Technology - Beyond human: How I became a cyborg. When writer Frank Swain joined the ranks of the cyborgs, he discovered that it meant losing control of a part of his body. In the first of our Beyond Human series, he explores why enhancing the senses raises surprising personal and ethical problems. Listen: What does red or green sound like? In the clip above from BBC Radio 4’s Hack My Hearing, Frank Swain meets an artist who created a unique device allowing him to hear colours. Last year I became a cyborg. At the time it didn’t seem like an auspicious occasion, more a humbling and disorientating experience. My journey began when my hearing started to falter, due to a combination of unlucky genetics and too many late nights in loud clubs. With that decision, I joined the millions of people whose mind, body or senses are replaced by technology, from wireless pacemakers to bionic legs. When I was fitted with hearing aids, I wondered: could I hack them to give me enhanced listening abilities?
No tinkering He needn’t have worried too much. Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots. SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie. Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon.
The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans. It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year. Executives at the Internet giant are circumspect about what exactly they plan to do with their robot collection. But Boston Dynamics and its animal kingdom-themed machines bring significant cachet to Google’s robotic efforts, which are being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who spearheaded the development of Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software. A recent video shows a robot named Cheetah running on a treadmill. Mr. Dr. This Drone Can Fly, Swim, Drive, and Hop Its Way Through a Mission | Danger Room.
The Sandia Multi-Modal Vehicle Concept. Image: Sandia National Laboratories The future of military drones isn’t surveillance and dropping bombs. It’s transformation: a single unmanned vehicle that can fly, swim, drive, and even hop like a frog across a variety of terrains and obstacles. Conceived by the Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Cybernetics unit at Sandia National Laboratories, the “Multi-Modal Vehicle Concept” would travel land, sea, and air by transforming itself to accommodate different terrains. Its wings become fins as it dives into water, or underwater paddles that shed casings to reveal wheels as it moves toward land — wheels with the ability to jump 30 feet into the air. As it stands now, carrying out a similar mission would require coordinating a team of unmanned aerial, undersea, and ground vehicles made by different manufacturers with different communications systems.
Multi-Modal Vehicle does have its limitations. Nanotech bots can find, kill diseases. Insectes cyborg : petits robots et grosses questions. ROBOTS - Est-ce un insecte ou un robot? Les deux mon général. Lancé cet été sur une plateforme de crowdfunding par une entreprise éducative, le projet RoboRoach propose de démocratiser les neurosciences... en créant son propre cafard cyborg. Si l’initiative peut faire sourire, des chercheurs de la North Carolina State University (NCSU) prennent la chose au sérieux. Ils estiment dans une étude que de petits cyborgs, comme ces cafards, pourraient se révéler utiles en cas de catastrophe, grâce à leur capacité à explorer éboulis, ruines et autres décombres. Lire aussi: » Le MIT crée des robots qui s'assemblent tout seuls » Robocup: les robots aussi ont droit à leur Coupe du monde de football Cartographie en direct L'idée? Dans un premier temps, les cyborgs exploreraient la zone de manière tout à fait aléatoire.
Une fois la nuée de cyborgs éparpillée, les cyborgs seraient ensuite instruits de continuer d'avancer jusqu'à ce qu'ils se retrouvent face à un mur et le suivent. Polémique. Boston Dynamics frees its four-legged sprinting robot: Cheetah becomes WildCat (video) Robots May Revolutionize China's Electronics Manufacturing. Robotic Snakes Could Invade Mars (For Science) So far, the only robots to be sent to the Martian surface have come in the form of stationary landers or mobile rovers. But could the next generation of robotic Mars explorer come in the form of a… snake? This little bit of lateral, slithery thinking comes from researchers at SINTEF (Stiftelsen for Industriell og Teknisk Forskning), a research institute based in Trondheim, Norway, who have built prototype robotic snakes that could explore where no Mars rover has ever explored before.
