and research efforts in the subject would help spark a robotics education movement that now extends from the Atlanta-based women?s college to several historically Black colleges and universities.

Helping out in the effort are scientists from major research universities, such as Dr. David Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Williams and Touretzky are the principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively, of the Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact (ARTSI) Alliance project. With support from a three-year, $2 million grant by the National Science Foundation announced this past fall, ARTSI will help fund a second wave of robotics education at eight historically Black schools and stimulate outreach efforts at the K-12 level. (more…)

From effortlessly lifting your car that weighs over 1,000 kg to painting it, inspecting it and even sending a text message in case of an emergency - you name the task and they will perform it with ease. In case you haven?t guessed it yet - it robots - and some of them, claiming to be driven by the latest technology are on show at the auto expo.

Given their utility, there are 11 companies including ABB, Panasonic, Kuka, Precision Automation & Robotics India (PARI), Motoman Motherson Robotics, Hi-Tech Robotics Systemz, Fanuc and Rockwell who are at the expo, eyeing the Indian market where companies are increasingly focusing on automation. Of these 11 exhibitors, five are Indians, which shows that despite being a late entrant, the country has finally stepped into the world of robotics and automation.

The application of robotics, artificial intelligence technologies in India is quite new. Initially, companies were apprehensive to use robots in manufacturing or any other industry. But, now, as India is becoming manufacturing hub for companies all around the world, domestic players are realising the advantage of robotics and automation. At present, the growth in India is much faster than in Japan or other Asian countries, says Milind Adkar of PARI. The Pune-based company is displaying its ‘Golfing Robot’, which, it says, can play golf with 97% accuracy.

According to industry estimates, 2008 onwards, the world market for industrial robots is expected to grow 4.2% a year rising to 139,300 units in 2010. “In India, the industry is expected to grow by at least twice the global average,” says Rajive Kaul of CII.
(more…)

Over 37,500 High-school Students to Compete in 41 Regional Events MANCHESTER, N.H.–(Business Wire)–FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) launched its seventeenth FIRST Robotics Competition season today with a Kickoff at outhern New Hampshire University in Manchester, NH, hometown and headquarters of FIRST. The FIRST Robotics Competition is an annual competition that helps students discover the rewards and excitement of science, engineering, and technology. Over 37,500 high-school students on more than 1,500 teams from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the U.K., and every state in the U.S. are participating in this year’s competition.

At the Kickoff, all teams were shown this year’s game field for the first time and received a common kit of parts made up of motors, batteries, a control system, and a mix of automation components - but no instructions. Working with mentors, students now have just six weeks to design, build, and test their robots to meet the season’s engineering challenge. Once these young inventors create the robot, their teams participate in regional competitions that measure the effectiveness of each robot, the power of collaboration, and the determination of students. (more…)

LAS VEGAS ? Looks like it’s time for WowWee to graduate from making robotic toys to making full-fledged consumer robotics. The maker of Robosapien and Roboraptor dipped its toe in the water last year with the release of Robopanda, its first remote-control-less robot. However, with its 2008 lineup, the company is setting its sights on becoming a home-robotics leader.

The company reports that its US product lineup will feature some 15 products, and three new ones are worth noting.

Two years ago at CES 2006, WowWee demonstrated its new two-wheeled P.E.A. (Personality Evolved Robot), the first product of a partnership between WowWee and Segway. Just like Dean Kamen’s Segway human transporter, the roughly 1-foot-tall black and white robot balanced on two wheels. It had two long arms and a screen for a face. Two years later, P.E.A. has returned as “Mr. Personality.” Gone is the two-wheeled balancing act. Instead, this red and silver home-entertainment robot gets around on three wheels set at roughly right angles to each other. What remains is the color LCD face and the robot’s sense of humor. (more…)

PALMER - Pathfinder Regional Vocational Technical High School had great success in its first robotics competition last spring and during this academic year the school will not only compete but also host the Massachusetts regional tournament.

It means a lot of work for electronics technology teacher Eric A. Duda, but he is up for it.

“The educational value of this is great,” Duda said.
He is not only teaching and guiding the students in this program, he is watching them do work at a level that he was involved with as an electrical engineering student at Western New England College.

“It’s amazing,” Duda said. “They design something. They build it. They test it. They record all of their results.”

School teams all over the world compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge Championship by building a robot that meets required specifications and can perform a designated task.

The 2008 contest calls for a robot that can pick up rings that are 3 inches in diameter and put as many of them as possible on a pole while racing the clock.

While Duda’s students find it fun and exciting, their work also fits into the state’s curriculum frameworks for electronics technology.

“It takes a lot of math skills and a real scientific approach. They do a lot of computer programming,” Duda said. “This covers a real wide range and ties everything together.”

