Robot toy for cute pet

Someone sent me a link to the YouTube video below showing a robot cannon that someone built to play fetch with his dog Jerry. The robot works really well and the dog seems happy. If the machine also dispensed a cookie every now and then then the dog might be using it more often because as the robot's creator states in the video's description,

Far from being a replacement for me, I was always right there with him enjoying his fun. And with all the troubles that I went through to build the ball machine, I still end up throwing more balls than that the machine could count! According to the computer, he played with the machine by himself only 3 times in his life.

NASA Mars rovers survive budget cuts

NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers faced extinction yesterday as news were that budget cuts had forced NASA to suspend the operation of one rover and scale back the operation of the other. It all started when NASA sent a letter to JPL telling them that their budget will be reduced by $4 million annually and that the Mars exploration rovers project had to scale back operations. As a result of this reduction in funding, JPL was forced to consider shutting down the rover Spirit.

The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring the Red planet's surface for the last 4 years; their mission was initially supposed to be only 3 months long but the well constructed robots have outlived their specifications. Both robots have performed scientific research on the remote planet much longer and for much cheaper than a manned mission could have achieved at this stage in history. Having to shut down any one of the rovers would have been a huge loss at least until the next generation rovers have landed on Mars (one rover is scheduled to start its trip to the Red planet next year.)

Fortunately, a day (if not a few hours later) NASA announced that the operation of the Mars rovers will not be affected by any budgetary cuts. According to an Associated Press article,

"All elements of the Mars Exploration Program will operate under their previous program guidance as if the letter was never sent," NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said in a statement.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin did not review the letter, sent by James Green, who leads the agency's planetary science division.

"Dr. Griffin did not know beforehand that Dr. Green sent the letter, nor did Dr. Green obtain explicit approval from Dr. Griffin to send the letter," Brown said.

It sounds like at least some people at NASA still have their priorities straight. For a country that has spent billions of dollars to fight wars in remote countries, it would have been sad to suspend the operation of these two mechanical space explorers for a lack of a few million dollars in funding which pales in comparison to the cost of the war on terrorism.

Scientific American Reports on robots

I was at the grocery store the other day and I stopped to look at the magazines on display. To my surprise, the latest edition of Scientific American Reports was focused on robotics. Naturally, I picked up a copy and even though I have only read the first 3 articles so far, it looks like a great edition.

The special edition Scientific American hosts a number of articles by well known robotics scientists and futurists who discus the past, present, and future of robotics. The first article is from Microsoft's Bill Gates who discusses the similarities (in his opinion) between the computer revolution and the upcoming robot revolution. Obviously, he does not miss the opportunity to sell Microsoft's entry in robotics in the form of the Microsoft Robotics Studio. I have said before that I like the fact that a large company such as Microsoft has decided to focus some resources on the development of software tools for robot development but I find Gates' articles annoying for the simple reason that he always comes off as if they were the first to think about doing this. Mr. Gates you are not the first to try and develop such software so please get off your high horse about it already!

The 2nd article is written by the well known CMU scientist Hans Moravec who has been a witness of robotics development since the days of the Stanford cart and he has written a number of books on the subject. Moravec starts by talking about the progress in robotics over the last 3 decades and then goes on to talk about where robotics is heading according to his opinion. Using the exponential growth in the performance of digital computers as a guide, he predicts that by 2050 a single computer will match the intelligence of a human brain; he outlines how he believes this will come about in 4 stages, i.e., 4 generations of robots will eventually lead to the creation of machines as intelligent as humans.

Properly educated, the resulting robots will become quite formidable. In fact, I am sure they will outperform us in any conceivable area of endeavor, intellectual or physical. Inevitably, such a development will lead to a fundamental restructuring of our society. Entire corporations will exist without any human employees or investors at all. Humans will play a pivotal role in formulating the intricate complex of laws that will govern corporate behavior. Ultimately, though, it is likely that our descendants will cease to work in the sense that we do now. They will probably occupy their with a variety of social, recreational and artistic pursuits, not unlike today's comfortable retirees or the wealthy leisure classes.

Interestingly, he does not speculate what will happen to us humans when the intelligent robots decide that they are better off playing golf instead of working for us.

The 3rd article is by futurist Ray Kurzweil who predicts that digital computers will be able to simulate (and as such match the intelligence of) a human brain by 2020; clearly, there is a disagreement of 30 years between Moravec and Kurzweil. Kurzweil predicts that by 2055 a $1000 (constant dollars) computer will have the computational capacity of all human brains on the Earth. In his opinion, one day (obviously this day is only a few decades ahead of us) we will be able to transfer any human brain onto a digital computer and as such continue to exist even long after our bodies have turned into star dust. Honestly, this sounds pretty cool to me and I am glad that, if Kurzweil is correct, might happen within my lifetime meaning that I still have a chance for immortality even if I fail in my scientific career!

