Latest in Robotics news thread

[Mr. H.]

Do robots have black cocks?

 

[ScienceRocks]

wow

Ford is working with MIT, Stanford to build “common sense” into self-driving cars

Ford Motor Company is teaming up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to research the future brains of its autonomous cars. Projects like Ford’s research vehicles are putting the sensors and computing power into cars that would allow them to read and analyze their surroundings, but these two universities are developing the technology that will allow them to make driving decisions from that data.

Ford is working with MIT, Stanford to build ?common sense? into self-driving cars ? Tech News and Analysis

 

[ScienceRocks]

Details of successful first test flight of Taranis UCAV demonstrator revealed

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) and BAE Systems this week announced details of last year's first test flight of the Taranis unmanned combat demonstrator aircraft, which BAE bills as the "most advanced aircraft ever built by British engineers." The 15-minute test flight took place at an undisclosed location outside of the UK on August 10, 2013 as part of a project to show the UK’s ability to create a unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) capable of surveillance, targeting, intelligence gathering, deterrence, and strikes in hostile territory.

Details of successful first test flight of Taranis UCAV demonstrator revealed

 

[ScienceRocks]

Harvard researchers create termite-inspired robot builders

Harvard researchers create termite-inspired robot builders

Researchers at Harvard University have taken inspiration from the swarm construction method used by termites to create TERMES. These robots are intended as the first step in a project with the ultimate goal of creating a fully automated robotic workforce that can create complex structures without the need for centralized control.

The robots are designed “with a philosophy of simplicity” needing to perform only a few simple functions with a high degree of reliability. Each robot houses ten sensors and three actuators in order to detect its position relative to the blocks used in the project as building materials.

TERMES units are only aware of their immediate vicinity and have no concept of the progression on the structure as a whole, or of the work conducted by their fellow robots. They simply progress what is in front of them to its final state.

Who said that one day we couldn't all sit on our asses?

 

[ScienceRocks]

SuperDroid fields remote control snow plow

In the southeast United States, snow storms are as about as common as canoes on Mount Everest, which is what makes the current task of digging the region out from under the recent deposit of the white stuff so irksome. To aid the inexperienced snow shoveler, SuperDroid of Raleigh, North Carolina is selling a remote-controlled robotic snow plow that allows you to clear the drive while sitting where it’s warm with a cup of cocoa.

SuperDroid fields remote control snow plow

 

[ScienceRocks]

Scientists make artificial muscles out of fishing line and thread



Scientists make artificial muscles out of fishing line and thread | Science Recorder

Scientists have been creating a lot of artificial things lately. First it was artificial leaves and now artificial muscles. That’s right, scientists simply twisted a sewing thread and fishing wire and ended up with a muscle that’s 100 stronger than animal or human tendons. The invention is explained in the journal Science and could aid in the constructions of human-like robots, prosthetic limbs, medical equipment and even comfortable clothing.

Artificial muscles also exist in the form of carbon nanotube yarns and metal wires, but they are generally too costly or collect rather small amounts of energy, scientists said.

These new powerful polymer fibers, composed of affordable everyday supplies that cost around $5 per kilogram, pull their energy from their geometry. The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson conducted an experiment that involved twisting these thin fibers,that were only a few hundred micrometers long, until they begin to coil. (The same effect will happen if you twist a rubber band until it collapses to form bigger loops.)

 

[ScienceRocks]

Robot Cargo Ships could have 20-50% lower operating costs
Robot Cargo Ships could have 20-50% lower operating costs

Rolls-Royce is designing unmanned cargo ships. Dontrol centers will command hundreds of crewless ships.

Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says. They might be deployed in regions such as the Baltic Sea within a decade, while regulatory hurdles and industry and union skepticism about cost and safety will slow global adoption, said Oskar Levander, the company’s vice president of innovation in marine engineering and technology.

Researchers are preparing the prototype for simulated sea trials to assess the costs and benefits, which will finish next year

 

[ScienceRocks]

Rise of the human exoskeletons

BBC News - Rise of the human exoskeletons

On the outskirts of Pisa in a back room of a modern block, a machine is waiting for its operator.

The device has arms and legs and is suspended by ropes from a metal frame. Its only other tether is a thick umbilical cable plugged into its back.

After a few final checks, research engineer Gianluca approaches the machine, turns, and puts his feet on its feet and buckles them in. He straps himself in across his chest and puts his arms into its arms.

With a finger he then presses a button, and the machine jolts into life, lights flashing and joints whirring as he cautiously steers his body suit across the floor.

 

[waltky]

Granny'd like to get one of `em to clean the trailer...

Q&A: Robots Join Fight Against Ebola
October 23, 2014 - As the world scrambles to contain the deadly Ebola outbreak, which has infected up to 9,900 people and claimed nearly 4,900 lives, some hospitals have turned to robots to help them fight back.