“They are doing a great job,” he said. (more…)

AFC Stamping and Production, Inc. produces finished components used in power sports and automotive applications, and automotive stampings that have welded components.
The Dayton, Ohio, company was established in 1989, and employs 100 people. It is a subsidiary of FC Industries, whose family of companies includes Barsplice Products Inc., AFC Tool Inc., Dayton Precision Punch and FC International.

AFC Stamping and Production is housed in an 115,000-square-foot facility that accommodates nine production lines, including a CNC bender, end finish equipment, resistance welding, and fully equipped press and manual welding departments.

Jon Lambert, engineering manager for AFC Stamping and Production, Inc., is responsible for capital expenditure, continuous improvement, plant layout and process and tooling concepts, and supports the company?s lean manufacturing initiatives and internal and external customer requirements.Before adding a robot to the workforce, the product mix was produced by an outside contractor. Prior to outsourcing, the assemblies were welded manually, creating several disadvantages, including cost, lack of manpower, operator control of quality and poor product flows. (more…)

ASIMO, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, can’t drive his own car yet, but he is helping manufacturers make vehicles safer.

Twenty-one years of technology have allowed the all-seeing, all-hearing and sometimes-dancing Asimo to evolve from a disembodied set of legs that took up to 20 seconds to pace a single step into a robot that can slalom through road cones and run at 6 kmh.

The latest version of the Asimo robot is touring Australia and will be in Sydney until December 2.

Its engineering achievements have required scientists for the car maker Honda, the company behind Asimo, to master the skills that govern locomotion, such as how humans shift their weight as they walk. This technology has subsequently been adapted to help prevent vehicles from swerving, according to Hongsiri Suesattabongkot, a Honda engineer and former robotics student at the University of NSW.

The mechanical midget, which at 1.3 metres tall would barely be able to peer over a steering wheel, has also been responsible for a technology that warns drivers about impending collisions. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) — A small green and tan dinosaur slowly wandered across the table in an airy Emeryville, Calif., office space. As it plodded to the end of the table, one plastic hoof started to step off the ledge and instead it felt thin air. It slowly backed up and murmured a little cry.

The 20-inch-long toy is a much-anticipated robotic device named Pleo, and it will finally ship next month to consumers after a year’s delay. Created by the same team who brought the world the Furby, the Pleo will also mark an advance in robotics, as it packs much of the functionality of far more expensive robotics toys into a much lower cost design.

Some industry futurists believe robotics will be the next big thing. The nascent area has sometimes been compared to the early days of the personal computer industry, when tinkerers gathered in garages and at computing clubs to swap ideas and parts.

“There is a revolution in the offing,” said

But the company, co-founded in 2003 by Furby co-creator

FANUC Robotics America, Inc. and Flexicell will demonstrate the latest intelligent robotic solutions for assembly, machine tending, picking, packing and palletizing at Flexicell?s facility in Ashland, VA, Nov. 28-29, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The event will feature robot system demonstrations, interactive presentations, and breakout seminars on FANUC Robotics? new LR Mate 200iC LEAN (light, efficient, accurate, nimble) robot and iRVision products (built-in vision) including examples of 2D and 3D robotic vision applications. Also, attendees will have the opportunity to meet with automation experts to discuss their own manufacturing challenges.

In addition to the LR Mate 200iC mini robot and iRVision, the event will showcase the FANUC M-430iA high-speed picking robot, R-2000iB and M-710iC material handling robots, force sensing, offline programming, and simulation products. (more…)

Waiakea High School’s robotics team this month took a first-place award in the 16th annual International Microbot competition held in Japan.

Facing off against several college teams from across Asia, students representing the Hilo school won the Fully Autonomous Micro Robot Maze Competition with a robot named Teeny Humuhumu.

The team took third place in the Micro Robot Racer competition with a robot named Stich.05; fifth place, Remote Controlled Micro Robot Maze Competition, with Teeny Humuhumu; and a special judges’ award for best effort. (more…)

Someday the robots will rise up and kill us all. They’ll record our lives, obliterate our privacy, set off nuclear war, and eventually turn on us and eat our brains. If any of this ever did happen, it would serve us right. We, at least American consumers, don’t deserve the future that robots really have to offer.

Recent evidence abounds. What’s more appalling?a television commercial depicting an industrial automotive robot committing suicide or the public outcry that followed? We have a robot psychiatrist (more on her later) and an entire country?South Korea, not the U.S. (for now)?committed to the “ethical treatment” of robots.Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

It isn’t all the fault of U.S. consumers. Our robotics expectations buckle under the massive burden of fantasy robotics. Our conception of consumer robotics is steered, almost entirely, by science fiction. We confer personalities and cognitive thought on robots before we even see them. We assume that they’ll have human emotions and foibles. (more…)

Today?s schoolchildren are getting a healthy dose of robotics ? the newest of the three Rs ? in an effort to inspire more American students to pursue careers in engineering, science, technology and math.

In Galveston County, schoolchildren as young as 6 and as old as 18 are meeting after school to design, build and program robots for competitions.

