Hasta La Gadget!

There are plenty of robot builders, but none bring as much elegance to engineering as Shigeo Hirose. His creatures are Star Wars, Iron Giant and Dean Kamen rolled into one cybernetic maki.

Truth is, I’d never heard of Shigeo Hirose or the Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab at Tokyo Tech until I read Wired for War—author PW Singer, featured in our interview here, sings the praises of the robot master, possibly the world’s foremost.

As you can see in the montage and the rundown, below, the dude has been building stuff for years, and things he designed 30 years ago, still seem startling compared to the commercial robotics we’ve grown used to. Swimming snakes, tiny velociraptors, and giant hands that close around women’s waists—this guy seems to know that the real fuel of robotic development is a careful combination of humor and fear.

Make sure you watch all three minutes of the video—the last 30 seconds feature a rollerskating robot that quite frankly blew my mind. Here’s a rundown of the featured models, in the order in which they appear in the video:

Active Code Mechanism R5 (2005) – This swimming snake scared the hell out of me. I used to be afraid of sharks, now sharks should be afraid of ACM.

Elastor (????) – What’s cool about this slinky with a claw is that it can easily reach things a human arm can’t. That and it looks like the prototype for the Lost In Space robot. Danger!

Genbu (1995) – This “articulated multi-wheeled mobile robot” is one of many robots Hirose has designed that can navigate over debris. What makes this one special is it’s shiny silver spiky look—like it’s also a lot of fun at S&M parties.

Soft Gripper II (1978) – We have all seen this in movies: The robot hand reaches out and grabs someone, King Kong style, around the waste. But when you see it demonstrated in real life, with a giggling woman, it’s frankly chilling. Where’s the rest of your gargantuan killer robot, Hirose? Wait, don’t answer that.

VmaxCarrier (2000) – This “holonomic omni-directional vehicle” at first reminded me of Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine, panhandling the beginning of Trading Places. Then I glimpsed the underside of this lightweight device—with its four omni-discs, each with eight motorized wheels (for a total of 32 wheels)—and realized this was no movie prop.

Titrus III (????) – I think the lack of a page describing this robot confirms that Hirose only did it to show that he could. The shuffling little dinobot may be more cute than practical, but damn if I don’t want six of them.

SMC Rover (1997) – This planetary exploration robot can send its wheeled legs off on autonomous missions, owing to motors and batteries housed in the wheels themselves. It’s brilliant and whimsical, but it also reminds me of John Carpenter’s The Thing for some reason.

TAQT Carrier (1991) – This mechanical wheelchair is no match for Dean Kamen’s pre-Segway one, but it was built many years earlier, and has a rounded styling that reminds me of Star Wars, like it could be found on Tatooine.

Soryu V (1997) – One set of treads, and a robot can fall on its back as it climbs vertical terrain. Two or three, as in this case, and it’s suddenly more adaptable. Here, to prove the point, Hirose shows it on grass and snow.

Roller-Walker (1994) – It’s a rollerskating robot. A rollerskating robot. It’s like Xanadu meets Short Circuit. Somebody call Steve Guttenberg, Olivia Newton-John and Jeff Lynne, pronto.

More fun with Shigeo Hirose:

• BBC gallery of his “robot menagerie,” including the wall climbing “Ninja” not included in the video.

• Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab, website in English

• Wired for War book on Amazon and author site

Video montage expertly assembled and edited by our own Mike Byhoff; “Music for a Found Harmonium” and other yodels, airs and preludes by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra available for MP3 download at Amazon.com.

You have to be a special kind of city to think that insane videos of a giant squid / robot attacking and duking it out while destroying your beautiful, historic buildings is a great way to bolster tourism. World, meet Hakodate: their official tourism board has produced an amazing series of videos over the past few months that you really just have to see for yourself. Oh, did we mention that the videos worked? Yeah, we’re totally there. Hit the read link for all three videos; our favorite, Hakodate’s winter video, is after the break.

[Via Pink Tentacle]

Continue reading Robot, giant squid have epic battle in Japanese tourism videos

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Robot, giant squid have epic battle in Japanese tourism videos originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you shrug off Terminator and Battlestar Galactica as never-gonna-happen impossibilities, PW Singer has news for you. His spine-tingling book, Wired For War, carefully explains the robotics revolution that’s gripped our military since 9/11.

If you believe Singer (shown at left with an unarmed robot), the biggest revolution happening in the world today is the one taking place in military robotics, unmanned fighting systems, which were next to non-existent before 9/11, and have multiplied exponentially since the Iraq invasion of 2003.

