Hasta La Gadget!

Filling up potholes can be quite the thankless job for local municipal councils, but it is a necessary job that needs to be done. Sometimes, it can get quite hot and sweltering under the unforgiving afternoon sun, and here we are with a robot that could eventually end up filling up potholes throughout the city, while making sure that its roads are clean. At the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B for short), it demonstrated its latest pan-India robotics competition known as E-Yantra, which is open to all undergraduate engineering students. The whole idea is to create different kinds of robots, and one such programme include the ability for robots to fill up potholes. Well, this would certainly mean less work for us humans, but it could also translate to having less accidents while being on the job, right? After all, the robots can work round the clock without worrying about being tired or asking for a raise, and they won’t even pull off a strike.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Mahoro lab android performs dangerous lab work, AndyVision robots might spell end of retail assistants,

Are robots slowly but surely taking over the whole world? That does seem to be the case from what we have seen in the movies – they might end up subjugating mankind like in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or they could help us out as droids, ala Star Wars. Researchers over at Carnegie Mellon University are far more practical, where at the Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing, this bunch of brains on legs have managed to successfully develop a robot which is said to make life a whole lot easier at the supermarket – and also the lives of store owners.

Known as AndyVision, their robot will be able to assist store owners in keeping items in stock, where the robot itself comes with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, in addition to 2D and 3D images of products as well as a floor plan of the premises. This mechanized robot will wander around the shop, making sure that those items that are suffering from low lines or are out of stock will be replenished – soon, and alert the store owner of incorrectly shelved items. I wonder whether customers will also be able to pass a pre-fabricated shopping list to AndyVision and it goes through its database, printing out the exact aisle and shelves as to where you can find these items.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robot learns about body language, Popchilla robot toy might be able to help autistic children,

If there is one thing that robots need to do in order to enter the uncanny valley deeper than ever before, they would need to pick up the nuances of a human’s body language. Yes sir, that is right – robots still have no idea on how to figure out the nitty gritty of our body language. After all, it is said that what we communicate is just 30% effective through speech, the bulk of the remainder go through body language. A research scientist at Willow Garage is currently hoping to imbue robots with basic etiquette lessons, including making way in an elevator whenever someone else wants to get in.

It would be a real leap in the artificial intelligence world if robots of the future are able to pick up all the small details that, well, make us human. After all, androids in movies like Alien and Star Trek could easily fool us into thinking that they were really humans, until one sees the innards of the particular android being full of wires, bolts and nuts. Having said that, can robots be taught to lie, and when they do, will they also send out signals unwittingly, such as touching the ear or nose?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Popchilla robot toy might be able to help autistic children, Robot hand wins every time at Rock, Paper, Scissors game,

A couple of years ago we saw a glove that can play rock paper scissors. While that glove was smart – it learns from your patterns – it could still lose. This robot hand on the other hand will win 100% of the time, all the time. It’s not psychic, it just has insanely fast reflexes.

Scientists at the Ishikawa Oku Laboratary used a combination of a high speed camera and a fast moving robot hand, resulting in a rock paper scissors champ that recognizes what hand its opponent is going to play. In other words, the robot will wait for you to make your move before it decides what to play, but it all happens in only a few milliseconds that you won’t be able to notice it. Watch the demo below:

You know who can beat this robot? The glove. Problem solved.

[via Ishikawa Oku Laboratory via IEEE via Ubergizmo]

Japan got itself in the good graces of many a Futurama fan after creating Bender’s ancestor. Then again, another Japanese robotic creation — one that specializes in rock, paper, scissors — may actually have more in common with the morally questionable, beer-guzzling bot. That’s because this sneaky little future overlord wins 100 percent of its matches by using an oh-so human trait known as cheating. See, the researchers at the University of Tokyo’s 4chan, er, Ishikawa Oku Laboratory programmed the “Janken” robot to recognize its human opponent’s hand shape and counter it within a millisecond. Adding to the troll factor is the fact that it was unwittingly named the “Human-Machine Cooperation System” because, well, it needs the cooperation of some poor human sap to work its magic. The achievement joins other man-versus-machine milestones, including losses by humans in chess and shogi. Of course, the question now is, what happens if you pit two “Janken” machines against each other?

Continue reading Japanese robot trolls humans at rock-paper-scissors, sadly wasn’t named the UMADBRO 9000 (video)

Japanese robot trolls humans at rock-paper-scissors, sadly wasn’t named the UMADBRO 9000 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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