Also soon to be no longer required will be lab bench workers, who perform no
better and at much more cost than a new robot. This is good news for
reducing the cost of drug development, but not so good for human
scientists.

The US Army has awarded US$2.25 million to two robotics firms to prototype a
robot “dog” (in the context, “mule” would seem more appropriate) to carry
ammunition, food, and supplies into battle, reports Wired‘s Noah
Shachtman. Legged locomotion for robots is extremely difficult but advances are
very visible in Sony’s Aibo robot dog, Honda’s Asimo humanoid, and
Sony’s Qrio child-sized humanoid that can run — albeit barely, and then
only on a flat surface unlikely to obtain on a battlefield. The four-legged
robots will see in three dimensions, as we do, using technology developed at
NASA and currently at work on Mars in the Spirit rover.

Reference: Shachtman, Noah (2004).
“http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61808,00.html.” Wired News, January
7.

Underwater State of the Art

A state-of-the-art Canadian autonomous robot called Aqua can walk on
the ground and sea floor and swim using six flippers. The machine is designed to
monitor the ocean environment and biology, survey ship bottoms and oil
platforms, and conduct undersea searches. Recent successful tests in the
Caribbean are to be followed by further trials in Canadian lakes this summer.
Aqua can walk into the water from the shore, swim to a specified area,
build a three-dimensional model of what it sees, and recognize objects known to
it.

Reference: Kapica, Jack (2004). “Canadian
robotics project makes waves.” Globe and Mail Update, January 23.

Robo-Birds

Asking people just a few years to ago to imagine wheeled robots roaming
hospital wards by themselves seemed to be asking a lot, yet it has come to pass.
Now, instead of the trundling wheeled robot or the ungainly android, imagine
tiny robobirds zooming through hospital corridors to check up on patients,
locate a doctor (who’s forgotten to turn on his pager or implanted chip), or
guide a visitor through the hospital labyrinth.

A University of Delaware professor is developing flocks of bird- and
insect-like miniature flying robots for area surveillance. Obvious applications
include industrial, military, and rescue. High-tech materials such as
carbon-fiber composites and Mylar keep the robots light yet strong. A flock of
such devices may eventually be autonomously controlled by wireless networking
among the robots, but first the professor and his team must optimize the flying
ability of the flapping wing robots. They especially want to mimic the
hummingbird’s ability to hover.

How real is such R&D? As real as the funding it has attracted from the US
National Science Foundation, Air Force, National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and National Institutes of Health.

Reference: University Of Delaware (2004). “Small
Robotic Devices Fly Like Birds.” Science Daily, January 26.

Smarter Vision

A system built from a $30 webcam plus a motorized pan-tilt camera mount and a
processor, costing less than $300 in total, can detect motion by analyzing
differences between frames (15 per second) and then automatically follow the
moving object. Key to the system is a very fast and efficient, patent-pending,
image-processing algorithm. The system’s developers are now working to give it
the ability to track a given size, shape, or color, and ignore other moving
objectgs in its field of view.

Applications include surveillance at ATM machines, businesses, hospitals,
warehouses, factories, and homes, homeland defense, military uses, child
monitoring, playground surveillance, hospital ward monitoring, border patrol,
and videoconferencing (enabling speakers to walk around without going
off-camera.)

We think this development is interesting both for its functionality and its
low cost, which results from the commoditization of video and miniature motor
technologies. Such commoditization is occurring in medical technologies also,
and will have the same cost-cutting, function-improving impact.

Reference: University of Rhode Island (2004). “Advanced
motion-tracking camera developed for security, surveillance.” Science Blog,
January 26.

Robot-Human Cooperation

Carnegie Mellon University researchers backed by US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency funding are exploring the frontier of robot-human cooperation by
putting both robots and humans onto Segway scooters to form a soccer
team, and watching how they cooperate to win. All team members will be on a
“level playing field,” so to speak, with essentially identical acceleration,
speed, and maneuverability, and using the same ball manipulation device.

The lessons learned may apply to human-robot collaborative situations in
general. Examples, report Eric Smalley and Kimberly Patch in Technology
Research News, include “autonomous robot vehicles sharing the roadway with
human-driven vehicles, robot building construction crews, search and rescue
operations, and space exploration.”

The human players will be able to communicate with the robot players through
an (undescribed) device and (it appears) through speech. The robots have a
vision camera to track the soccer ball and onboard computers to processes images
from the camera and make decisions. The robots learn how to play soccer by being
first remote-controlled by humans in a game. Having internalized the rules and
skills of the game, they then become fully autonomous players.

Reference: Smalley, Eric; and Kimberly Patch
(2003/4). “Bots,
humans play together.” Technology Research News, December 31, 2003/January
7, 2004.

Robo-Scientists

Major media world-wide picked up on the news that British scientists have
developed a “robotic scientist” able autonomously to design and conduct genetics
experiments and interpret the results. In tests, the robot scientist produced
the same lab bench results generated by graduate students doing the same work.
As is usually the case, its developers deflect consideration of the job losses
such technology implies, by claiming the robot will free scientists from the
drudgery of lab-intensive work and enable them to pursue higher, more creative,
things. As the robot becomes more intelligent, it will be able to take over even
more functions.

For a sense of how intelligent robots will become, read “Next Gen
Supercomputers” and “Quantum, Photonic AI” in the Computing section. For
further discussion of the impact of robots on employment, see “The End of Work”
in the Acceleration section.

Reference: Dominguez, Alex (2004). “Scientists
Develop Experimenting Robot.” Associated Press/Yahoo News, January 14.