Showing posts with label Robots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robots. Show all posts

Just Another Big Softy, But Now You See him, Now You Don’t


The new excitement on the block is that we have just another big softy, but now you see him, now you don’t.

Species from chameleons to squids have an interesting ability to change color to blend in with the background. Just the sort of ability many of us would have wished when we ended up somewhere either over-dressed or under-dressed.

Some while ago, Whitesides et al made a soft tetrapod that could lurch, crawl and undulate about the place like something you wouldn’t want to step on in poor light (1). It was tethered to its driver via pneumatics driving its fluid actuators deep in its silicone rubber body.

It is now a horse of a different color. It has developed a circulatory system and dyes can be pumped through its bendy body (2, 3). Not just plain dyes, but light sensitive dyes like fluorescent dyes or heat sensitive dyes.  There is local control of segment circuits so it can exhibit color patterns.

So we have a prototype soft, squidgy robot that can glow in the dark or hide in your cabbage patch and listen to the sweet nothings that you’re whispering in your neighbor’s shell-like auricular appendage.

This little beastie has a big advantage – it’s cheap. Even better, I would think it’s a great candidate for 3-D printing. But before we all rush out crying for our own squidgy tetrapod for Christmas, they still have to crack the external drive system and build the pneumatics into its body.

Computer control would clearly go hand in hand with that. The only thing that we have left to do is to define its mission statement so that it has a clear understanding of its place in the world. We don’t want to envision a future world with lots of cheap squidgy tetrapods running amok, changing color and causing trouble.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/51/20400.full.pdf+html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19286259
  3. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6096/828.abstract


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com

Commanding Robots


When we receive good advice, whether to save the planet or to look after ourselves, we are often reluctant to take it. But the how we get the message is also important. Reading a few lines in a manual and we find that easy to ignore, but as we move further into the blue skies ahead we will have our devices and machines giving us good advice verbally.

How are we going to cope with some form of robot telling us what to do? Roubroeks et al of U Tech. Eindhoven have been trying to persuade 138 adults of a wide range of ages to start saving the planet when they use their washing machines (1). They tried various degrees of firmness in the advice as well as different methods of delivery.

The advice came in three ways: i. a printed document on a computer screen, ii the printed document with a picture of a cute iCat robot looking at them and lastly, iii. a movie clip with the robot speaking the text. The advice ranged from general advice to “you must” advice.

The candidates didn’t care for the robot apparently telling them what to do. The impassive picture of a robot gave them a little less negative feelings and they were least negative about the printed screen document.

What went down with the least resistance to the message was kindly advice without a robot anywhere in sight. Robots were bad news when the instruction was firmly given. Now, most of us get rather negative about obeying commands gratuitously given, but it seems we certainly don’t like machines telling us what to do even if it is only standing there looking at us as we read the instructions.

I would dearly like to know if any of the participants went home and actually took the advice to save energy by using lower temperature wash cycles. They should really try the experiment with a voice from the washing machine triggered by the setting up of the wash cycle asking them or strongly telling them to conserve energy with a voice of someone’s grandmother.


http://www.springerlink.com/content/k32017q46775557n/fulltext.pdf

Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/blog/

Amazing Robot Mice


Robots are rushing off the production lines to fill all sorts of niches previously filled by people or animals. It’s almost a month ago (November 8th to be exact) that I posted about the swarms of robot trashcans descending on young children with the dual purpose of cleaning up the streets and training the kids to be tidy. Not all robots have been produced with such high minded ideals, though.

An animal that has long been the focus to be robotically simulated is the mouse. What do you do with a robotic mouse? Well, you do what a lot of cognitive scientists have long done with live mice, that is, you put them in a maze.

The 32 All Japan Micromouse Championship was run last month in Tsukuba. The suffix “micro” is a bit of a misnomer, though, as the mice are a little larger than computer mice. More the size of a small rat really, so they would be better classified as “Mini-Mouse”, but that name may have gender and IP implications in spite of the spelling.

The competition is very mouse-lab-like in that the mice are placed in a large maze. They have an orientation run where they scurry around digitizing the layout and then they get down to serious business. This consists of a series of timed runs with the winner being declared the Big Cheese who gets through the maze in the least time.

Clearly going down blind alleys is bad and going too fast can mean crashes, which negate that run. The big news this year is that the speed record was broken with the winner clocking a time of 3.921 seconds (1). Previously the 4-second barrier looked uncrackable, but Ng Beng Kiat’s micromouse, Min 7, pushed through the pain barrier of a bug in his algorithm and cracked it to take 1st place. A photo library of the winner is available on Ng’s website (2).

Ning5 is also from the Ng Beng Kiat stable and came second in the half-size micromouse event after having had to cope with the same algorithmic bug. Ng and his stable comes from Singapore. He works at the Alpha Center there and robot mice kits are available to help get aspiring trainers started. The competition circuit is world wide and the beasties are easier to transport than horses.

I’m left with one idle thought. Surely a much smaller version of a micromouse shouldn’t be saddled with such a name as a “half-size micromouse,” but should have a proper title of its own.   Maybe “Nanomouse” would fit the current fetish for all things nano.