You don’t have to read Wired for War (or Gizmodo) to know why military robots are awesome: On the battlefield, they won’t hesitate to take a bullet for you, and when they bite it, you don’t have to go and tell their mama how sorry you are. But robots are no longer just an extra layer of protection for our flesh-and-blood warriors, they are a new fighting force—the US has 12,000 on the ground and 7,000 in the air—that are changing the way the generals see the battlefield, and the way soldiers define what it means to fight.

I got in touch with Singer after Wired for War was published, and the cool, calm way he explains how different the world will be from now on—how the extended conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned robots from novelty items to autonomous killing machines, how cute dormroom debates over Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics have morphed into heated arguments at the Pentagon—has really got me convinced.

This week we’re celebrating the book with a series of posts on topics it covers, but at first, it’s time for you to hear from Singer himself, and drink in some of that truth. As he himself would say, citing The Matrix, it’s time to swallow the red pill:

Giz: One of the biggest purposes of your book is to make, for the first time, a compelling argument for the reality of the scary sci-fi future, right?

PWS: There are a couple of points of the book. One, to sell lots of books. Two, to get our heads out of the sand when it comes to the massive changes happening in war, to say this is not science fiction but battlefield reality. Next, this is not the revolution that Rumsfeld and his people thought would happen. You may be getting incredible new capabilities, but you’re also getting incredible new human dilemmas to figure out. The fog of war is not being lifted. Moore’s law may be in operation, but so is Murphy’s law. Mistakes still happen. The final aspect is to give people a way to look at the ripple effects that are coming out of this, on our politics, the warrior’s experience, our laws, our ethics.

We’re experiencing something incredibly historic right now, and yet no one is talking about it. Think about the phrase “going to war.” That has meant the same thing for five thousand years. It meant going to a place where there was such danger that they may never come home again, may never see their family again. Whether you were talking about my grandfather’s experience in World War II or Achilles going off to fight the Trojans.

Compare that to what it means in a world of Predator drones, already. One of the pilots I interviewed says you’re going to war—for 12 hours. You’re shooting weapons at targets, killing enemy combatants. And then you get back in your car and you drive home. And 20 minutes later, you’re sitting at the dinner table, talking to your kids about their homework. So we have an absolute change in the meaning of going to war, in our lifetime right now, and nobody was talking about it.

Giz: That’s mind blowing. The thing you’re hitting on here is the role of humans in war. Many argue that you can’t take the human being out of war, but will there be a time when robots just fight robots? And what’s the point? Doesn’t there have to be a human target? If robots fight robots, who cares?

PWS: Basically you’re asking the question that’s the famous Star Trek episode [“A Taste of Armageddon,” TOS 1967], where two machines fight each other, they calculate what would happen, and then a set number of humans are killed based on the computer calculations. That’s how they do the wars.

If we do get to that scenario, is it war anymore? We’d have to reconfigure our definitions. This is something we do. Some people back in the day thought that the use of guns was not an act of war, it was murder. It was a crime to use guns. Only cowards used guns. Well, we changed our definitions.

Giz: But the human has always been in the target of whatever murderous weapon—I’m asking what happens when Predator drones on our side go after Predator drones on their side over the Pacific Ocean.

PWS: It’s not a theoretical thing. Is that war anymore? Or does it take away the valor and heroism that we use to justify war, and just turn it into a question of productivity? Maybe that’s where war is headed.

But things don’t always turn out as you described. Every action has a counter-reaction. You develop these systems that give you this incredible advantage. But as one of the insurgents in Iraq says, you’re showing you’re not man enough to fight us [in person]. You’re showing your cowardice. You’ve also shown us that all we have to do is kill a few of your soldiers to defeat you.

Another one says that you are forcing my hand to become a terrorist. Say you get to drones vs. drones. Someone else will say, “A ha! That’s not the way to win. The way to win is to strike at their homeland.”

And with drones on drones, this very sophisticated technology, you’re also taking war in a whole ‘nother direction. Because now the most effective way of defeating drones may not be destruction, it may be wars of persuasion. That is, how do I hack into your drones and make them do what I want? That may be better than shooting them down.

Or, if they’re dependent on communication back to home, I’ve just pointed out a new vulnerability. The high tech strategy may be to hack them, and disrupt those communications, but of course there’s a low-tech response. What’s an incredibly effective device against the SWORDS system, a machine-gun-armed robot? It’s a six year old with a can of spray paint [says one military journalist]. You either have to be bloody minded to kill an unarmed six year old. Which of course will have all sorts of ripple effects, such as who else will join the war and how it’s covered. Or you just let that little six year old walk up and put spray paint on the camera, and suddenly your robot is basically defused.

