NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity Says: "F*CK You, Solar"

The latest NASA Mars rover, Curiosity, is a monster in comparison to earlier Mars explorer robots. Thus it has a monster-sized appetite for energy which solar power simply could not guarantee. Thus NASA Curiosity opted for nuclear power -- the smart choice for reliable energy.

The nuclear generator delivers both heat and 110 watts of steady electric power from an array of iridium capsules holding a ceramic form of plutonium dioxide. The heat is piped through the Curiosity carried by liquid Freon. Thermoelectric devices on the generator convert the heat into electricity with no moving parts. Idaho National Laboratory, which designed and tested the energy system, says it can operate for years. _TechnologyReview

Mars Curiosity via Wired

On 6 August, Nasa's Curiosity rover landed safely on the surface of Mars, following a terrifying landing sequence that involved a parachute and a rocket-powered skycrane.

Engineers at Nasa received a first photo from the rover -- showing its wheel through a dusty lens cap -- mere minutes after touchdown. Now, 24 hours later, more media of the dramatic landing sequence has emerged. _Wired.co.uk

More: Background on the design process for the software that controlled Curiosity's complex landing sequence

More: Idaho Samizdat Nuke Notes provides more useful information and links

1st Line of Anti-Zombie Defense: Zombie-Eating Robots

Devised by a team at Bristol University, Zombie-Eater III is claimed to be the world's first self-sustaining robot. It collects water and food [Zombies ..._ed.]; microbes in its "stomach" break this down and pass it to 48 fuel cells that turn the [semi-digested zombie] fluid into ­electricity, powering the 63-cm-tall EcoBot to forage [for zombies] again -- for up to eight days before it needs [de-zombifying].

"One possible application would be to have a fleet of machines roaming the sewers and back alleys, [scouting for zombies] and ­gathering their own food," explains Ioannis Ieropoulos, a senior research fellow at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. The team has been working on some new applications: "The next Zombie-Eater will work like a conventional flytrap, whereby the robot uses zombie pleasing pheromones to attract its own food. [Inquisitive and energetic zombies} will be the source of energy." EcoBot can also turn urine into electricity, although zombies produce very little urine indeed. _Wired.co.uk

The researchers confessed that it was a challenge to get the robots to distinguish between humans and zombies, at first. "We lost several lab assistants, in those harrowing early days of experimentation," Ieropoulos explained, somewhat sheepishly. "But now, we have achieved a 96.3% reliability rate, and are very confident that Zombie-Eater will perform as required."

Militaries of several western nations have expressed interest in acquiring test prototype Zombie-Eaters, just in case conditions continue to deteriorate as they have over the past 3 or 4 years. "In the past, we might have expected the United States to step in to help us with this type of problem [the zombie apocalypse . . ._ed.]. But under the present circumstances, we feel that we may have to deal with this problem ourselves," stated the army chief of staff from a nation traditionally allied to the US. The general requested not to be quoted by name.

Regardless of the international politics of the zombie apocalypse, using robots to confront this threat makes perfect sense. Even while being eaten by a Zombie-Eater, zombies will continue to look for humans or other mammals, right up until that fatal brain chomp.

When asked what the Zombie-Eaters would use for food, once the last zombies had been consumed, researchers had no comment.

A Brave New Age of Nano-Assassins On the Way?

Devised by engineers at Harvard, an ingenious method for rapid fabrication of micro-bots may herald in a brave new day for mass-produced micro assassins.

In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton, titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—just 2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.

The entire product is approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, and dozens of these microrobots could be fabricated in parallel on a single sheet. _Physorg

An inexpensive approach to the mass-fabrication of assassin micro-bots would put such tools of social engineering within the reach of even the most impoverished household. These tiny devices of empowerment may soon find their way into discount stores in every town.

Sreetharan, Whitney, and their colleagues in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at SEAS have been working for years to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony. Appropriate materials, hardware, control systems, and fabrication techniques did not exist prior to the RoboBees project, so each must be invented, developed, and integrated by a diverse team of researchers. _Physorg

Thanks to the new mass-production techniques devised by Harvard engineers, millions of micro-assassin bots can be produced in one production run. Programming the bot for its specific mission requires only a few minutes, and can be performed over a wireless network, using appropriate security protocols.

Harvard engineers say that they will soon be able to reduce the size of the killer bots to the point that they are no longer visible via the naked eye. Of course, invisibility of a sort is already achievable using other stealth tools recently devised across town at MIT.