At any rate, the rest of the articles are more about current developments in robotics and their use today. There are two articles on space exploration. One article advocates the use of robots for exploring space while the other advocates the importance of human astronauts. I haven't read these yet but the articles address a subject that has been under debate for the last few years and I am looking forward to reading the authors' opinions on the subject.


Moreover, there are articles on swarm robotics, the ballbots, brain computer interfaces and artificial muscles. Finally, there is an extensive article about the Grand Challenge and the innovations that resulted from the fierce competition among the teams looking for a place in human history.

Overall, this issue of Scientific American is very interesting and I can't wait to read all of it. The writing is very high level so anyone can understand it without requiring a PhD in robotics or artificial intelligence. The magazine will be available on news stands until May 6, 2008.

Buy a subscription to Scientific American

COM-BAT: A robotic bat for urban warfare

An interesting piece of news comes from the University of Michigan which was recently awarded a $10 million grant to open the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology (COM-BAT) with the focus of developing a robotic bat useful in urban combat zones. The complete robot which is financed by the US Army will be developed collaboratively among the University of Michigan, University of California at Berkley, and University of New Mexico; each school will focus on developing one aspect of the 6-inch bat-like robot. According to the news release from the University of Michigan,

Engineers envision tiny cameras for stereo vision, an array of mini microphones that could home in on sounds from different directions, and small detectors for nuclear radiation and poisonous gases.

Low-power miniaturized radar and a very sensitive navigation system would help the bat find its way at night. Energy scavenging from solar, wind, vibration and other sources would recharge the bat's lithium battery. The aircraft would use radio to send signals back to troops.

Sounds like a very cool robot. It is unfortunate that it is being developed for use in the army. At least we can be thankful that current plans do not include the robot carrying weapons and firing at troops but only intelligence gathering (which will very likely be used to more efficiently eliminate enemy troops making the bat-robot only indirectly responsible for killing human beings.)

Sir Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008

News are today that writer Sir Arthur C. Clark died today in Sri Lanka. He uses 90 years young. The prolific writer contributed 100 books on space, science and the future, but he was mostly known to the masses for being one of the writers behind the very successful 2001: A Space Odyssey movie directed by Stanley Kubrick. According to a BBC article on the passing of Sir Arthur, his contributions to the world are described as follows.

Sir Arthur's vivid - and detailed - descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world. He was the author of more than 100 fiction and non-fiction books, and his writings are credited by many observers with giving science fiction - a genre often accused of veering towards the fantastical - a human and practical face.

You can read Sir Arthur's biography at the Arthur C. Clarke foundation web site here.



Update: I added the above video of Arthur C. Clarke's reflections at his 90th birthday.

Boston Dynamics BigDog robot

Check out the video below showing Boston Dynamics' 4-legged BigDog robot traversing a number of different surfaces. The video shows the robot which can carry a payload of more than 300 lbs climb a steep hill, traverse a surface covered with snow or ice, jump over obstacles, and walk over rumble. It is fantastic how BigDog can regain its balance after being pushed or after slipping on ice. The robot is equipped with a large number of sensors including a laser gyroscope and stereo vision. This quadruped robot's creators fairly refer to it as the most advanced robot of its kind. But enough talk. Just watch the video and judge for yourselves.

Visually guided emotional robots

Bruce Mohun of the Knowledge Network recently interviewed two Canadian robotics professors on the subject of intelligent and emotional service robots. Professors James Little from Computer Science and Elisabeth Croft from Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) discuss their efforts to create these robots. Dr. Little was the professor behind the Curious George team that won the 2007 AAAI Semantic Robot Vision Challenge Competition. Dr. Croft is interested in developing robots that can sense the emotions of their human co-inhabitants and act accordingly. It is an interesting and entertaining interview embedded below.

More 3D movies coming our way

It would appear that 3D movies are making another comeback on the basis that recent films such as Chicken Little, Beowulf, and Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert managed good revenues. CNN reports that movie studios plan to spend up to $700 million dollars for outfitting thousands of theater screens to show 3D movies using Disney's Real D Cinema software and projector technology.

Real D is different than traditional 3D projector technology because it uses a single projector (as opposed to using 2 projectors in older systems) along with an ingenious setup that eliminates flicker and errors when, for example, the viewer turns her head sideways. Real D utilizes glasses with circular polarized lenses instead of the more traditional read and blue filter glasses that you might remember from some older TV shows who did 3D episodes and gave the glasses away for free.

