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January 30, 2005
RFID-Equipped Robots Used as Guide Dogs
A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article. The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2005
A Century of Einstein
If you think it's sometimes hard to understand how a teenager's mind works, have some sympathy for Albert Einstein's mother. When he was just a teenager, Einstein was pondering what a light wave would look like if he could observe it while moving at light speed.
That's just the sort of gee-whiz anecdote that can distance normal people from Einstein's achievements (and from physics in general). But what Einstein did 100 years ago this year is neither irrelevant to everyday life nor merely arcane scientific lore. Without the revolutionary papers he wrote in 1905, we would barely recognize the world around us. Where would we be without him?
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 27, 2005
Battle bot: the future of war?
They've spied on the enemy, sniffed for deadly chemical and radioactive emissions, and sacrificed themselves to detonate terrorist bombs. Now robots are ready to strap on guns and fight the battles too.
This spring, the United States armed forces are expected to deploy 18 Talon robots to Iraq. The semi-autonomous machines will be capable of firing rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and rockets with better accuracy than human soldiers. They're the latest step in a surge of battlefield "bots" that are increasingly shouldering the military's most dangerous jobs.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 26, 2005
Japanese engineer a giant leap for robotics
An Osaka-based consortium of robotics experts has thrown down the gauntlet to future players of the beautiful game with the confident claim that their humanoids will be so skilful that they will play mankind off the park within 50 years.
"By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football's World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that," Shu Ishiguro, who heads Robot Laboratory, says.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2005
Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff in the Universe
If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second.
But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.
Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or perform other leaps of cosmic logic.
Fast forward a century. Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things -- that moves at so close to the speed of light you might think it'd make Einstein a bit nervous. His theory of relativity appears not to be endangered by the blazing speeds, though.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2005
Best-Kept Secrets
At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, Charles Bennett is known as a brilliant theoretician--one of the fathers of the emerging field of quantum computing. Like many theorists, he has not logged much experience in the laboratory. His absentmindedness in relation to the physical world once transformed the color of a teapot from green to red when he left it on a double boiler too long. But in 1989 Bennett and colleagues John A. Smolin and Gilles Brassard cast caution aside and undertook a groundbreaking experiment that would demonstrate a new cryptography based on the principles of quantum mechanics.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 22, 2005
What future for Hubble telescope?
Since its launch 15 years ago, it has captured some of the most profound - and widely distributed - images of the Universe.
Its ethereal shot of a shimmering Eagle Nebula is as likely to be found on the side of a bus as in the pages of an astronomy textbook.
And, like a celebrated icon, Hubble has now become the focus of controversy.
Its future is up for grabs. And as scientists discuss how - even whether - to service the ageing telescope and prolong its life, the debate over using a human or a robot to do so has grown contentious.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2005
Bionic Robots
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed microscopic robots made of silicon that are powered by muscle tissue. The microbots were created by allowing the self-assembling cells to grow on a tiny robotic structure, less than one millimeter long.
Each structure had two legs with feet, and the cardiomyocytes, muscle cells from (in this case) a rat's heart, grow in an organized manner on the silicon superstructure (i.e., the skeleton). Since the muscle cells grow on their own, there is no need to graft muscle tissue to the superstructure. The structure can then be powered by placing it in a system charged with glucose, similar to a living body. The muscles then contract in an organized manner, causing the microbots to "walk."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood
Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.
Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2005
ISS CREW POISED FOR ANOTHER EVA
The International Space Station (ISS) crew is preparing for the first 2005 extra-vehicular activity (EVA) scheduled for January 27.
"This time, the main task faced by Salizhan Sharipov and Leroy Chiao, is getting the German robot ROKVISS outside and fix it to the outer surface of the orbiter," a spokesman for the Russian Mission Control Center (TsUP) said on Tuesday.
The complicated 2-ft tall structure with a difficult name of ROKVISS (Robotic Components Verification on ISS) is fitted with two joints, a metal finger and two integral video cameras. The remotely controlled robot was designed to take some workload off the ISS crew. The manipulator will be mounted on the outside of the station, where it will first have to prove it is fit to operate in outer space.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2005
Life, Reinvented
One of Endy's friends at MSI, Rob Carlson, charted the rates at which various biotechnologies were improving. The DNA-reading machines used by the Human Genome Project were doubling in efficiency every 18 months. DNA synthesis was accelerating even more quickly. If reality kept up with these "Carlson curves," then by 2010 a single lab worker would be able to synthesize a couple of human genomes from scratch every day. No more need for DNA bashing - just write out the sequence you want and synthesize it straightaway.
The Carlson curves also showed that the price of DNA synthesis was falling rapidly. That trend has only continued. In 2000, the cost of assembling sequences to order was roughly $10 to $12 per base pair. Today, it's down to $2. Some scientists foresee DNA synthesis dropping to 1 cent per base pair within a couple of years. That's a gene for 10 bucks, a bacterial genome for the price of a car.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 15, 2005
Conversations control computers
Because information from spoken conversations is fleeting, people tend to record schedules and assignments as they discuss them. Entering notes into a computer, however, can be tedious -- especially when the act interrupts a conversation.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology are aiming to decrease day-to-day data entry and to augment users' memories with a method that allows handheld computers to harvest keywords from conversations and make use of relevant information without interrupting the personal interactions.
The researchers have built three prototype handheld computer applications that tap keywords from conversations.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 14, 2005
Supercomputing goes global
Size matters in supercomputers because size translates into speed. And supercomputers are all about speed. The quest for the fastest computer to discover new drugs, crack ciphertext or model global weather and nuclear reactions has set a lot of records in a short time.
