[lotuseclat79]

AIDA Robot Aims To Change The Way We Interact With Our Car (w/ Video).

MIT researchers and designers are developing the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) - a new in-car personal robot that aims to change the way we interact with our car. The project is a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.


AIDA. Photo - Courtesy of the SENSEable City Lab

-- Tom

[ekim68]

NASA moon-excavation robot competition digs deep

Student teams use automation and robotics technologies to design and build robotic machines to excavate simulated lunar soil (known as "regolith") last week. And the goal is leave your opponents in the dust — literally.

Excavating regolith, according to NASA, will be an important part of any construction projects or processing of natural resources on the Moon. The robots are tested in box containing eight tons of simulated lunar regolith that is about four metres square and about one-half-metre deep. In order to qualify for a prize, a robot must dig up and then dump at least 150 kilograms of regolith into a container in 30 minutes. The teams with the robots that move the most regolith will claim the three cash prizes.

http://www.automationmag.com/2009103...digs-deep.html

[lotuseclat79]

Armada of Robots to Explore Saturn's Titan?.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.

"The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time."

"In the future, multiple robots will be in the driver's seat," Fink said. These robots would share information in almost real time. This type of exploration may one day be used on a mission to Titan, Mars and other planetary bodies. Current proposals for Titan would use an orbiter, an air balloon and rovers or lake landers.

-- Tom

[ekim68]

More on post #178:

A glimpse of the future: Robots aid Japan's elderly residents

TOKYO — It looks like a scene from Robocop or one of the Terminator movies: A human steps into a sleek robot suit and is miraculously transformed, suddenly capable of astonishing feats of strength.

But this is no sci-fi film — it's a promotional video by Cyberdyne, a Japanese electronics company. It shows an elderly male patient with Parkinson's disease being strapped into a robotic skeleton that, using sensors attached to the wearer's skin, reacts to nerve impulses and moves its "arms" and "legs" accordingly.

The robotic suit, known as the Hybrid Assisted Limb (or HAL), is designed to boost its wearer's strength by a multiple of 10. In July, it allowed the patient at the Seiko En nursing home in Tsurugashima, Japan, to walk for the first time in two years, Cyberdyne CEO Yoshiyuki Sankai says.

"I was surprised," Sankai admits. "I expected him to stand up, but not to walk."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/ro...n-robots_N.htm

[Blackmirror]

Until robots are equipped with a human brain then we are safe

[lotuseclat79]

Photos: International Robot Exhibition 2009.

Hundreds of robots have gathered at the International Robot Exhibition (IREX) now underway at Tokyo Big Sight. Here are a few photos from the event, which runs until November 28.

-- Tom

[Gabriel]

Originally Posted by Blackmirror

Until robots are equipped with a human brain then we are safe

WhoaThat could be scary BM.

[ekim68]

As much as I am a fan of robots and robotics, I believe that could be a concern...They already respond to the commands programmed in. (And we have seen first hand on this site how damaging some software is...) Didn't Asimov propose the first law of robots was to not injure humans?

[lotuseclat79]

Download Your Own Robot Scientist.

Ever wanted to have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it’s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Scientists, lawyers mull effects of home robots.

Eric Horvitz illustrates the potential dilemmas of living with robots by telling the story of how he once got stuck in an elevator at Stanford Hospital with a droid the size of a washing machine.

-- Tom

[ekim68]

Robots of future may need a good lawyer

Robots have been an increasingly familiar sight in recent years, disarming explosives in Iraq, delivering mail in industrial complexes or bringing drugs to nurses in hospitals. But the coming generation of robots will be cleaning houses, doing security work, helping in nursing homes and handling a widening variety of tasks as their capabilities grow.

As robots leave the factories and move into homes and businesses, there is going to be more and more interaction between regular people and increasingly more competent - and mobile - machines, said M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. And more contact always means more problems, and the U.S. legal system better be prepared, he said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...BA691AVGGS.DTL

[lotuseclat79]

A new step forward for robots.

Engineers decode human balance to build walking robots.


M2V2 is a life-size bipedal robot. Sensors in its feet help it stand on one foot and shift sideways. Courtesy of The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

The A-Team of Robots (Audio Slide Show).

Researchers at University of Minnesota's Center for Distributed Robotics have built robots of diverse sizes, shapes, and specialties -- now can the bots work as a team?

-- Tom

[ekim68]

On a Roll: Autonomous Navigation Lasers and Robotics Push "Smart" Wheelchair Technology to the Cutting Edge

Engineers can build autonomous vehicles capable of cruising city streets without the aid of a human driver, as demonstrated two years ago in the DARPA Urban Challenge. A team of researchers is now looking to translate that success to the medical field by building so-called "smart wheelchairs" with artificial intelligence that uses lasers, sensors and mapping software to operate and navigate powered chairs for riders who cannot do so on their own.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...art-wheelchair

[lotuseclat79]

The Robot Revolution: Robot Revolution Around the World (Videos).

If science fiction is to believed, the world is a few steps away from an Artificial Intelligence revolution, a technological leap that will enable us to have robots in the home, helping us in our daily tasks and jobs... before they rise up against us. However before Judgement Day happens, we look at who is leading the market in robotics.

-- Tom