It will be interesting to see if the technology will stick this time or it will be exciting for a bit and then disappear once more until a new advance in 3D movie projection makes it popular again.

More information:

CNN: Deal could bring 3-D movies to 10,000 screens.
Wikipedia: Real D Cinema.

Robot sex: David Levy on the possibility of human and robot marriage

Scientific American hosts two interesting articles on the subject of robot sex and more specifically the future possibility of marriage between robots and humans (you can find links to the articles at the end of this post.) Both articles discuss David Levy's views on the subject of robot sex and marriage. Levy published a book titled Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships on this subject last year making the argument that intimacy between humans and machines is inevitable and likely to be legal in the not so distant future.

He argues that there is a certain number of people who cannot find love among the human population and can benefit from filling this emotional and physical void with a sex robot designed to provide the companionship necessary to keep them happy. He cites the use of sex dolls and prostitutes today as an example of relationships that can be replaced by intelligent robots in the future providing more than physical satisfaction due to advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. Levy predicts that love and marriage with robots will be commonplace by 2050. When it comes to marriage, other scientists consider the idea of legal marriage between a machine and a human ludicrous but Levy argues,

If you went back 100 years, if you proposed the idea that men would be marrying men, you’d be locked up in the loony bin. And it was only in the second half of the 20th century that you had the U.S. federal government repealing laws in about 12 states that said marriage across racial boundaries was illegal. That’s how much the nature of marriage has changed.

I haven't had a chance to read Levy's book and compared to Levy I definitely haven't done any research on the subject of love and marriage with robots but I have to agree with him on most points. Intelligent (to a certain extent) robots used as sex machines by both men and women are likely to exist in the future; whether this is moral or not is a question to be answered elsewhere and not in this blog. In terms of legal marriages between robots and humans, I think that it is a practice not likely to happen and even if it did it would be something practically meaningless; what kind of rights would a person be sharing with a robot that would necessitate a legal marriage between them?

More information:

Scientific American: Not Tonight, Dear, I Have to Reboot
Scientific American: Humans Marrying Robots? A Q&A with David Levy

New iRobot Verro pool cleaning robots

Just in time for the summer season, iRobot announced today a couple of new additions to their Verro pool cleaning series of robots. The two new robots are the Verro 100 and the Verro 500 models are specifically designed for above ground and in-ground pools respectively. More specifically and according to the company's Press Release,

The new Verro 100 will navigate and clean a flat-bottomed above ground pool of any shape, while vacuuming debris along the way. The new Verro 500 features sturdy rubber rollers that brush and power-scrub all pool surfaces, as well as a powerful vacuum to remove debris. The Verro 500 cleans pool floors and climbs walls all the way up to the water line. Sitting atop sturdy treads that drive the robot, the Verro 500 works on all pool surfaces, including vinyl, tile, fiberglass, and gunite.

The two robots are complemented by the previously announced Verro 300 pool cleaning robot. These robots are not cheap and each costs $399, $699, and $999 for the 100, 300, and 500 model respectively. I only wish that I had a pool to clean so that I had a real excuse to buy one of these.

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WordNet and visual object recognition

Visual object recognition is a hard task. Current computer vision technology is good at recognizing a small number of objects but fails when it comes to differentiating among large numbers of objects and among different classes of objects. Much work is currently focused on tackling these problems in order to increase the usefulness of object recognition systems. Recent work from INRIA focuses on the study of semantic hierarchies encoded in WordNet in order to enhance current visual object recognition algorithms.

WordNet is a large semantic network of the English language modeling human psycholinguistic knowledge grouping synonyms together into synsets and recording the differences among them. Basically, WordNet encodes a large number of relationships between objects such as the fact that both a car and a motorycle are wheeled vehicles and their presence in an image implies the presence of wheels. This kind of knowledge is what Marcin Marszalek and Cordelia Schmid are trying to exploit in their 2007 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) paper titled "Semantic Hierarchies for Visual Object Recognition."

The two researchers show how prior knowledge about object classes and their relationships encoded in WordNet can be used to improve on visual object recognition using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The idea is that if the recognition system is asked to answer the question "Is there a car in the image?" then the system can start by querying WordNet about prior knowledge relating to the "cars" label. The resulting semantic network from WordNet might include additional knowledge about cars such as the fact that they are wheeled vehicles and as mentioned earlier one or more wheels can be expected to be present in the image. The visual object recognition algorithm can answer the original query better by utilizing an object detector for cars and also one for wheels. The experimental results show a small improvement over state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for object recognition but there is still lots of work to be done before human-level recognition levels can be achieved.

For more information, you can browse the researchers' CVPR poster here (pdf) or read the full paper here (pdf).