Stories tagged robots
The Mega Beave Trophy itself: You earned it, Martin.
Courtesy zenA steel-fabricator in Oregon has built an 8-legged, 6 ton, walking vehicle. It seats six, runs on a Chevy V8 engine, and appears to have a mortar mounted on its side. (Or possible it's an exhaust pipe. Whatever.) It's called the Walking Beast.
3 years and $50,000, but you've done something rad, good sir. Something very rad indeed.
I think an award is called for. Let's see...
All right. Science Buzz is proud to present, for the first time ever, The Beaver State Award of Mega, to the very deserving Martin Montesano.
Tags : Oh, good. Cyborg monkeys.
in Life Science, Scientific Enterprise, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
The scariest of robots: And how do I know there's a monkey brain inside? Look how angry it is.
Courtesy litmuseOh, you’re probably the same way—how often do you find yourself thinking, “I wish monkeys were more terrifying. Sure, they’re all fanged little were-men, with hand-feet and clever brains, but there must be some way that they could be worse.”
Pretty often, huh?
And, when you watch the news, don’t you constantly find yourself musing, “Hmm. The future is looking a little too bright.”
Well, don’t worry, Buzzketeers. The future promises to be just as dark and bewildering as ever, and horrifying cyber-apes are part of it.
“Now, JGordon, it can’t be that bad.”
Hey! Don’t sound so disappointed; it is that bad. Skeptical? Check it out for yourself—Sciencemen and Techladies have trained two macaque monkeys to control huge robotic arms…using their monkey brains!
Macaques have shown their evil little faces on Science Buzz before (murderous enthusiasm and enthusiastic murder), and I don’t think a refresher on robots is at all necessary—because there’s no escaping them.
Robotic limbs are becoming kind of a big deal these days, but even the most advanced of them rely on nerves remaining in a partial limb, or another part of the body entirely; which muscles to activate for a certain function must be relearned, or an operation like gripping with a robotic hand can be linked to a movement like shrugging the shoulders. It’s tricky to do, and it pushes the brain’s flexibility, especially considering that the only feedback the limb gives might be a hot or poking sensation at the connection point (this in place of a real limb’s feedback, like the pressure, friction, or warmth one might feel through their hands or feet).
Wiring a prosthetic (or any robotic device) directly into the brain—as was the case with these monkeys and their robot arms—overcomes some of the problems with existing prosthetic technology, while adding some new challenges.
With electrodes implanted right into the brain, relearning limb function can come much more quickly and naturally (awful little monkeys can do it, after all). A little too quickly, actually—a monkey at Duke University was similarly wired up this winter to make a robot in Japan walk, and the robotic body actually received the signals to walk before the monkey’s actual body did. Limbs wired the same way could be too fast or powerful for the brain to initially cope with. You might, say, run into a wall before your brain has time to create another route for your robo-legs; the speed of the limb action would be faster than the speed of thought.
However, if the prosthetics operated with a “closed neural loop,” that is to say if they could be made to provide natural feedback to the brain (like heat, pressure, strain, etc), scientists think that the brain could adapt much more quickly, and could even learn whole new pathways of motion. So a person wired up in the right way might be able to control a plane, or a nanosized robot directly with their mind. And it wouldn’t be something where you would think about walking forward and the plane would fly forward—you would learn the plane’s movements of flying, feel the flying, and control it as if you were the plane. That sort of things is still a long way off, and unless new technology is invented to sense and input to the brain in another way, it would require having a bunch of electrodes stuck through your skull and into your neurons.
This, of course, is all scientific blah be de blah, and if distracts from the real issue behind the story: cyborg monkeys. Do you know what the monkeys were actually taught to do with their metal limbs? Feed themselves. How horrible. Why not just teach them how to operate guns with their minds, or remove human brains through our nasal passageways?
In time, that too will come to pass. Look forward to it.
Darn – and I just paid big bucks for The Gutter Helmet ™.
You would take this from him too?: The man has a harmonica stuck in his mouth, for God's sake. Leave him at least some of his dignity.
Courtesy aeonfireJust when you think that they've taken all they could...they take some more.
Those horrible robots will not leave us organics be. First they take valuable manufacturing jobs away from young children, and now they've got their horrible metal claws in what we always assumed made us human.
No, not love. Robots claimed love long ago. I'm afraid they've dug even deeper. Robots have taken our music.
No doubt created by some misguided genius, a robot band now exists. Ala House on the Rock, except, you know, functioning*.
The band, called The Trons, doesn't rock very hard, but I'm afraid that it does rock a little bit, and that's troubling, to say the least.
See them do their odd thing here
*Anybody who's down with House on the Rock and its horrifying musical rooms wins the JGordon Certificate of Achievement, by the way.
Smart toilets: You'd be amazed what you can learn by sitting on these commodes
Do you have one of those old, boring, regular toilets? Check out video here on the "intelligent toilets" in use in many public areas in Japan. It's actually scary what these toilets can learn about you while you're doing your daily business.
Robot round-up
Robots are everywhere! So is news about robots. Here are a few stories that caught our eye recently:
A sign of the times: JGordon isn't the only one who knows how to find wacky stuff on the Web!