Supercomputers are defined loosely by IDC as systems that cost more than US$1 million and are used in very-large-scale numerical and data-intensive applications. Today, their power is measured in trillions of floating-point operations per second, or TFLOPS.
The current world record for computing speed is 70.72 TFLOPS, posted in November by IBM's BlueGene/L system, which is destined for the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But supercomputers run as much on the testosterone of competition as on DC power, so the latest performance benchmark isn't likely to last very long.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2005
Robot makers say World Cup will be theirs by 2050
THE footballers of tomorrow will have the midfield guile of Zinedine Zidane, the finishing ability of Andriy Shevchenko and the staying power of Roy Keane.
A Japanese consortium of robotics experts has thrown down the gauntlet to future players of the beautiful game by claiming their engineered humans will play mankind off the park within 45 years.
"By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football’s World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that," said Shu Ishiguro, who heads Robot Laboratory in Osaka. "When we have accomplished that, we will have a society in which humans and artificial intelligence are completely in harmony."
Mr Ishiguro and his team are placing their faith in the offspring of VisiON.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 12, 2005
Sixth Sensors
Dr. Stephen C. Jacobsen, robotics guru and head of the College of Engineering's Center for Engineering Design, has one of the most hyper-organized offices I've ever seen. Cabinets full of meticulously color-coded files line the walls, and his phone projects toward him on an articulated stalk. When I walk in, he seems entranced with the images on a large computer monitor.
You get the sense that this is a guy whose time is so valuable that everything around him must be structured perfectly to prevent a single moment's thought or movement from going to waste.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 11, 2005
Could a hole in space save man from extinction?
The great 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley once wrote that the "question of all questions for humanity... is that of the determination of man's place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos".
We might soon be able to provide the answer to this huge riddle as a battery of instruments - including satellites, gravity wave detectors and laser devices - not only begins to give us startling insights into our place in the cosmos, but also forces us to confront the birth and final death of the universe - and even the possible existence of parallel universes.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2005
The Paranoid Machine
Computing Beyond Turing
70 years ago (1935), Alan Turing started his studies of mathematical logic and formulated the initial parts of a theory, that would become - as "Turing Machine - the foundation of our computers until this very day. Turing compared his universal calculating machine to a human who calculated a number, and restricted its principal application to "those problems which can be solved by human clerical labour, working to fixed rules, and without understanding".
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 09, 2005
Tuning The Kernel With A Genetic Algorithm
Genetic algorithms as used in machine learning are modeled after the process of evolution as observed in nature, and are a field within the science of artificial intelligence. The idea is to generate a "population" defined with unique strings of "chromosomes", to test each of these chromosome strings for "fitness", to select a subset of the chromosome strings with the best fitness and use them to create new chromosomes, to apply random mutation to a small subset, and finally to start the process all over again. Over time, all the chromosomes should "evolve" toward having the best possible fitness, as defined by the algorithm.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 08, 2005
Robosapien Gets Major Makeover
Robosapien, the monkey-like "robot" that's been, well, wowing crowds since 2003's Comdex and last year's Consumer Electronics Show, is about to get a major update and some cool new friends. Wow Wee, a company launched by former JPL robotics physicist Mark Tilden (he also worked for NASA and DARPA), will introduce a radically redesigned and significantly more expensive Robosapien V2, as well as a brand new Roboraptor and Robopet at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2005
Android learns faces, shakes hands
A team of South Korean scientists unveiled a bipedal robot equipped with wireless networking capabilities Thursday, which they claim is the first such android ever developed.
Called NBH-1, short for network based humanoid, the robot boasts the ability to communicate remotely with external computer servers from which it can receive software upgrades, said Yoo Beom-jae, who led its development.
"Through the wireless networking ability, NBH-1 can recognize people using facial recognition technology," said Yoo, a professor at the state-run Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 05, 2005
Next generation of robots
Robot dogs don't chew the hearth rug and demand to be taken for a walk at inconvenient times. Computerised vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers carry out the tasks that some of us find a bore, others a strain. "All very limited," says Professor Aaron Sloman, from Birmingham University's School of Computer Science. "They can do specific things but none can say why they do it."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 04, 2005
How Water Molecules are Connected
Water may be the most important molecule on Earth, but our understanding of its properties is embarrassingly limited. In solid ice form, water takes on numerous phases and structures that can be studied by means of diffraction techniques. As a liquid, however, water poses a frustrating structural puzzle because of the complex hydrogen bonding that forms a disordered network. Recently, researchers from the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, the BESSY Laboratory, Stockholm University, Linköping University, and Utrecht University have used the APS to obtain detailed information about the nearest neighbor coordination geometry in liquid water.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 03, 2005
As robots learn to imitate
Can robots learn to communicate by studying and imitating humans’ gestures? That’s what MIRROR’s researchers aimed to find out by studying how infants and monkeys learn complex acts such as grasping and transferring it to robots.
“Our main motivation for the project was to advance the understanding of how humans recognise and imitate gestures,” says Professor Giulio Sandini, coordinator of the three-year IST-funded project, MIRROR. “We did that by building an artificial system that can learn to communicate by means of body gestures.”
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 02, 2005
Deep Impact
The big, grown-up boys on the NASA team can hardly wait. Next Fourth of July, they get to bust up a comet, Hollywood-style.
"Blow things up? I'm there. Yeah, I don't have any issue with that," says Richard Grammier, manager of the project for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (And, oh yeah, he used to work with explosives in the military.)
The spacecraft is called Deep Impact just like the 1998 movie about a comet headed straight for Earth. NASA's goal is to blast a crater into Comet Tempel 1 and analyze the ice, dust and other primordial stuff hurled out of the pit.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 01, 2005
Fly-eating robot powers itself
Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself.
Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.
Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.
Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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