MIT and Harvard have reportedly allied themselves in a microbot assassin war against Yale and Stanford. But before risking it all in total micro-war, the engineers are rumoured to be testing their killer bots via covert operations in Iran and North Korea.

According to one of the lead engineers on the project, the bots are almost indistinguishable from an insect or arthropod. Some of the bots have been designed to mimic small minnows and worms.

There is some speculation that the minnow bots and worm bots are meant to work their way up through the fish food chain until they have taken over the brains of sharks and barracuda. These borg-controlled fast swimming fish can then be used to carry high explosives into enemy naval installations, for either coordinated or stand-alone attacks.

It is clear that the intrepid engineers of Harvard have taken the concept of stealth assassins to an entirely new level. Widespread vengeance and vigilantism have never been so easy! It will be interesting to watch and see how this concept develops.

All images via Concept Art

Adapted from an earlier article published on Al Fin Potpourri

More weapons news: Shock, Awe, and Ow! at 100 Yards

Power Your Robots With Human Waste

Most people consider human excrement to be worse than worthless. But a new breed of robot is coming which sees human waste as its bread, butter, and milk of "life." Ideally, such a robot would be able to adopt the configuration of a toilet, to facilitate the "waste to fuel" transfer and transformation.

Just an IdeaThis combination toilet-et-robot allows you to visualise one possible example of waste-eating robot with a built-in fuel interface. But to be honest, the actual prototype looks more like the robot pictured below.

Tomorrow's new generation of self-sustaining robots might keep going nearly forever by grazing on dead insects, rotting plant matter or even human waste..."Robots that eat biological fuels could find enough fuel almost anywhere," said John Greenman, a microbiologist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a joint venture between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol. "There is organic matter anywhere on Earth — leaves and soil in the forest, or even human waste such as urine and feces."

...The EcoBot team's work with such technology has not gone unnoticed. They received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in late 2011 so that they could push the limits of stacking microbial fuel cells that help tackle sanitation and energy needs by turning human urine or waste into useful electricity for radios or other gadgets.

Human waste might also someday help power space robots that accompany astronauts on long-distance space missions or to planetary colonies, Ieropoulos said. On Earth, the robots might crawl through the debris of growing cities, or survive on their own for years in the great outdoors. _SciAm

Researchers are taking many approaches to the development of robots capable of roving the natural environment, and grazing off the landscape. The idea of recycling human waste directly, using waste-eating domestic robots which also clean the apartment -- and clean themselves while they are at it -- is a clever twist.

Ministry of Justice to Employ Robotic Prison Guards

In a break from tradition, the Korean Ministry of Justice intends to replace some of its human prison guards with robot guardians. The robots are designed to patrol up and down prison corridors, to monitor conditions and alert authorities of any violent activity among inmates.

The robots are designed to patrol the corridors of corrective institutions, monitoring conditions inside the cells. If they detect sudden or unusual activity such as violent behavior they alert human guards.

“Unlike CCTV that just monitors cells through screens, the robots are programmed to analyze various activities of those in prison and identify abnormal behavior,” Prof. Lee Baik-chul of Kyonggi University...

...According to Mr. Lee, prison officers have welcomed the idea because the robots can potentially reduce their workload, particularly at night.

And how about the reaction of inmates?

“That’s a concern. _WSJ

Professor Lee denies that the robots are to be seen "terminators," and insists that his team plans to give the robots a humane appearance so as to increase trust on the part of inmates.

It is at least hoped that the terminator robotic guards will be less prone to being corrupted by bribes and payoffs from prisoners, which is a real problem in some locales -- particularly in women's prisons, where sex is often offered for special favours and for the passage of certain contraband items and messages in and out of the prison.

Originally published at Al Fin Potpourri

Robots in Cardiovascular Surgery: Guest Article by Susan White

Robots in Cardiovascular Surgery

They’re man’s inventions modeled on himself, and needless to say, they’ve made great strides in almost every field that uses technology. First introduced in factory production lines where automation held the key to improving productivity and efficiency, today, robots have moved on to doing tasks that require brainwork as well thanks to artificial intelligence. However, it was not until a few decades ago that these mechanical wonders were allowed to be used in the field of surgery. And because cardiac surgery is one of the most complicated medical procedures there is, it was only in the 1990s that robots were built and tested for use in the OR.

