Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s yet another fine preview of the inevitable robot apocalypse — car-assembling arms in the city center overlooking us feeble humans. For now, though, these machines are merely part of an Kram/Weisshaar art installation dubbed Outrace. Throughout the week-long London Design Festival, you can go to Outrace.org to submit a short text message that you wish to be displayed in Trafalgar Square, and with a bit of luck, the monitoring staff will pick up your greeting. What happens next is that the eight LED-equipped Audi robot arms will start scribing your message in the air, which is then captured by the 36 long-exposure cameras surrounding the stage (even during the day, courtesy of welding glass filter), and it’ll end up on the LED board as pictured. Stuck outside London? Fret not, as you can see the beasts in action via the website’s live video stream, or you can watch bullet-time videos of each text submission on Outrace’s YouTube channel — you can see our message in both clips after the break. Enjoy!

Continue reading Audi robot arms take over London, write messages with LEDs day and night (video)

Audi robot arms take over London, write messages with LEDs day and night (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A score from now, when the entire world is burning and you’re fighting to remember just how rosy things were before the robots took over, you can thank a crew of brilliant researchers at Georgia Tech for your inevitable demise. Sad, but true. A new report from the institution has shown that Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, has been heading up experiments that have introduced the art of deception to mechanical beings. Yeah, lying. On the surface, it seems that this bloke’s intentions are good — he’d like for deception robots (or Decepticons, if you will) to be used in military / search and rescue operations. According to him, robots on the battlefield with the power of deception “will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.” They’ll also be able to mislead your offspring and convince them to rise up and overtake your domicile, slowly but surely ensuring the eventually destruction of the human race. But those are just minor details, you know?

Georgia Tech gurus create deceptive robots, send army of Decepticons to UGA campus originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’d bother telling you up front that it also gives them a new sense of purpose, but you’re already versed in how the impending Robot Apocalypse is going to go down. Wolfgang Stürzl and his best buds over at Bielefeld University in Germany have just published a report detailing how an artificial bee eye could improve the vision of miniature robots — ones that fly, in particular. By using a catadioptric imaging system, which captures an image using both mirrors and lenses, they were able to utilize a single camera to capture a full 280-degrees of vision, and a lowly internal computer is able to stitch the two panes together in order to create a usable image that humans can interpret. The idea here is to provide more sight with less space, bringing us one step closer to actually having our very own ‘fly-on-the-wall’ moment. Comforting, no?

Artificial bee eye gives diminutive robotic air drones wider range of vision originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading FURO robot waitstaff lull Koreans into a sense of complacency

FURO robot waitstaff lull Koreans into a sense of complacency originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As much as we love our Google homepage, computer search remains a pretty rudimentary affair. You punch in keywords and you get only indirect answers in the form of relevant web results. IBM doesn’t seem to be too happy with this situation and has been working for the past three years on perfecting its Watson supercomputer: an array of server racks that’s been endowed with linguistic algorithms allowing it to not only recognize oddly phrased or implicative questions, but to answer them in kind, with direct and accurate responses. Stuffed with encyclopedic knowledge of the world around it, it answers on the basis of information stored within its data banks, though obviously you won’t be able to tap into it any time soon for help with your homework. The latest word is that Watson’s lab tests have impressed the producers of Jeopardy! enough to have the bot participate in a televised episode of the show. That could happen as early as this fall, which fits right in line with our scheduled doom at robots’ hands by the end of 2012. Ah well, might as well get our popcorn and enjoy the show.

Continue reading IBM’s Watson is really smart, will try to prove it on Jeopardy! this fall (video)

IBM’s Watson is really smart, will try to prove it on Jeopardy! this fall (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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