Courtesy Veronica Belmont
High school students compete in a robot-building competition.
A robot conducts the Detroit Symphony.
A robot dials 911.
And lawyers are beginning to debate the legal ramifications of robots on the battlefield.
Which, inevitably, leads to the society to prevent cruelty to robots
Last weekend, NIST (the guys who keep track of what time it is) hosted a RoboCup nanosoccer exhibition match, where the playing field was smaller than a grain of rice. Read more about the nanobot soccer match at BotJunkie.
I don't see any spikes at all: Wait...is that a tiny flamethrower? Oh, no, it's just its little tummy.
Courtesy rcoderWell, I think robots should be scarier, anyway. And I mean classically, empirically scarier. A robot shouldn’t get a press release unless it could be nicknamed “crusher,” or “mecha-death,” or “slaughterbot.” Some crap like that, anyway. Even if a robot’s sole purpose is to, say, drop eggs into a carton, it should still have a buzz saw arm installed on it. For the sake of appearances.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t scary robots out there. There are scary robots out there, very scary robots, but they’re full of the wrong kind of scary. Check out this little dude. For those of you who can’t access links, or something, here’s the dope: we’ve got a horrible little robo-creature that makes me think Casper the friendly ghost has been having sex with Volkswagen Beetles. iCub is what they call it, which is short for “iCub is designed to lay eggs in your mouth and burst out of your chest. iCub!” Ostensibly it’s designed to learn human language from the ground up, like a human baby, but look at the thing: those big eyes already have language, and they’re saying “I can’t wait to get my ovipositor down your esophagus.” Brrr.
No, I’ll take the T1000 over that any day.
Or, here, we have a little robot that was clearly designed to relate to its human coworkers. How can you look at a face like that and not think, “Oh, here’s something I can talk to.”? You can’t. But this robot will keep staring at you long after the interaction becomes uncomfortable, and then it will whisper things to you, like how it knows where you sleep, and how sad you’d be if something happened to your dog. Don’t argue—I’ve seen the schematics.
Now, with the new generation of walking robots we’re just starting to move in the right direction. Not this little guy, obviously. Robots that are just learning to walk should try to take attention away from the fact that they can barely do something that I’ve been able to do by myself for, like, ten years. The little MIT robot (linked to above), however, looks like something I might “accidentally” back over with my car. Whoops! Back to the drawing board.
A new robot out of the Netherlands seems to be stumbling towards where I want my robots. The name, “Flame,” needs some focus grouping, but it has potential, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, there is no actual flame involved in the machine. It’s head looks sort of flamey, but they again so do teardrops. : (
Flame is upright, however, and approaching human size, both good signs. Again, though, its sole purpose is learning how to walk smoothly, which isn’t super scary. Unlike the stumpy shamble of man y other walking robots, Flame employs the human walking style of “falling forward in a controlled fashion” (how’s that for a metaphor for life). The hope is that Flame will provide insight on the mechanics of human walking; that it might aid in treatment and rehabilitation in people who already have leg injuries. Ironic, really. Not because humans should be teaching robots to walk, but because robots should be crushing their human creators, not teaching them how to walk. What a funny world.
Guess which country is betting on robots? No, guess!
Your future bath assistant: Not yet waterproof, but adequately creepy. Those eyes...
Courtesy JanneMYes! You were totally right! It’s Japan!
JGordon, “betting on robots” is more than a little bit vague. What exactly do you mean?
Good question, Guy. What I’m getting at is this: Japan’s population is shrinking. Birthrates are much too low to sustain current population levels, and, just like our baby boomer generation, a huge chunk of the population is racing toward old age. By 2030, it’s thought that the size of the Japanese workforce will shrink by 16 percent, leaving the country with a couple of problems to consider: who will replace all those workers, and who is going to help take acre of all those old folks? It’s the sort of situation often alleviated by a foreign workforce, but Japan is unused to, and generally unwilling to accept, large-scale immigration. So what’s the solution?
The oddly-named think tank, Machine Industry Memorial Foundation (maybe something was lost in translation), has proposed that robots be used to help make up for the declining workforce. From vacuumbots to robo nannies, robots could be filling the jobs of 3.5 million people by 2025. That doesn’t necessarily mean the robot population of Japan will increase by that number—we all know that one robot can do the work of several humans.
MIMF also points out that a robot workforce could also make it so that older people no longer “have to rely on human nursing care,” saving the government 21 billion dollars in elderly insurance payments. Robots could do housework, read aloud, and “help bathe the elderly.” We all know how much people hate human contact, especially the elderly, so I’d say things are shaping up pretty well for the pensioners of Japan.
Naturally, there are some obstacles to this perfect robot future. I won’t even get into the obvious ones, but robot technology, high cost, and, MIMF points out, human mindsets need to adjust to robot workers, leading to my favorite quote of the spring. Says one MIMF researcher, “People need to have the will to use the robots.”
So right.
Robots, robots everywhere!
Lined up for the assault: The robot invasion is set to begin!
Courtesy scottobear
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