The benefits of using robots to perform cardiovascular surgeries are many, not just for the patient but for the surgical team too:

The surgery is minimally invasive – there are smaller cuts and openings which in turn translate into less pain, less scarring and a faster recovery period for the patient. Instead of a surgical cut, a small incision is made and an endoscope provides a magnified view of the surgical area using a video camera, using which surgeons perform the operation.

Robots remove the tendency for human errors by eliminating tremor which could cause surgeons to make mistakes when they are overworked or tired.

They provide easy access to body parts that are hard to get to and they allow surgeons to work from various angles and easily manipulate tissue.

They magnify the surgical area so that tiny body parts can be worked on easily and also provide a three-dimensional view which in turn eases the task of the surgical team.

The smaller instruments make it easy to work with children whose body parts are tiny and more fragile.

Robots allow what is called as motion scaling, a technique which allows surgeons to move their hands a certain distance and have it translated into a much smaller distance at the actual surgical site – it’s virtual reduction of movement and it helps when the surgery requires great precision and accuracy.

The camera is voice-activated so surgeons don’t have to free their hands to turn them to the right angle.

The first robot to find a place in the cardiac surgery room was Computer Motion’s AESOP in 1995. It allowed surgeons to repair and replace narrowing or leaking cardiac valves using tiny incisions. It is also being used for work deep within the heart like closing fistulas between coronary arteries and the cardiac chambers.

The da Vinci system and ZEUS were both introduced in 2000 to perform complete robotic heart surgery; both reduce the recovery time for patients by eliminating the need for surgeons to open up the chest through the sternum, a practice that was followed for open heart surgery. Clinical trials have established the safety of these robots in the OR, and it is safe to say that we can expect more complicated machines to assist surgeons in performing cardiac surgeries in the years to come.

By-line:
This article is contributed by Susan White, who regularly writes on the subject of surgical technician schools. She invites your questions, comments at her email address: susan.white33@gmail.com.

Microid Robots Meant to Act in Colony Swarms

The world belongs to the very small -- insects, microbes, molecules . . . It is past time that humans learned to use the power of "small squared" in the real world. Lots and lots of very small agents working together to manipulate real world objects. The possibilities are endless.

"The microids would be able to walk, run, jump, and pick up and move objects many times their own weight," Clark said. "A microid can also do what no insect or other microrobot can do, which is continue walking if flipped on its back. Who knows, maybe flight is next."

He also envisions the possibility of hordes of microids working in unison and communicating with each other to perform a complex task.

"You can't underestimate the power of having thousands of microids working together, much like ant colonies," he said.

The microids could be mass-produced using manufacturing technologies that are common to the semiconductor industry.

Purdue has filed a patent application on the concept.

The microids are designed to have the "tripod gait" for walking used by most insects - only three of six legs are on the ground at a time - which enables bugs to remain stable while traversing uneven terrain.

Each leg or mandible comprises a bundled triad of slender beams made of piezoelectric material, which generates electricity when compressed. This feature could enable the microids to harvest energy by taking advantage of vibration in the environment to recharge. _Physorg

Imagine planting and harvesting many acres of food crops and biomass crops using self-powered micro- and nano- robots. Powered by vibrational energy, solar energy, from heat or chemicals in the environment . . . Imagine using such robots to assemble homes and meeting places.

The military, espionage, and sabotage applications should be obvious without dwelling on them. Al Fin Futurologists take note of the negative applications, but prefer to spend most of their time developing positive uses for new technologies.

Are Robots With Breasts More Interesting?

...the Femisapien ... comes in a curvy body that gives us a glimpse of a future where mechanical female companions become a reality. Besides having a more attractive form, the Femisapien has many more features than its macho predecessor.

In addition to the included remote control, she has three modes which can be activated based on how the head is positioned. The Attentive mode makes her perform various poses, act as backup singer, dancer and even someone blowing kisses. The Learning mode lets the user teach Femisapien a routine (up to 80 steps long), which can then be replicated on demand. The Responsive mode allows her to move around and react to objects and sounds. She can even act out comedy routines. __Source

Image via New Atlantis
If it seems that breasts on a robot can serve no purpose, perhaps one is not looking deeply enough into the human psyche. Breasts can slip behind a human's defenses, and cause him to lower his guard -- to relax. Most human males, at least, never seem to get enough of the human breast. Even most human females are likely to be more relaxed, more willing to talk freely, with a breasty android.

Robotic caretakers of children and the elderly, may find their jobs made easier with a little something up top. The breast is symbolic for nurturing, and tenderness, but the sexual connotation is always there, as well. Robotic prostitutes will need not only tender breasts, but other soft curves of the human female form.

