Posted by ljmacphee on January 2, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news, robotics | 
Good things occur.
Imagine two foot tall robots traveling at ten mph armed with machine guns that stop on a dime and are accurate from a quarter mile distance. That’s one of the future weapons heading our way. Robotex is developing military robots privately, no gov’t red tape, and doing so quickly and cheaply. At these prices we could drop one on every block in a city. There’s no mention of group intelligence or swarm behavior yet, but who could resist? You know they are thinking about it.
But bad things can happen.
The pros and cons of this are obvious. It gets our soldiers out of harm’s way. The downside is the first time it makes a bad choice and wipes out civilians things’ll get ugly. Can you feel the Terminator coming closer to reality?
More importantly is the development of military weapons privatizing. The upside is we get fantastic weapons sooner and cheaper. But will they go to the US military? What’s to prevent the new privately developed weapons from going to other governments; or more concerning other private groups?
Information is scarce, this is a private company and I’m sure the government does not want much information out there either.
More information:
Ethical implications of robots in war ( pdf )
Killer robots from Silicon Valley could replace soldiers
Military recruits thousands more warbots for new unmanned surge
Who Stole the Plans for iRobots Battle Bots?
Zombie warfare: The rise of the mil-bots
See also:
The terminator for pirates has arrived
Robots of war
Posted by ljmacphee on December 26, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news, robotics |
Cockroaches are prefect for testing swarm behavior, they are pack members and behave as a swarm. They group together especially when hiding. They find a cool, dark place and pile into it as a group.
Four cockroaches built by Jose Halloy were introduced into a cockroach group. At first the roaches ignored the robots. They were then given sex hormone odors and accepted into the roaches group. The roaches were given two dark hiding places, one darker than the other. At first they and the robot preferred the dark hiding place. The robot was reprogrammed to prefer the lighter of the two dark hideouts and 60% of the other roaches followed suit.
Simpler methods such as hunting decoys have had success influencing animal behavior. But this method doesn’t have a way for the decoy to further interact with the animal. Robots gives us that opportunity. The things we learn from such studies will also give us insight in to ways to better control robot swarms.
See also:
Swarm intelligence reaches a new level
More information:
Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Insticts
Robot ‘pied piper leads roaches
Leurre - Artificial life control in mixed societies
Slashdot ‘Robots Assimilate into Cockroach Society
Papers
Building mixed societies of animals and robots ( has pictures and details of the robot - cockroach experiment - excellent beginner’s paper )
Swis Track: A tracking tool for multi-unit robotic and biological systems ( more details on the cockroach experiment, also easily readable)
Posted by ljmacphee on December 24, 2007 under robotics |
I was working through my rss feed on robots the other day and ran across this short story. It’s worth a read, just some light reading for the holiday.
So, for months, I’ve been seeing this “stock robot” trading machine ad, all over the net. From time to time, it would pop up on my blog too; so I bought one.The “stock trading robot” was delivered in a metal box, about half the size of a coffin. I’m sure my neighbors thought “The Fly” was having dead monkey’s delivered to his house. Very nice. . . . [ read more The important matter of stock trading robots]
Posted by ljmacphee on December 12, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news, robotics |
Truth is I already feel like Jane somedays. I push buttons on the dishwasher, washer, dryer, roomba, scooba and now if I just had Rosie to water the plants and put the clean dishes and clothes away life could be good.
A personal robot that can water plants, remind owners to take their medication, turn lights on and off, and control appliances has won a contest sponsored by iRobot.
Danh Trinh, 35, of Towson, Md., won iRobot’s Create Challenge contest and its $5,000 prize, with his Personal Home Robot, the company announced Tuesday.
iRobot Create is a preassembled programmable robot designed so developers can create new robots without having to build everything from scratch. . . . [ read more Personal Robot Wins iRobot's Create Challenge]
More information:
Picture of the robot
Tom’s Hardware iRobot Create Challenge
Posted by ljmacphee on December 5, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news, robotics |
Machine gunned robot ships are chasing pirates and saving innocents. The future has arrived and the Terminator is in it.
Spartan USVs have been deployed for a while, I’ve found references back to 2003. They gather information to protect military vehicles from Cole type attacks. The Spartan can run about two days and travel at around 50 mph.
The newer MRVI Interceptor can be controlled or run autonomously. It has been designed to take on pirates, protect oil rigs and military vessels.
Robots versus pirates—it’s not as stupid, or unlikely, as it sounds. Piracy has exploded in the waters near Somalia, where this past week United States warships have fired on two pirate skiffs, and are currently in pursuit of a hijacked Japanese-owned vessel. At least four other ships in the region remain under pirate control, and the problem appears to be going global: The International Maritime Bureau is tracking a 14-percent increase in worldwide pirate attacks this year. [ more information Robot boats hunt high-tech pirates on the high-speed seas]
More information:
Spartan Scout ( pdf )
MRVI Interceptor
Sea Robotics
USV Video
See also:
Robots of War
More robots on the sea
What happens when weapons development goes private?