Students love the program ? ?It?s just so fun,? gushed eighth-grader Chelsea Wolfe ? while teachers are pleased that students are excited about learning.Not only are they absorbing valuable engineering, math and science knowledge, they?re also learning to collaborate with each other and present their research, said local math and science teachers.

?I had a parent say to me, ?I wish they would get as excited about their schoolwork as they do about robots,?? said Anne Morrison, a Galveston third grade science and social studies teacher. ?I said, ?It is schoolwork, but shh … don?t tell them that.?

?Bots instead of books

At least two county school districts ? Galveston and Clear Creek ? offer robotics as an extracurricular activity. (more…)

After a two-year collaboration with colleagues at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University scientists unveil their Gigapan camera system this week. It’s a robotic device that attaches to any digital camera. The device enables the public to shoot interactive, multi-billion pixel panoramas that can be explored in great depth on the Internet.”We are going to change the way people browse for exploration, discovery and cultural understanding,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics. Nourbakhsh is co-director of the Global Connection Project, with project scientist Randy Sargent of Carnegie Mellon West. [ read more Introducing the Gigapan Camera ] 

The robotic camera mount takes hundreds of overlapping images to create the panoramas. The the software developed to go with the robot stitches all the images together.More information:GigapanView some of the panoramas that have been takenSystem enables any digital camera to produce interactive, multibillion pixel panoramsGoogle Earth GigaPan: Disappointing? See also:Amazing camera phone art

With robotics playing an ever more integral role in STEM education, Innovation First, the company behind a wide range of robotics initiatives, has launched a new online resource targeted directly toward K-12 and post-secondary education.

Innovation First provides robotics programs to about 140,000 students around the world (making up about 12,000 teams), and just last month the company launched robotevents.com in an effort to provide a resource for those interested in robotics competitions. The new resource, Vex Robotics Education, hosted on the Vex Robotics site, is designed as a resource for educators looking to introduce robotics into STEM curricula. It includes free education and classroom support materials for download and also introduces custom classroom lab kits based on the Vex Robotics Design System. The kits include components for building radio-controlled robots. (more…)

Adept Technology Extends Robotics Distribution Into BrazilLIVERMORE, Calif.CA-ADEPT-TECHNOLOGY

Adept Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADEP), the leading provider of intelligent vision-guided robotics and global robotics services, announced today that it has signed an exclusive agreement with MAR Industries to distribute the company?s full product line in Brazil. The relationship between the companies accelerates Adept?s distribution strategy and provides customers in the expanding Brazilian manufacturing marketplace with extensive automation expertise based locally in their region.

Under the terms of the agreement, MAR Industries will be the exclusive distributor for Adept?s complete Portfolio of robotics, controls, vision and software products, including the innovative Adept Quattro? s650 packaging robot, throughout Brazil. (more…)

Originally 20 teams had hoped to compete in the Urban Challenge, 11 made the first cut.  Some didn’t pass the ’safe for road’ test. The 11 finalists VictorTango, CarOLO, Ben Franklin, Cornell, Stanford, Tartan, MIT, Knight Rider, AnnieWAY, Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Terra Max all competed for a three and a half million dollar prize.

Six of the vehicles crossed the finish, and the three winners were Stanford ( $1 million ), Carnegie Mellon ( Tartan )( $2 million ) , and Virginia Tech ( Ben Franklin ) ( half a million ) finishing in less than 6 hours each.The course was 60 miles long, and vehicles had to avoid obstacles including 50 human driven cars.

More information:
Darpa, Urban Challenge

. . . The idea of evolutionary algorithms is not new. Until recently, however, their use has been confined to projects such as refining the aerodynamic profiles of car bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That is because only large firms have been able to afford the supercomputers needed to mutate and crossbreed large virtual genomes?and then simulate the behaviour of their offspring?for perhaps 20m generations before the perfect design emerges.What has changed, in this as in so much else, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days.The result is that the range of applications to which the principles of evolutionary design are being applied is growing fast. Among those revealed at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference held in London this summer were long-life USB memory sticks, superfast racing-yacht keels, ultra-high-bandwidth optical fibres, high performance Wi-Fi antennae (evolved to avoid patent fees), cochlear implants that can optimise themselves to individual patients and a cancer-biopsy analyser that was evolved to match a human pathologist?s tumour-spotting skills.

How can evolution help improve a USB stick? It turns out that the storage transistors in these flash-memory devices are prone to being gummed up with electrostatic charge that they cannot dissipate. That prevents them being erased, limiting the stick?s useful life. A team at the University of Limerick in Ireland therefore evolved new signal-timing patterns that minimise the build-up of the disabling charge. The result: USB sticks that last up to 30 times longer than their predecessors. At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos let an evolutionary algorithm come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre?s bandwidth. . . . [ read more Don’t invent evolve]

See also:
Evolutionary computation: An overview(pdf)
Adrian Thompson’s Hardware Evolution Page ( He uses evolution to improve computer chips. )