Of course, in a meeting with officers from Joint Forces Command, one of them responded, “We’ll just load the system up with non-lethal weapons, and we’ll tase that little six year old.” The point is, robotics are not the end of the story, they’re the start of the new story.

Giz: Okay, so if everyone can get their hands on a crate of AK-47s these days, will robots be traded like that, on the black market? How can countries without technological sophistication make use of robots?

PWS: There is a rule in technology as well as war: There’s no such thing as a permanent first-mover advantage. How many of your readers are reading this on a Wang computer? How many are playing video games on an Atari or Commodore 64? Same thing in war: The British are the ones who invented the tank, but the Germans are the ones who figured out how to use the tank better.

The US is definitely ahead in military robotics today, but we should not be so arrogant as to assume it will always be the case. There are 43 other countries working on military robotics, and they range from well-off countries like Great Britain, to Russia, to China, to Pakistan, to Iran. Just three days ago, we shot down an Iranian drone over Iraq.

The thing we have to ask ourselves is, where does the state of American manufacturing, and the state of our science and mathematics education in our schools take us in this revolution? Another way to phrase this is, what does it mean to use more and more “soldiers” whose hardware is made in China, and whose software is written in India?

A lot of the technology is commercial, off the shelf. A lot of it is do-it-yourself. For about $1,000, you can build your own version of a Raven drone, one of the hand-tossed drones [which you launch it by throwing in the air, shown at left] our soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we have is the phenomena that software is not the only thing that has gone open source. So has warfare. It’s not just the big boys that can access these technologies, and even change and approve upon them. Hezbollah may not be a state, may not have a military, but in its war with Israel, it flew four drones.

Just as terrorism may not be small groups but just one lone-wolf individual, you have the same thing with robotics and terrorism. Robotics makes people a lot more lethal. It also eliminates the culling power of suicide bombing. You don’t have to convince a robot that it’s going to be received by 70 virgins in heaven.

And about not being able to get it like an AK-47. Actually, two things. One, there’s a bit in the book about cloned robots. One of the companies was at an arms fair and saw a robot being displayed by a certain nation in their booth. And they’re like, “That’s our robot, and we never sold it to them. What the hell?” It’s because it was a cloned robot.

And two, there’s a quote, “A robot gone missing today will end up in the marketplace tomorrow.” We’ve actually had robots that have been captured. We actually had one loaded up with explosives and turned into a mobile IED.

Giz: So, in other words, only a few years after being deployed, they’re already being turned against us.

PWS: This is war, so of course it’s going to happen. It doesn’t mean the AK-47 is disappearing from war. War in the 21st century is this dark mix of more and more machines, but fights against warlords and insurgents in the slums. Those players are going to be using everything from high-tech to low-tech.

[Wired for War website; Wired for War at Amazon]

I just bombarded Futurama’s co-creator David X. Cohen with some very important questions, including what he would name his Roomba, why he’s not afraid of robots and what Futurama’s chances are for renewal. (Spoiler: 50/50.)

Mouth: dry. Stomach: queasy. Head: racing. Not only is David X. Cohen the co-creator of one of my favorite shows of all time, he’s a fellow Berkeley computer science alum, fellow nerd, and a tremendously funny guy. He also holds the dream job—comedy writer and creator of a successful Sci Fi TV show. After fully preparing myself by watching the latest Futurama movie—Into the Wild Green Yonder—I had hours worth of questions for the man, but he only had 30 minutes.

I had to get the most important question on everyone’s minds out of the way: Will Futurama be coming back to Fox for a 6th season? Although Fox has indeed been making noises about the show’s return, Cohen said DVD sales of the fourth movie may be a deciding factor in whether or not the project would be profitable. Basically, we need to go out and buy the DVD and Blu-ray if we want to bring Futurama back. Cohen also revealed that although there is a fifty-fifty chance of the show returning, he has yet to hear more concrete details about it from Fox—according to him, though, “No news is good news.”

But how is the movie? In a word, good. In two words, very good. Into the Wild Green Yonder feels as if the Futurama writers used the first three movies as practice for getting back into the groove of writing Futurama episodes and was a final coda to the series. That’s not to say that the first three movies were bad—they were just different.

If the Bender-focused, first half hour of the movie were its own episode, it would solidly land in any “top ten funniest Futurama episodes of all times” list, hands down. However, because the next 58 minutes covered some very familiar, classic Futurama-esque territory, it made Into the Green Yonder feel like the one movie—out of the four—that connected the most with the series. But why this movie, why now?