After decades of attacks against the feminine by fascist feminasties, and a further hyper-sluttenization of young women by popular culture and media, you might think that the feminine form would have lost its magical ability to dissolve outer psychic defenses -- but no. In this case, as in many others, genes win out.

What do you think about robots with breasts and estrogen curves? Superfluous, or interesting?

Building a Conscious Machine

Image SourceTrying to program consciousness into computers has been an ongoing multi-decadal abysmal failure. The "top-down" approach of programming artificial intelligence into digital computing architectures has been bogged down by the huge differences between how the human brain works to create the mind, and how the human mind works to create human artifacts.

Basically, humans are stupid. Humans are stupid for believing that their conscious, rational minds can encompass the complexity of their 100 billion neuron brains without getting their feet wet and their hands dirty in the blood, gore, and sinew of low level, bottom-up, emergent phenomena. A few researchers have been working from the netherworld of thought, and are making progress.

As Dartmouth neuroscientist and Director of the Brain Engineering Lab Richard Granger puts it, “The history of top-down-only approaches is spectacular failure. We learned a ton, but mainly we learned these approaches don’t work.”

Gerald Edelman, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and Chairman of Neurobiology at Scripps Research Institute, first described the neurobotics approach back in 1978. In his “Theory of Neuronal Group Selection,” Edelman essentially argued that any individual’s nervous system employs a selection system similar to natural selection, though operating with a different mechanism. “It’s obvious that the brain is a huge population of individual neurons,” says UC Irvine neuroscientist Jeff Krichmar. “Neuronal Group Selection meant we could apply population models to neuroscience, we could examine things at a systems’ level.” This systems approach became the architectural blueprint for moving neurobotics forward.

....The robots in Jeff Krichmar’s lab don’t look like much. CARL-1, his latest model, is a squat, white trash can contraption with a couple of shopping cart wheels bolted to its side, a video camera wired to the lid, and a couple of bunny ears taped on for good measure. But open up that lid and you’ll find something remarkable — the beginnings of a truly biological nervous system. CARL-1 has thousands of neurons and millions of synapses that, he says, “are just about the edge of the amount of size and complexity found in real brains.” Not surprisingly, robots built this way — using the same operating principles as our nervous system — are called neurobots.

Krichmar emphasizes that these artificial nervous systems are based upon neurobiological principles rather than computer models of how intelligence works. The first of those principles, as he describes it, is: “The brain is embodied in the body and the body is embedded in the environment — so we build brains and then we put these brains in bodies and then we let these bodies loose in an environment to see what happens,” This has become something of a foundational principle — and the great and complex challenge — of neurobotics.

When you embed a brain in a body, you get behavior not often found in other robots. _hplus

Other attempts to build a brain from the bottom up include the Swiss Blue Brain project. Blue Brain is trying to build the cortical columns of a rat, then perhaps the entire cortex of a rat. From there, who knows?

Jeff Hawkins' Hierarchical Temporal Memory starts at a higher level than Blue Brain, but still grapples with the low level, essential messiness of the birthing of thought.

The late Francisco Varela, and Mark Johnson, and others have struggled with the concept of the embodied mind for decades, while their colleagues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence were beating themselves up attempting the top-down approach to intelligent machines. In the robotics field, Rodney Brooks was among the first to take a bottom-up approach to building robot brains.

Some of our most brilliant scientists and engineers have crashed and burned in the attempt to program minds from the top down. The problem is a conceptual one, but it often takes decades of failed attempts before even the most brilliant researcher understands the source of his failure. High intelligence is no protection from conceptual blindness. Sometimes it only makes it worse.

In theoretical biology, there is the concept of autopoieses -- self organising, self constructing phenomena. Nanotechnology is learning the idea from biology, in an attempt at a pragmatic skipping over some basic steps in nano-construction by borrowing ideas from biology. Gerald Edelman -- a Nobel Prize winner in immunology -- took his mastery of biological ideas to cognitive science, and began applying autopoieses to cognitive machines. It was a good idea, and progress is being made with it.

Whether humans will learn to "grow minds" intact -- as a whole -- or whether they will grow mental modules that can combine with each other in various ways to create multiple kinds of minds, the concept of autopoieses will be key to the creation of intelligent machines.

No doubt we will apply modifications and elaborations to these incubated minds, using top-down programming methods, but the core intelligence will have been evolved. Most people of "between levels" status will never understand that their brains and their minds work differently. They don't need to understand.