VIDEO: Mars Tumbleweed Rover to Explore Mars? The key problem with any robotic Mars exploration effort is that of maneuverability, even the most agile of wheeled rover has limits on what it can do. The best thing about snakes is that they are the ultimate contortionists able to probe any nook and cranny, avoiding hazards along the way. “Manoeuvrability is a challenge. ANALYSIS: Could the Tumbleweed Rover Dominate Mars? ANALYSIS: Mars Tumbleweed Rovers Will Rock, Bounce and Roll. How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them. The Insane Sex Robots We Never Saw in Elysium. The one piece of genuine cleverness in this film was how the citizens of Elysium ceded their true power to the robots.
They preserved their own authority, but delegated their strength to an impartial, dispassionate force that did not share their prejudices. By editing a file, Matt Damon and his friend were able to harness that strength for the rest of humanity. Once this was done, the robots would no longer harm Earth-dwellers, or allow them to come to harm through inaction (which is why they dispatched medical aid to Earth). Essentially, the presence of robots and artificial intelligence in a position of power (who were not influenced by that position's usual prejudices) allowed the class gap to be bridged in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. Robot Climbs Walls to Paint Graffiti.
Designers from Berlin creative firm Sonice Development created the Vertwalker, a roomba-looking, wall-climbing bot that paints a trail of color in its wake. At an installation in Jerusalem, the Vertwalker glided across a once-white wall in a nonsensical design, making seemingly random twists and turns along the way. As Fast Co. Design explains: "The Vertwalker works autonomously with a fixed set of rules that make use of the internal sensors and keep it within a specified area on the wall. It’s that unexpected pattern that creates the Vertwalker’s wall art. Inside a small lip that lines the bot's outside hides a vacuum, which suctions the bot to the wall, but just enough so it can still freely glide.
Although the Vertwalker makes it possible to tag the skyscrapers of the future with some drone-powered graffiti, that isn't the designers' ultimate goal. The bot is currently on display in a London Gallery. Image: Vimeo, Sonice Development. Will Robots Replace Rent-a-Cops? Image via Flickr Has a fear of robotics ever kept anyone from robbing banks? I'm not talking about the surveillance systems, laser-armed tripwires, noisy alarms, or automated locks on the doors. I'm talking about actual robots—an evolution of the ROOMBA Vacuum cleaner, but with legs, not cute, and definitely not something you want to rob. Now, an EU-funded, £7.2 million ($11 million USD) collaborative project, called Strands, is underway in England to develop 4D, artificial intelligence for security and care applications. It aims to produce intelligent robo-sentinels that can patrol areas, and learn to detect abnormalities in human behavior.
Strands, as Nick Hawes of the University of Birmingham said, will "develop novel approaches to extract spatio-temporal structure from sensor data gathered during months of autonomous operation," to develop intelligence that can then "exploit [those] structures to yield adaptive behavior in highly demanding, real-world security and care scenarios. " MIT performs the greatest unboxing ever: The Atlas Robot | News. DARPA Is Developing an Intelligent Machine That Can Think on Its Feet. Image via Wikimedia Commons Will a computer ever really mimic the human brain?
Recently, we learned it takes 82,000 super-powerful processors to simulate just one percent of the brain for a single second—the brain is so large and complex, simulating the whole shebang is near impossible. The futurists over at DARPA, who have long been chasing artificial intelligence, are after something slightly different. Rather than focusing on the mind's capacity and scale, they're interested in mimicking the cognitive thought process itself. They're working to develop a machine that can esstentially reason and problem-solve on the fly, without human intervention—"intelligent real-time computing," as they call it.
In other words, a computer that can not just think, but think on its feet. The research agency's new program to this effect will focus on mimicking the cerebral neocortex—the part of the brain that's crucial for things like memory, perception, awareness, and attention. H/T Network World. The First Talking Robot Travels to Space. The world's smallest astronaut is heading into deep orbit. At barely a foot tall and lighter than a pair of moon boots, Kirobo is a talking Japanese robot that will be the newest guest at the International Space Station. The robot, which is equipped with voice recognition programming, will record and relay communications to Mirata, a twin machine back on Earth. He will also record conversations with Kochi Wakata, the incoming ISS commander assuming leadership in November. The origin of the term "Kirobo" is a mix of the Japanese words for "hope" and "robot. " He is able to perceive human faces and experience empathy and compassion, making it far more intelligent than existing question-and-answer devices like ones that offer physical therapy and assist with walking.