  1. http://www.robots-dreams.com/2011/11/ng-beng-kiat-nails-the-2011-all-japan-micromouse-competition-video.html
  2. http://www.np.edu.sg/alpha/nbk/

Just How Mobile Is Your iPhone?


Day after day, smartphones sit in your pockets, bags, or holsters until required to perform for a few minutes before being re-consigned to darkness and oblivion, That is until their owners get bored and demand playtime. Absolute dependability is demanded, and year-by-year the performance bar is raised. The threat of being cast aside for a new love is constant.

A new day is dawning, for iPhones, that is, and maybe, just maybe, for the rest of us owners. Thanks to Romotive, your iPhone can become truly mobile. An independent life is just over the horizon for them and is no longer just a fantasy (1).

Romotive have designed a wheelchair for your iPhone (1, 2). The phones headphone jack supplies the communication link and your phone can drive itself about the place, scare your cat, bark at your dog or otherwise take its place in the good life. This is as it should be in these days of cell phone based democracy.

Now, the guys at Romotive, having set their iPhones free, haven’t got much further than persuading them to act as go-betweens in office romances by delivering flowers to pretty coworkers, but guys will be guys, I guess.

The promise, of course, is that App Developers will jump in with all sorts of applications so that your old iPhone 4, and the 4s when the 5 reaches your hot sweaty hands, will be liberated into retirement and allowed to run free around your accommodations making themselves useful in a myriad of ways.

Imagine, with a mechanical arm, they could lift themselves out of their chairs and place themselves on charging mats, and then be off again in an hour to play each other at some multiplayer game or, if wanting some personal time, go off into the corner and tweet wisecracks on your Twitter account. Maybe even trundle into your bedroom for a candid photo of you snoring to post on your Facebook wall.

  1. http://romotive.com/
  2. http://news.discovery.com/tech/the-robot-with-a-smart-phone-brain-111118.html

Momentary Lapses


Leaving aside the Theory of Relativity (Special or General), most of us experience time as an elastic dimension. We have all, at one time or another, presented ourselves at a reception desk and been told “just a moment, sir/madam/ miss/ sonny or some such epithet”. But that moment is never properly defined.

It is the same when a family member has purloined you favorite gadget. You ask how long they will be using it for and you get the reply “how long is a piece of string?” Well, if someone hands me a piece of string, I know exactly how long it is, but your sibling is dissembling. What they really are saying is “how long is a piece of stretchy elastic?” A very different thing and the situation will often end badly.

Telephone robots are particularly good at handing you the flexible moment. “Please continue to hold, your call is very important to us” and then the same boring musak is pumped into your ear, is a common experience for most of us as we desperately wait for help from a technical service guru.

Let us now turn that situation around and look at the quandary from a robot’s point of view.

Don’t be unsympathetic, now. 

This can be a real problem for a service-bot. With aging populations in many countries, the future is for more of us to have home helps in the form of robots. Visualize the situation when our care-bot is about to serve our dinner and we tell it to “wait a moment” as we shuffle off to the bathroom. How long should it wait before it decides that there is a problem? Kennedy and Trafton of the Naval Research lab. address this  in a new paper (1).

Your care-bot has to substitute calculation for common sense. In the above example, it would have to know your shuffle rate, what you were up to in the bathroom and how long that should take. I can imagine that your magazines and crossword puzzles would disappear from that room in the house!

The algorithm is clearly complex with a decision tree so the care-bot just waits, puts your dinner back in the oven, in the refrigerator or into the dog while it goes on the back porch for a sulk. Or, finally, should it drop everything and rush to break down the door and shock you back into the real world?

  1. W.G.Kennedy & J.G.Trafton, Int. J. Soc. Robot. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-011-0098-7

Robotic Dribbling


World Cup football, that is soccer, is back in the news. The tournament, with all its drama, with its tears of joy or disappointment, is being played out in Istanbul. It is time for the World RoboCup.

Disaster for the UK, though. They were knocked out during the early stages and didn’t make it into the final series. The good news is that the manager won’t be sacked. I would venture a thought. The team were all French nationals. They were in heavy training in Edinburgh, but nevertheless one might question their loyalty just a smidge.

This is four-a-side football and most are bipedal. There is a class for robots with wheels, but although it results in a faster game, it doesn’t quite have the magic of one biped shoving another over or diving to save a goal. They weren’t supposed to shove each other over any more than their human copycats are, and they are heavily penalized for it.

So far the kicking is fairly gentlemanly. In due course this will increase. It may take some time before they will “bend it like Beckam.” They have until 2050. That is THE DATE when the plan is for a team of robots to beat a FIFA people team. No money will be changing hands of course.

When I picture a team of robots trotting out onto the hallowed turf at Wembley and beating the pants off England, I feel the carpet moving. I think that we’ll need to focus on cricket. The laws of cricket (ah, you had forgotten that cricket has laws and not little things like rules) will confuse the robotic players. Also when they break for tea, they will have no end of trouble with the strawberry jam and Devonshire cream on their scones.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14103537