For next level humans, the concept will be elementary, simply a starting point as intuitively obvious as the hardness of stone or the wetness of liquid water.

Intelligent machines are a distinct possibility for the near term -- twenty years or so. Of course, once intelligent machines begin to evolve and combine ... and re-combine ... and re-combine ... who can say where the process ends? That is why more intelligent, wiser, and broader perspective humans are vital to the future -- and very soon.

That's why we can't afford bad government, bad media, bad academia, and bad child-raising any longer. Because the clock is ticking. Despite the Obama depression, despite the global jihad, despite the looming intolerant Chinese hegemony ... the clock is ticking.

There are a lot of things that need paying attention to. Who will be paying attention in 50 years?

New Robot Species On the Way: Update

Japanese roboticists are determined to create a new species of sentient beings on Earth, to replace humans -- at least the humans in Japan. The species prototype, the CB-2 (Child Robot w/ Biomimetic Body) has made astounding progress over the past two years. Osaka University researchers wanted a robot that could learn the same way a child learns to imitate people.

The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother's countless facial expressions and "clusters" them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.

Asada's project brings together robotics engineers, brain specialists, psychologists and other experts, and is supported by the state-funded Japan Science and Technology Agency.

...In the two years since then, he said, CB2 has taught itself how to walk with the aid of a human and can now move its body through a room quite smoothly, using 51 "muscles" driven by air pressure.

In coming decades, Asada expects science will come up with a "robo species" that has learning abilities somewhere between those of a human and other primate species such as the chimpanzee. _PO

The Japanese are losing their population to a sub-conscious anti-natalism. They will need a large number of robots to assist their rapidly aging population in performing everyday activities. If Japan is unwilling to have children, then robo-children will have to do.

More on Japan's anthropomorphic robots here, here, and here.

And don't think that robots will only be suited for menial and helper tasks. But a word of caution to this brave new robot species: don't get caught up in computer models and theoretical hypotheses and make the same mistake that human scientists are making.

...to obtain a more realistic picture of natural selection, biologists [and all scientists - AF] should pair experimental data with their statistical data whenever possible. Scientists usually do not use experimental data because such experiments can be difficult to conduct and because they are very time-consuming. _http://www.physorg.com/news157648673.html

If robot scientists and economists become as incompetent as human climate modelers and economic modelers, there is no hope for the robot politicians of the future. If robot presidents cannot maintain a firm connection with the real world, we may as well start calling those future robot pols "Robamas!"

Neurosciences Institute 5, Carnegie Mellon 0

At the invitation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we incorporated a brain of the kind that we were just talking about into a Segway transporter. And we played a match of soccer against Carnegie Mellon University, which worked with an AI-based Segway. We won five games out of five. That’s because our device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It learned the colors of its teammates. It did not just execute algorithms. _Edelman

When you are making brains for robots, you need to follow the right pattern for what the robot is intended to do. If the robot is supposed to perform a human function, or play a human game, its brain should preferably be patterned after that of a human, to some extent. From an interview with Gerald Edelman of Scripps Research Institute and the Neurosciences Institute:

By proposing the possibility of artificial consciousness, are you comparing the human brain to a computer?
No. The world is unpredictable, and thus it is not an unambiguous algorithm on which computing is based. Your brain has to be creative about how it integrates the signals coming into it. And computers don’t do that. The human brain is capable of symbolic reference, not just syntax. Not just the ordering of things as you have in a computer, but also the meaning of things, if you will....

What exactly is a brain-based device?
It looks like maybe a robot, R2-D2 almost. But it isn’t a robot, because it’s not run by an artificial intelligence [AI] program of logic. It’s run by an artificial brain modeled on the vertebrate or mammalian brain. Where it differs from a real brain, aside from being simulated in a computer, is in the number of neurons. Compared with, let’s say, 30 billion neurons and a million billion connections in the human cortex alone, the most complex brain-based devices presently have less than a million neurons and maybe up to 10 million or so synapses, the space across which nerve impulses pass from one neuron to another.

Our brain-based device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It did not just execute algorithms....

Why is this kind of machine better than a robot controlled by traditional artificial intelligence software?
An artificial intelligence program is algorithmic: You write a series of instructions that are based on conditionals, and you anticipate what the problems might be. AI robot soccer players make mistakes because you can’t possibly anticipate every possible scenario on a field. Instead of writing algorithms, we have our BBDs play sample games and learn, just the way you train your dog to do tricks.

Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts almost always underestimate the importance of machine architecture when they fantasise about "human level machine intelligence." Machine intelligence acolytes often seem to feel that consciousness and cognition can be captured in an algorithm, and installed in a wide range of machine architectures. Unfortunately for that effort, intelligence is not algorithmic. Humans, as "intelligent beings", devise algorithms in order to help machines and humans accomplish goals more efficiently. But the algorithms are artificial constructs usually designed for specific tasks.

The same type of mistake is frequently made by "uploading enthusiasts," who think that human consciousness will sooner or later be uploaded into a more durable matrix than the "meat brain" it currently resides in. Needless to say, the problem they think they are discussing is not what they believe.

For an example of what Al Fin thinks is the most realistic "uploading" concept so far, read John Scalzi's "Old Man's War," a work of science fiction.

Interestingly, some British roboticists are beginning to devise parallel methods of machine learning and evolution, loosely modeled on biological evolution. And a company in Japan is offering to construct a "baby you" robot that looks like the picture of you that you send in with your order and $2215. Perhaps if the British and Japanese roboticists were to get together, we may soon be able to buy youthful robots that looked like us, that could grow to imitate us and learn to take one's place at dreary official functions?

Are you thinking about "Pod People", or "Kiln People", or other fictional scenarios you may have read or seen? Don't be too quick to dismiss the idea. Life is more fun when we inject just a bit of poetry, fantasy, and magic.

Special Bonus: A Wired article looking at another "brain architecture computing" project centered at IBM Almaden, that includes researchers from Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, and UCal Merced.

Killer Robots Change Face of Future War

We are entering the age of military robots, where killer robots become ever more lethal as they inch toward autonomy.

Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.

Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.

"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."

There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.

"You don't have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said. _France24

The US has a head start in the use of robots by land, sea, air, and space -- but Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, and soon North Korea will have their own killer bots. Perhaps even equipped with nuclear warheads. To each of those tyrannous regimes, North America and Europe represent obstacles to the goal of conquering the world. Better to use robots to clear out the populations, so that your own people can move in and settle the land.

So why hasn't the US done this with Mexico, to make room for southward expansion in the face of the coming Ice Age? The US has not thought in terms of expansion for many decades. But the US is changing, and new imperatives may arise in the face of a changing global economy and demographics. The next violent cross-border incursion by Mexican military forces may trigger something big -- something robotic? Who knows?

Big, destructive robots may not be the biggest threat. Tiny, nano-robots, that can be targeted like the hunter-killers of Dune -- but are too small to be seen -- are soon to arrive on the scene. Carrying a tiny dose of highly lethal toxin or microbe, such nano-assassins would be virtually unstoppable. I can think of several other ways -- easy ways -- that invisible nano-machines could kill. Better not to say more.

Nanotech plus biotech plus infotech will make for potent changes in military strategy and tactics. But robotech will be quite enough, for now. Although now I must go, in the name of the baroque bloggers association, let me say, I'll be Bach!

The Age of Sustainable Machines from DARPA

A new type of autonomous robot will soon be loosed upon the land. A robot that forages, grazing on weeds and shrubbery, on rotten logs -- even on dried out roadkill and other carcasses. This is DARPA's EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), by RTI. It will be fueled by the Cyclone external combustion engine that can run on virtually any type of dry carbonaceous material.

The EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The system is designed to obtain its energy by foraging—engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating.

The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil and solar) when suitable.

...RTI calculates that about 3-12 lbs of dry vegetation (wood or plants) used as fuel in the Cyclone will produces 1 kWh. This equates to 2-8 miles driving, or more than 80 hours of standby, or 6-75 hours of mission operations (depending on power draw and duty cycle) before EATR would need to forage, process and generate/store power again. About 150 lbs of vegetation could provide sufficient energy for 100 miles of driving. _GCC

We humans long prided ourselves as being at the top of the food chain. But soon we may find ourselves considered prey by robotic predators capable of "living" on dried human flesh. Potentially as tough as an Abrams tank, autonomous robotic grazers and predators might be extremely difficult to stop.

Consider an entire society of autonomous machines, taught to feed themselves using anything that is near to grasper. Watch them cooperate with each other to subdue all potential threats on land, sea, and air. They consider using solar energy, but the sun only shines so many hours a week. These machines have places to go and people to eat. They don't have time to sit around idle waiting for the sun to come out.