Xenex Disinfection Services, a Texas-based company founded by two epidemiologists, has developed a line of robots to help eliminate pathogens that cause infections. The company’s CEO, Morris Miller, offered more insight into the Xenex technology in an email interview with TECHtonics.

Q. What do your robots do exactly?

Miller: … Xenex robots are scientifically proven to be effective against the most dangerous pathogens, including Clostridium difficile (C. diff), Ebola virus, norovirus, influenza, and staph bacteria, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA.

A Xenex germ-zapping robot can disinfect a typical patient/procedure room in 5-10 minutes.

… The Xenex germ-zapping robot works by pulsing xenon, an inert gas, twice a second at high intensity in a xenon ultraviolet flashlamp. This produces ultraviolet C (UVC), which penetrates the cell walls of microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, mold, fungus and spores. Their DNA is instantly fused so that they are unable to reproduce or mutate, effectively killing them on surfaces and in the air without contact or chemicals.

Q. Is the technology harmful in any way?

Miller: No … Xenex robots are considerably faster, safer and “greener” than other automated cleaning and infection control methods, including toxic mercury UV and hydrogen peroxide-based systems, which can take multiple hours to achieve the same level of disinfection.

Q. Have the machines been field-tested?

Miller: The robots are in use in more than 250 U.S. hospitals. Hospitals using our robots to disinfect their facilities are reporting a drop in their infection rates (a decrease in healthcare- associated infections – HAIs), which is how we measure success. Xenex represents a significant advancement in UV disinfection technology, which has historically relied upon mercury bulbs requiring significantly greater exposure times to disinfect.

Six peer-reviewed studies have been published supporting the efficacy of the Xenex technology, including three where Xenex customers reported significantly reduced HAI rates after implementing the Xenex robot for room disinfection. No other UV technology has peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the impact of the technology on actual patient infection rates.

Q. Why are the robots not deployed in more hospitals, especially where Ebola cases have emerged?

 

[waltky]

Granny'd like to get one of `em to clean the trailer...

Q&A: Robots Join Fight Against Ebola
October 23, 2014 - As the world scrambles to contain the deadly Ebola outbreak, which has infected up to 9,900 people and claimed nearly 4,900 lives, some hospitals have turned to robots to help them fight back.

Xenex Disinfection Services, a Texas-based company founded by two epidemiologists, has developed a line of robots to help eliminate pathogens that cause infections. The company’s CEO, Morris Miller, offered more insight into the Xenex technology in an email interview with TECHtonics.

Q. What do your robots do exactly?

Miller: … Xenex robots are scientifically proven to be effective against the most dangerous pathogens, including Clostridium difficile (C. diff), Ebola virus, norovirus, influenza, and staph bacteria, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA.

A Xenex germ-zapping robot can disinfect a typical patient/procedure room in 5-10 minutes.

… The Xenex germ-zapping robot works by pulsing xenon, an inert gas, twice a second at high intensity in a xenon ultraviolet flashlamp. This produces ultraviolet C (UVC), which penetrates the cell walls of microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, mold, fungus and spores. Their DNA is instantly fused so that they are unable to reproduce or mutate, effectively killing them on surfaces and in the air without contact or chemicals.

Q. Is the technology harmful in any way?

Miller: No … Xenex robots are considerably faster, safer and “greener” than other automated cleaning and infection control methods, including toxic mercury UV and hydrogen peroxide-based systems, which can take multiple hours to achieve the same level of disinfection.

Q. Have the machines been field-tested?

Miller: The robots are in use in more than 250 U.S. hospitals. Hospitals using our robots to disinfect their facilities are reporting a drop in their infection rates (a decrease in healthcare- associated infections – HAIs), which is how we measure success. Xenex represents a significant advancement in UV disinfection technology, which has historically relied upon mercury bulbs requiring significantly greater exposure times to disinfect.

Six peer-reviewed studies have been published supporting the efficacy of the Xenex technology, including three where Xenex customers reported significantly reduced HAI rates after implementing the Xenex robot for room disinfection. No other UV technology has peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the impact of the technology on actual patient infection rates.

Q. Why are the robots not deployed in more hospitals, especially where Ebola cases have emerged?

 

[ScienceRocks]

Robot Waiters Already At Work In China

A restaurant in China is now staffed by a team of robot servers. The automated waiters take orders and serve food to any table within the restaurant, and tell customers to enjoy their meal.

 

[ScienceRocks]

ASIMO in New York: Beginning Of Robot Uprising Chillingly Documented In “ASIMO Visits The Big Apple”

Earlier this year, the Honda ASIMO humanoid robot became the most popular four-foot tall, anthropomorphized, non-sentient object to hit NYC since Kermit and the Muppets took Manhattan back in 1984. During his tour of the city, ASIMO made a television appearance on “LIVE with Kelly and Michael,” dazzled tech journalists at an invitation-only demonstration event at the New York International Auto Show, and waved to human onlookers who will one day serve him and his robot brethren once the Great Robot Uprising of 2025 has come to fruition.

