SCHEMA is a conversational humanoid robot at Waseda University in Japan with some pretty serious skills. As you’ll see in the new video they have posted (which is embedded below), SCHEMA is able to participate in a three person conversation without losing the plot, and is perfectly capable of understanding which speaker is which and what has been said by whom. It’s an impressive performance, to say the very least.
The more that technology advances, the more important it becomes to remind ourselves of its potential pitfalls–I’m speaking, of course, about killer robots. As we push closer to Halloween, it seems like an appropriate time to pay tribute to some of the baddest, meanest, and downright creepiest robots we’ve seen on screen and the front pages of the Technology section.
Here’s the PCMag staff’s nominees for the scariest robots of all time.
Humanoid! Robots! In space! It’s been 15 years in the making, and now mankind is finally ready to launch Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot, into space. The “robot butler” is designed to help human space travelers, and perhaps, at some point, even replace them during particularly risky missions.
Robonaut 2 will be part of the November 1st shuttle launch, taking off packed in a box full of foam on the space shuttle Discover.
“The challenge we accepted when we started the Robonaut project was to build something capable of doing dexterous, human-like work,” NASA’s Rob Ambrose told MSNBC. “From the very beginning, the idea was the robot had to be capable enough to do the work but at the same time be safe and trusted to do that work right next to humans.”
In the meantime, he’s been embarking on an equally arduous mission: Twitter. The space ‘bot has been tweeting since July under the handle @AstroRobonaut. He’s accrued some 16,000-odd followers in that time, helping engage space fans with tweets such as, “I have exactly one week left on Earth — Discovery (and I!) launches at 4:40 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 1!!”
Robots can help children become smarter and happier. Javier Movellan, who has spent the better part of the last three decades playing with kids and robots, is sure of it.
Movellan, an associate professor affiliated with UC San Diego’s Machine Perception Laboratory, is a psychologist and a robotics researcher. He studies children’s interactions with robots for two reasons: to better understand childhood development and to build better robots. He has found that emotion and interactivity are more important to kids than humanoid appearance or abstract intelligence. Movellan answered Wired.com’s questions about his work by e-mail.
Image: Javier Movellan with Qrio Robot at UCSD’s Early Childhood Education Center. Credit: UCSD Machine Perception Lab.
Household robots could become a reality sooner than we think. But the first hurdle they would have to clear is to prove they can make great pancakes. After all, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
A demo posted by Willow Garage, a Palo Alto, California, robotic company, shows two robots working together to make pancakes from a mix. The robots — James and Rosie — even flipped the pancakes correctly.
As you can see in the video (the fun stuff begins at the 1:26 mark) the James robot opened and closed cupboards and drawers, removed the pancake mix from the refrigerator, and handed it to Rosie.
Rosie the robot cooks and flips the pancakes and gives them back to James. Watch for that moment of suspense when Rosie is about to flip the pancake (at the 8:35 mark) and the spontaneous applause from the onlookers when the robot gets it right.
“Behind this domestic tableau is a demonstration of the capabilities of service bots,” says Willow Garage on its blog. “This includes characteristics such as learning, probabilistic inference and action planning.”
For a robot, learning how to flip a pancake is quite a task. Earlier this year, two researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology taught a robot how to do it. The robot had to hold its hand stiffly to throw the pancake in the air and then flex the hand just enough so it could catch the pancake without having it bounce off the pan. It took that robot about 50 tries to get it right.
The latest experiment brought together two different robots: James, a $400,000 robot from Willow Garage and Rosie, a robot from the Technical University Munich. The two robots are among the most sophisticated and advanced humanoid robots today.
James has two stereo camera pairs in its head. The four 5-megapixel cameras are supplemented with a tilting laser range finder. Each of the robot’s forearms has an Ethernet wide-angle camera, while the grippers at the tip have three-axis accelerometers and pressure-sensor arrays on the fingertips. At the base of the robot is another laser range finder.
The PR2 is powered by two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, 48 GB of memory and a battery system equivalent to 16 laptop batteries or about two hours of battery life.
Rosie has two laser scanners for mapping and navigation, one laser scanner for 3-D laser scans and four cameras, including two 2-megapixel cameras, one stereo-on-chip camera and a Swiss-Ranger SR4000 time-of-flight camera.
The advanced capabilities of the robots came in handy for the task they were assigned. In the demo, one of the robots used the web to solve a cooking problem it faced. The robot looked up a picture on the web and went online to find the cooking instructions for the pancake mix that came from the fridge.
James and Rosie aren’t yet ready “for haute cuisine” say Willow Garage researchers. Nor are they likely to be in your kitchen anytime soon, unless you are ready to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars for a pancake that may not be half as good as the $5 IHOP stack.
But the experiment gives us a pretty good sense of the possibilities. And the robots are cute, besides.
Robots have been singing for a minute. But the HRP-4C doesn’t just sing, she performs. Watch her chirp the lyrics to her song, work the crowd, and shake her stuff in sync with her back up dancers. It’s pretty amazing. More »
Face it, some day you, me and everybody else will be working along-side robots. They’re already in our factories and starting to arrive in our homes. Despite everyone’s irrational fear of “our robot overlords,” this is as it should be. The only problem is that robots today are not nearly as smart as we think they are and a powerful manufacturing bot could, without meaning to, take your head off if you get in its way.
No, robots are not trying to harm us, but programming them to understand our emotions, needs and reactions to, say, pain is pretty darn difficult. Over in Slovenia, scientists are seeking to overcome this android deficit by teaching robots how humans react to varying degrees of human-robot collisions. To do so, researchers took a standard Epson manufacturing robot arm and programmed it to “punch” someone’s arm as many as 18 times with dull and then increasingly sharp instruments. Punchees were asked to record the severity of their pain. This ranged from “painless” to “unbearable”.
If our future is literally filled with robots, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to work alongside them without occasionally bumping into each other. As a report in New Scientist explains, the data will be used to program future robots and ensure that they slow down when sensors indicate they’re in the proximity of a human. No word on if the scientist will also program robots that do bump into humans to say, “My bad.”
Surgical procedures assisted by robots are nothing new — they can be more precise and less invasive — and now it looks like a new upgrade could make them even better. The main drawback of a surgical robot is that the human surgeon performing the operation gets no tactile feedback, but that’s not the case with Sofie. Sofie, a joystick controlled robot gives haptic feedback to the surgeon by adjusting the resistance the controls give to indicate how much pressure is being exerted, surely a welcome addition to bots of this kind. This robot is also more compact than many earlier bots of this kind, and its creators are now looking to bring it into production, with a goal of it coming to the market in about five years.
Jets, spacecraft, and giant robots—some people build amazing things in their garages. Makes you feel a little self-conscious about that “cherry” 1981 Malibu and the stack of National Geographics you keep threatening to put on eBay, doesn’t it. More »
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Face it, some day you, me and everybody else will be working along-side robots. They’re already in our factories and starting to arrive in our homes. Despite everyone’s irrational fear of “our robot overlords,” this is as it should be. The only problem is that robots today are not nearly as smart as we think they are and a powerful manufacturing bot could, without meaning to, take your head off if you get in its way.