Bringing this movie back to the feel of the series, as Cohen revealed, was somewhat intentional. For each one of the Futurama movies, the writers decided that they would cover one major area of Sci Fi. The latest one, like the series itself, is more of a large space opera that comfortably cradles you back into the company of the Futurama characters you grew to love. Cohen also pointed out that a scene in the newest movie—the one where Leela is giving out space coordinates—is probably one of the “most hardcore things they’ve done” in terms of showing respect for actual science.

It’s these science fans as well as the more hardcore viewers that would have noticed when Futurama’s writers give shout outs to real-world physics in their jokes—such as when the Professor invoked the observer effect after a horse race. This ability to mix humor with scientific intelligence is one of the greatest benefits of having so many smart writers on staff. The other benefit? The ability to actually have an interesting vision of the future.

And it’s this future that Fry’s trying to save once again. This could be why the Green Yonder felt like it was slightly retreading old territory. If you’ve seen some of Fry’s Nibblonian episodes, I’m sure you’re familiar with the basic premise—we get it: Fry’s special and he’s the only one who can save the universe. But that’s not to say there weren’t some great moments to be had during these 88 minutes. This is more akin to strolling down a familiar street you haven’t seen in years, examining which stores have changed and which haven’t, and reveling in the fact that you’re lucky enough to be back once more.

As the series draws to a (temporary) close, we wonder if we’ve learned the entirety of Fry’s origin story and how he came to be in the year 3000. Not to worry, Cohen assures that he is not finished with that tale quite yet. When asked how much of it was left—after the Nibblonian saga was finished and the “Lars” adventure in the first DVD movie—he responded that there is “one sentence,” uttered in the series that was left unaddressed. But it’s up to superfans to figure out which sentence, not to mention which episode, he is referring to.

Because David X. Cohen helped create the entire world and backstory of Futurama, he’s given a lot of thought to the future. Our future. Because he didn’t want to go to extremes and create either a utopia or a dystopia, Futurama’s universe is only about 50% realistic, according to Cohen. It does, however, borrow some ideas from our own world for both comedic and dramatic effect.

So what, if anything, in our real world future is David X. Cohen most afraid of? It isn’t robots, surprisingly enough. It’s stuff like nuclear bombs. Wars. And technology that kills people, fast. Things that—when taking the fact that Cohen grew up in the cold war and studied physics at Harvard into account—makes a lot of sense. But robots? Nope.

You would think that because Cohen is such a fan of robots, it would make sense that he’d own a Roomba. But he doesn’t. He laughs that Matt Groening gives him shit for this fact (if anyone should have a Roomba, it would be Cohen).

Is there any Futurama left to tell? Cohen thinks so. Besides further expanding on Fry’s origin story, he’s got plans to make the Planet Express crew exhibits in an alien zoo (among other things). However, beyond little ideas here and there, what’s currently occupying Cohen’s mind is how to escape from the crazy corner they’ve painted themselves into at the end of Green Yonder. Given Fox’s recent interest in bringing back the show for another season on television (50/50 chance!), it’s one mess Cohen will likely have to bend his way out of.

As for the Roomba, if Cohen ever were to get one, he’d name it Browser.

The best, nerdiest and probably funniest cartoon from the stickman comic XKCD was the sandwich strip seen above. If you don’t get it, then it doesn’t matter. If you do get it, it is quite amazingly hilarious. Sadly, trying it out in real life won’t work — it’s about as likely a transition from comic space into meat space as putting on a pair of glasses, re-parting your hair and expecting to be unrecognizable (we’re looking at you, Kal-El).

Happily, maker extraordinaire Bre Pettis and his trusty sidekick Adam Cecchetti decided to fix this, and built the Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot. The robot consists of a toaster oven, and bread and cheese delivery devices, just like the mechanized screws you see in vending machines. The robot is, of course, hooked up to a computer running a Unix variant. Type "Make me a sandwich" into the command line and it throws an error message: "What? Make it yourself."

Type in "Sudo make me a sandwich", however, and the robot goes into action. Check it:

There seems to be something about the XKCD comics that inspires people to bring them to life. In fact, we fully expect somebody to hack Kindle 2 to display the legend "Don’t Panic" upon startup.

Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot [Bre Pettis]

Sandwich [XKCD]

See Also:

• The Kindle’s Dirty Secret
• The Love Mattress: Not What You Think
• New Devices Replace Passwords with Pictures