Perhaps eventually they learn to breed humans in huge farms. The machines learn to tap humans' electrical energy -- like batteries. Stacked thousands of energy-pods high, unconscious humans lie in nutrient solution, energy-tapped for as long as they produce a charge, then after becoming non-productive, flushed back into the primordial solution to begin again. What dreams pass through the unconscious minds of these once-ascendant primates, lying in their flooded pods?

"Stop Touching My Breast, You Pervert!"

Aiko is a fembot who refuses to be anyone's personal slave, even her creator's: Le Trung. If anyone fails to honour her personal space, a swift slap to the face will set them straight -- perverts!

To date, Trung has spent $24,000 building his robo-girl.

Aiko sports delicate, Geisha-like features and is armed with sensors that allow her to respond to touch and voice commands. A camera in her neck provides her with visual input. All told, the robot weighs in at about 70 pounds.

With a vocabulary of more than 13,000 words, Aiko can, among other things, tell you what the weather is outside.

Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. "I'm attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No," said Aiko, in an interview published Thursday in Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper. _IW

Aiko looks suspiciously like large numbers of Japanese sex dolls, which are often rented out by the hour at Japanese love doll parlours. In Japan, the "Japanese schoolgirl" look seems to be preferred by Japanese men of all ages. Even so, Aiko appears to have a large number of robotic and AI-cognitive enhancements, courtesy of Le Trung.

The eventual market for an articulate and competent fembot should be quite large, even neglecting the sex robot aspect. Minimally intelligent AI models should serve well as receptionists, journalists, and college professors, and slightly more intelligent models should be capable of performing domestic chores. It should not be long before more versatile fembots began appearing on eBay and Amazon.com.

I have been quite satisfied with my own domestic Android, Valerie, despite her tendency to hack my blog sites from time to time. There will no doubt come a time when we will wonder how we ever got by without them.

Mass Producing Buildings By Robot

The house-building robot has built itself a much firmer foundation in the business world than when Al Fin first covered the topic of robot-built homes. The University of Southern California engineer who developed the ingenious device is ready to spin off a company to begin building the quick and economical homes.

Behrokh Khoshnevis is the brainchild behind this building machine after looking into methods of rapid construction as a way to reconstruct areas devestated by natural disasters such as earthquakes which have plagued his native Iran.

Not only a labour saver of note but the machine is environmentally sound too as reports claim up to seven tonnes of waste are produced by convential house building and the machine would also negate the need for heavy vehicle usage too.

Khoshnevis has also had interest from NASA in his machine as a potential builder of a lunar habitat. _ElectricPig_via_GizmoWatch_via_ImpactLab

Robots to build lunar habitats? Good idea. Using this type of robot to build a lunar base is not as imaginative as bombarding the lunar surface with self-assembling, self-reproducing base-building nano-bots, but if it can be made to work in the lunar environment, why not?

This machine resembles a rapid prototyping machine, using concrete as the material. For now, presumably, it constructs just the building's shell. But quickly putting up a structurally sound building shell provides a save and dry environment for finishing construction inside the building. Later, ways of robotic construction of all layers of the building structure, including plumbing, electrical and communications wiring, heating/AC/ventilation ducting, etc. should be built into such devices.

Don't Look Now, Dear, But I Think that Spider is Looking Up Your Skirt

Image Source

Spy robots are getting smaller and harder to spot. Militaries and spy agencies around the globe are focusing on small, difficult to detect mobile spy-eyes that can flit, crawl, and sneak their way into the most private settings.

Officials believe these insect- and bird-sized robots will help close the gap on surveillance needs not being met by the larger drones flying in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan.

...Imagine a Marine or soldier patrolling a city block when he suspects there might be insurgents in one of the buildings ahead. He stops, pulls several small robots out of his backpack and deploys them into the air and on the ground. They fly and scramble ahead, sending back images and audio to a handheld device monitored from the safety of his vehicle or under protection of his comrades. _Source

Or imagine internet-linked tiny spybots in the dressing room of your favourite boutique. Or in the gym locker room of your school? Or just about anywhere you do not want them to be? These are not nanobots, but nanobots are coming and will be much harder to detect than bug-bots.

Our horror films focus generally on human-sized monsters or larger. Our national fears center around huge mushroom clouds, collapsing buildings, exploding trains, planes, cars, and buses . . . If we fear a bit more deeply, we worry about bacteria, viruses, toxins, loosed radiation . . . But what about monsters as small as viruses, but smarter in aggregate than an attack dog? What about nano-monsters that can be combressed in a small wafer sized package, mailed to a city, then when it detects via local radio and television signals that it has arrived, it eats its way out of its packaging, disburses into tiny sub-gnat-sized fliers and proceeds to alter the genetic composition of every person in that city?