"We are trying to help create a society where humans and robots coexist," said Fuminori Kataoka, the project's general manager, in a recent video. "It was designed so that the person feels the robot being sympathetic or kind. " No, Really, How Do We Keep Robots From Destroying Humans? In the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, SGR-1 robots are on patrol, equipped with cameras and radar to detect intruders as well as speakers to warn them off. If that fails, they also carry machine guns and grenade launchers. In the U.S., the Home Exploring Robotic Butler can retrieve a book from a shelf, a meal from a microwave or a drink from the kitchen.
It can even separate an Oreo cookie. In Japan, a seal-like robot called Paro provides companionship for seniors -- and seems to ease the effects of dementia. Over the next few decades, robots will become part of everyday life. But as they grow more sophisticated and autonomous, they’ll confront situations of cultural and moral ambiguity that won’t be easily resolved -- situations that people, over the millennia, have learned to navigate but that resist codification that machines can easily understand. Three challenges in particular need to be explored. Robot Warriors The first and most immediate is in warfare.
Meet DARPA’s real-world Terminator, Atlas. DARPA and Boston Dynamics, of BigDog, Petman, and Cheetah fame, have unveiled their most advanced humanoid robot yet: Atlas. At 6’2″ (188cm) and 330lbs (150kg), Atlas is incredibly imposing; with 28 hydraulically actuated joints, LIDAR and stereo vision, a beefy on-board computer, and some of the most advanced robotic limbs ever conceived, Atlas is remarkably human-like in its behavior. While Atlas is initially conceived as a disaster response robot, such as cleaning up and looking for survivors after a Fukushima-like disaster, it’s easy to imagine Atlas being the basis of a robotic army, supported by BigDog mules. As you can see in the photo above and the video below, Atlas is incredibly technologically advanced. With 28 hydraulic joints, Atlas can replicate almost every degree of human motion — or, in the case of the robot hands provided by iRobot and Sandia National Labs, surpass them.
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot. Click to zoom in. 'Terminator' false arm ties shoelace and deals cards. Watch This Robotic Dog Throw Cinder Blocks With Its Head | Danger Room. Updated, 5:23 p.m. Flesh-and-blood dogs merely fetch. The robotic pooch that Darpa funded can throw. Boston Dynamics’ BigDog started life as a headless four-legged robot capable of hauling soldiers’ gear along rough and uneven terrain. The BigDog’s upgrades and follow-on robots are expanding the boundaries of robotic motion, initially with cash from Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office.
Its quadruped packmate the Cheetah can outrun Usain Bolt. But the BigDog has some new tricks: like, um, throwing a cinderblock, as shown in the video above that Boston Dynamics released Thursday. Whereas once the BigDog disturbingly lacked anything topping off its torso, Boston Dynamics has attached a fifth appendage where a humanoid robot’s head should be.
This is a new frontier for the BigDog. Update, 5:23 p.m.: I’ve changed the headline, since Darpa didn’t provide the add-on for the BigDog to throw anything. Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics. Augmented reality robot brings us one step closer to 'Avatar' technology. In the movie "Avatar," humans have developed technology that allows them to remotely control a genetically engineered alien body. Now new developments in augmented reality are bringing us eerily close to realizing that technology in the real world. Japanese researchers with Different Dimension Inc., a start-up company working on augmented reality, have invented a robot that can take on the appearance of any virtual or real character, which can potentially be controlled and animated remotely, reports Gizmag. Anyone present with the robot can then touch and physically interact with the virtual character as if they were really there.
Technically these developments go beyond augmented reality — which is the projection of virtual information onto the real world — and ventures into a new realm called "mixed reality," which gives virtual objects a physical reality. You can see the technology in action in the following video:
DARPA: Military's Martial Law Robots Herding Humans? Boston Dynamics: Dedicated to the Science and Art of How Things Move.