Move on up: The newest version of the climbing robot RiSE 3 hugs a pole as it climbs. It can climb rapidly and could prove useful for surveillance or inspection purposes.
Boston Dynamics
ICRA 2009 will showcase everything from tree-climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.
Today marks the start of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) in Kobe, Japan, where researchers from around the world will gather to discuss the latest advances in robotics--from cutting-edge climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania will present the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics--the company behind the four-legged military robot BigDog. It has four legs, and tiny claws made from surgical needles that can dig into a vertical surface. The robot's front legs are long enough to hug a telephone pole, and it can climb at 21 centimeters per second.
"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," says Daniel Koditschek, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the work. Because the robot can walk, climb, and rest quietly on a pole while conserving energy (watch a video), Koditschek says that it could "play an invaluable role in search and rescue, reconnaissance, surveillance, or inspection applications."
Another mobile robot set to debut at the event is Adelopod, developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Adelopod, which is about the size of a video controller, doesn't use legs or even wheels to get around. Instead, it flips itself over and over using a pair of 12-centimeter arms (video of Adelpod in action). This tumbling mode of locomotion is simple, saves energy, and doesn't require complex hardware, say the researchers involved. "Given its size, it can go places that other robots cannot," says Nikos Papanikolopoulos, director of the university's Center for Distributed Robotics. The group has also developed the larger Loper robot, which can carry several Adelopods and scatter them throughout an area.
Researchers at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in Germany, have designed a robot that can find its way around a city without GPS or preloaded maps. It does so by asking pedestrians for directions and using gesture tracking and voice recognition to interpret commands. It also uses human tracking, obstacle detection, and map building to guide itself around a busy city. "The novelty about our research is that we have a robotic system that uses human instructions as global waypoints for navigation in an outdoor environment," says Andrea Bauer, one of the researchers at TUM. "The robot can retrieve missing route knowledge just like a person, by asking passersby." Watch a video of the robot on TUM's website here.
A robot recently helped a quadriplegic shave himself for the first time in 10 years—but even the best mechanical helpers still need supervision.
Robots that stand in for remote workers could force people to learn how to tolerate a new breed of social failings.
Researchers think the solar-powered device could survey aging electrical lines.
I think we are heading either to Paradise or Death.
For Paradise we need to "give" artificial intelligence a soul and a religion. Buddhism would do fine because robots will try not to hurt or kill anybody, not even animals. Also suitable are the Ten Commandments.
Then we need to reform the economy. It has already started. For people it gets more and more difficult to find a job, because robots and artificial intelligence will do our work. It is a big joke that on the whole there is enough wealth for everybody and it is growing fast. But wealth will be concentrated on less and less people.
A solution: The taxation system needs to be modified: Small scale self-employ businesses and private people do not have to pay taxes. Big companies pay a tax proportional to the wealth they provide to people (employees, share-holders and CEOs).
And finally we must change the people as well. They must learn to occupy with themselves correctly if they aren't employed. All people -- regardless of age, sex, race, wealth -- get a social dividend. That's nice but what to do with the free time? Get drunk and randalize is not a good idea.
This is a fair task!
What's so special about robots?
People seem to be overly enamored with the idea of robots to the point of losing a grip on reality here. Robots are not magical man-made creatures created to solve (or cause) all the world's problems. Robots are what happens when you cross-breed a calculator with a power drill. They are complex electromechanical devices used for scientific inquiry or dull, dirty and dangerous tasks. These are amazing pieces of technology, but that is all they are.
Re: What's so special about robots?
Well, look at the bright side. Now you can simply "scare" a cat out of a tree, as opposed to calling the Fire Department to effect rescue.
Major advancement in feline "behavior modification" to be sure.
These advances are truly amazing to watch happen. From the physical movement (the wall climber and the tumbler) to the social information gathering, to the dynamic human detection systems. When we begin to put these all together with a few more advances we could start to see robotics as a household item.
An easy example currently is the Roomba vacume, but it works off of trial and error, with no real learning or mapping. Add in even a few of the technologies here, and it can move around the self-mapped out house avoiding collisions with unexpected people/objects, picking up recognizable objects (empty coffee cups) while doing basic chores at voice command.
As stated above as well, it may not be too much longer until we have a lot more of the manual labor taken over by robots, it happened with the auto-motive industry, what next?
Hi Guys
reading your comments about world automation and jobs losses for humans. What do you think about this www.thevenusproject.com I read one comment about killing people of on the forums earlier but hey... I thought automation was supposed to make human beings lives easier not kill people off? The major problem with capitalism at the moment is that it seems to be making people suffer who lose jobs due to automation. Surely evolution would be speed up if the economic system actually provided an incentive for people automating their jobs. How on earth this will be done though ????
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
National Instruments has gathered customer information and data regarding some of the cost differences between building a custom solution versus using NI off-the-shelf tools. Using this data, we built the Graphical System Design ‘Build vs. Buy’ Calculator. The calculator can help show the financial differences between building a custom solution versus buying an off-the-shelf system. This paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of both a traditional custom design approach and off-the-shelf embedded tools.
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jojo99
12 Comments
Robots
The rapid advances being made in robotics are fascinating!
I think that within 10-20 years, robots will be doing much of the blue-collar work that is currently being done by humans.
Forget about the offshoring of jobs to cheaper economies - robots will be able to do any work cheaper, faster and more efficiently than humans. There will be robots that repair other robots. Robots that build and maintain roads, paint walls, do janitorial work, stock store shelves, grow food, build houses, answer the telephone and provide intelligent responses, etc. In 50 years or less, robots may even be capable of performing much of the white-collar work that is done by humans today.
On the plus side, we humans will then be able to spend much more time thinking of "innovations", writing original books, creating art and so forth. We'll finally have all that free time that technology was promised to bring to us years ago.
But on the negative side, many won't have jobs to occupy their days and won't be productive in terms of work. So it is difficult to envision how our capitalist system will continue, at least in its present form. But perhaps robots will provide us with everything [they think] we need (suggested reading: Jack Williamson's classic 1949 SF book titled "The Humanoids").
With a scarcity of jobs, it seems to me that we will have an excess of dependent population and must therefore find some way to reduce it. Why have children when they will have little chance of ever finding a job or being productive? Perhaps we'll let the old folks die out (or dump them into the Soylent Green tank) while new birth will be only be allowed for those who have the very best genetics and the highest intelligent proclivity.
Or maybe robots will turn the world into a copy of a Terminator movie.
In either case, the rapid development of robots may not bode well for the human race as a whole.
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trueheartnow
1 Comment
Re: Robots
We will have technologies that can make anything...foods...products...large or small...out of compounds, elements, putting two H's with an O together and getting water...going apeshit with carbon and more. We will transcend money. What will be next? I would have to think about it some more. But there is more than enough good to counteract the potential negatives. Optimism is as real as rain.
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erbium
331 Comments
The Humanoids
- great book, he has another one same subject.
robots trying to take over and 'protect' us from ourselves. similar to irobot.
But these guys look suspiciously like the 'replicators' from stargate. All they're lacking is programming as a self learning weapon, which has gone amok and sentient; and a free power source by collecting quantum energy at the subatomic level.
We are working on denser circuits with quantum dots, etc but the 2nd may have to wait a bit.
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