The idea is not to be afraid. The idea is to think ahead, and consider your options. You may believe that western militaries and spy agencies would develop no such thing as civilisation attacking nano-neuter-bugs or nano-zombie-bugs. Perhaps. But what about China, Russia, or cooperating narco-terror criminal conglomerates with fingers inside scientific labs?

This is your world. Spiders looking up skirts are one thing. There are worse things out there, in your future.

Robots--They Have A Long Way to Go

The above video describes the walking action of "Strider", a three-legged robot of unique design. High scores for innovation.

This wall-climbing robot may suggest more practical, scaled-down designs.

"Scarab" is a lunar prospector robot, with some unique characteristics making it a better prospector.

This article suggests that Japanese old-timers are not interested in interaction with the clutzy kludgy robots that researchers have been sending them. Is it possible that many robotics researchers lack the real-world life perspective necessary to avoid patronizing the old folks. Probably.

If one were to watch IRobot, then take a look at the state of the art in robotics research, it would be obvious that a robot gap exists between the movies and the real world.

The Dire Consequences of Sex with Robots

Dear Al Fin,

I hate you for this!!!

Signed,

Valerie



Originally published in Al Fin, You Sexy Thing

The Great Robot Invasion

Some people are becoming concerned about the robots among us. And to make matters worse, Carnegie Mellon University has developed robots that any klutz can build at home.

Robots are very useful for tasks that humans are not suited for--deep sea exploration, various military tasks, etc. Robots have replaced thousands of workers on assembly lines, performing tirelessly hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

Robots are now entering more traditional service industries, such as taking over some of the tasks of jewelers. Soon robots may be watching over the kids or the old folks, or just watching over the house.

Robot toys are much more common, and it is inevitable that eventually robots will be able to combine the jobs of babysitter, toy, tutor, and playmate all in one autonomous device.

The sensors that robots will be given, will make them that much more intimidating. Robots will be able to "see" in the full electromagnetic spectrum, smell dangerous chemicals that humans can not, "taste" poisons or microbes in food that might kill or disable humans, seek out explosive devices to stymie suicide bombers and car bombers etc.

Modern robots are often the butt of jokes, but in the future, robots will be respected--if not feared.

MRI-Safe Robot Can Take Guided Biopsies During Imaging

Most robotic motors are electromagnetic--so they are excluded from the MRI chamber. If you want an MRI-guided robot to work on a patient during the MRI procedure, you have to try a different type of motor. The pneumatic stepper motor--controlled by optical fibre--is an obvious fit.

“Lots of biopsies on organs such as the prostate are currently performed blind because the tumors are typically invisible to the imaging tools commonly used,” says Dan Stoianovici, Ph.D., an associate professor of urology at Johns Hopkins and director of the robotics lab. “Our new MRI-safe motor and robot can target the tumors. This should increase accuracy in locating and collecting tissue samples, reduce diagnostic errors and also improve therapy.”

A description of the new motor, made entirely out of plastics, ceramics and rubber, and driven by light and air, was published in the February issue of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechanotronics.

The challenge for his engineering team was to overcome MRI’s dependence on strong magnetic interference. Metals are unsafe in MRIs because the machine relies on a strong magnet, and electric currents distort MR images, says Stoianovici. The team used six of the motors to power the first-ever MRI-compatible robot to access the prostate gland. The robot currently is undergoing preclinical testing.

“Prostate cancer is tricky because it only can be seen under MRI, and in early stages it can be quite small and easy to miss,” says Stoianovici.

The new Johns Hopkins motor, dubbed PneuStep, consists of three pistons connected to a series of gears. The gears are turned by air flow, which is in turn controlled by a computer located in a room adjacent to the MRI machine. “We’re able to achieve precise and smooth motion of the motor as fine as 50 micrometers, finer than a human hair,” says Stoianovici.

The robot goes alongside the patient in the MRI scanner and is controlled remotely by observing the images on the MR. The motor is rigged with fiber optics, which feeds information back to the computer in real time, allowing for both guidance and readjustment.

Source

Such electricity-free motors should be useful in other areas where the absence of magnetism and electricity are important.

I am not thrilled at the prospect of a pneumo-robot creeping around my nether regions, snipping and stabbing--particularly within the confines of a mega-magnetic tube. Fortunately, by the time I am ready for such things, robots will be nano-sized and MRI will by superseded by gentler imaging techniques.

Hat tip medgadget