 

[ScienceRocks]

15,000 robots usher in Amazon's Cyber Monday

An army of 15,000 robots is ready to roll as Amazon's fulfillment centers prepare for the holiday sales onslaught.

To pick, pack and ship those items, the company is launching a full-scale deployment of a robotic fulfillment system it purchased in 2012 and tested in 2013.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Anyone Can Now Use IBM's Watson To Crunch Data For Free

You probably know IBM's Watson platform best from its winning performance on Jeopardy. But the supercomputer is more than just a mechanism for IBM to publicly shame smart people. It's arguably the most powerful natural-language supercomputer in the world, and thanks to anew public beta, its number-crunching abilities are open to all.

 

[ScienceRocks]

A robot to guard your property for $6.25 an hour
Meet Silicon Valley's newest crime fighter: the K5 robot.

As the world grapples with the onset of drones and trembles at the increasing likelihood of sentient machines, a 300-pound machine is being deployed in places like corporate campuses and shopping malls. Like something out of a science fiction movie, the K5 is part of a broader effort to predict and prevent illegal activities.

While they are not quite artificially intelligent, these autonomous robots can see, feel, hear and smell, the man behind the bot told CNBC in an interview this week.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Robot pal brings school to ailing student
Robot pal brings school to ailing student Fox News

On a typical school day, seventh-grader Max LaDue answers a question from his teacher and chats with classmates at his Durham County public school. But 12-year-old Max, who suffers from a chronic gastrointestinal condition that keeps him homebound, takes part in class through a robot that he controls from his house.

The high-tech VGO Telerobot sits at Max’s desk, with a real-time image of the boy, who sits inside his Durham, N.C., home controlling the robot’s every move through his computer’s Internet. When Max has a question he’d like to answer, a light signals on the robot, prompting the teacher to call on him. When the period is over, Max is able to drive the robot from one classroom to another. The VGO Telerobot also has a camera that enables the boy to take screenshots of the classroom board, which are then downloaded to his laptop so he has class notes available when he needs them.

For a 12-year-old boy who loves to play video games, the chance to attend school via a high-tech robot is “awesome.”

“It’s pretty awesome to just be able to roam around on the robot and go from class to class instead of relying on someone to take the computer from class to class,” Max told FoxNews.com.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Palm Computing and Numenta Founder Jeff Hawkins Says True Machine Intelligence Now Less Than Five Years Away

The man who produced the first Palm Pilot and went on to found Numenta told a Silicon Valley gathering last week that he believes his company will successfully produce the first computers which can think and reason on their own. "We're going to finish this off in less than five years," declared Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Numenta.
Hawkins, who founded Palm Computing in 1992 and has been leading Numenta for the past nine years, delivered his prediction at the SVForum iHuman Conference in San Mateo, California last Thursday. Widely regarded as one of the country's foremost experts in the biological structure of the human brain, Hawkins has been working on machine learning technology that would give computers the ability to gather large amounts of data and use it to become even smarter as time goes on.
"I'm trying to reverse engineer the neocortex," explained Hawkins, referring to the area of the brain where spatial reasoning and conscious thought reside.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Computers Catch Up To Primate Brains

For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to design computer networks that can mimic visual skills such as recognizing objects, which the human brain does very accurately and quickly.
Until now, no computer model has been able to match the primate brain at visual object recognition during a brief glance. However, a new study from MIT neuroscientists has found that one of the latest generation of these so-called “deep neural networks” matches the primate brain.
Because these networks are based on neuroscientists’ current understanding of how the brain performs object recognition, the success of the latest networks suggest that neuroscientists have a fairly accurate grasp of how object recognition works, says James DiCarlo, a professor of neuroscience and head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the senior author of a paper describing the study in the Dec. 18 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Artificial Muscles That Remember

But these polymers could be even smarter if they incorporated another capability, shape memory. Shape memory polymers can be deformed to take on a particular shape—say, a spiral—then return to their original shape—flat, for instance—when triggered by a stimulus such as a change in temperature.

Smoukov is working on developing ionic actuators that also have shape memory, to make muscles that move back and forth between two, or possibly even three, states. “We can actually design about any function or any combination of functions that you like,” he told a session of the Materials Reseach Society’s fall meeting in Boston last week.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Scientists Create a Robot capable of Studying Movement over Various Terrains

Submitted by Joseph Gibson on Mon, 12/22/2014 - 12:59

It has been reported that scientist have developed a stick bug robot, dubbed Hector, that will be able to study movement over various terrains.

The researchers from Germany's Bielefeld University built a giant robot insect with six independently moving legs in order to study movement over various terrains.

For the design of the robot, the researchers actually motion captured a real stick insect walking and climbing.

- See more at: Scientists Create a Robot capable of Studying Movement over Various Terrains Perfect Science