RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events robots -- cinematic future or today's reality?

just about once a week, now, i'll see some big news article on how some grouping from berkeley or MIT or honda or something has developed some form of new robotics.

there's a major quest going on for a bipedal walking robot, for 'smart' robots that can defuse bombs, or for exoskeleton-like framed robotics, that will assist firefighters.

thoughts?

here is a link to a story from a year ago about honda's walking robot development.

and just this morning, there was an article here about a kingdom-come-batman-like robotic exoskeleton, that could potentially help wheelchair-bound people walk, or firefighters carry several people at once, or even be given to the military march for longer distances, without getting (as) tired.

also this morning:

British Robot Unveiled to Help Disabled

LONDON (Reuters) - A robot which looks and moves like a caterpillar to help the disabled in the home was unveiled in Britain on Thursday.

The Flexibot, which can clamp itself to specific points on the wall and ceiling, could be used to aid the elderly and disabled with domestic tasks such as shaving, cooking and cleaning.

It has three pivots allowing it to move between points and a three fingered hand to grip objects.

"We needed to develop technology to go a step further and get a flexible robot," said inventor Professor Mike Topping from Staffordshire University in central England, where the robot had its world launch.

"The Flexibot can go from socket to socket with the sockets being equally spaced. It can even travel along walls and latch onto a wheelchair," he told Reuters. "People in wheelchairs could take it to the supermarket and it could pick up cans of beans."

Scientists from Staffordshire University's Center for Rehabilitation Robotics developed the robot with help from colleagues in universities and engineering firms across Europe.

The project, which began in 2001, was subsidized by a $2.8 million grant from the European Commission (news - web sites) as part of its goal to make society less discriminating and accessible for everyone.

Topping, who has been involved in building robots for the disabled for 20 years, hopes the next stage in development will be a fully robotic kitchen with two Flexibots working in tandem under the control of a disabled person.

Terminators are going to kill us.

I'm even more interested in the development of artificial life/artificial intelligence systems. Even cinematic applications have developed some pretty impressive facsimilies of human problem-solving and intuition, especially the MASSIVE(tm) technology used to generate and animate huge crowds of digital 'extras' in the LOTR battle scenes. Once we've begun creating problem-solving machines, then we're onto something.

I would want a robot friend like the Robot from
Lost in space, ( the TV show. ) or even like Rex,
from Lester del Rey's book, Runaway Robot.

That would be ultra cool!!!!

I feel such robots could exist oneday,
not too many years from now. All we need is a few
breakthroughs in cybernetics.

Dammit -- where's Bibbo when we need him?

His minor in college was Robotics, and he's built the death machines -- he can tell us their weaknesses!

Ya know, I think that the B-9 Robot from Lost in Space was the first representation of a helper robot.

I mean, he babysat a child whom parents would neglect, he would yell "WARNING, WARNING, DANGER! DANGER!", And he kept the mincing, boy-hungry pedophile from defiling the child...

We all need a B-9 Robot.

Do they like the nekid human ladies like chimps do?

Hey that one doesn't have any legs! We can take it on!

It's Robo - Tron - Fun! Yay!

Tron?

Hated it!

Ok, how about Rock - Em Sock Em Robots????

BeardGuy's got a robot avatar! He's a narc!

Dear Mister Indestructable Man:

My avatar is Prince Planet. He's a boy from the planet
Radion. I watched his show back in 1966, when it was first broadcast here in the USA.

He's an alien BOY, not a robot.

Here's a Link to a site about him:


web page

I have about 38 of the 52 episodes on VHS. They're STILL pretty cool, after almost 40 years!

(just a joke, BG -- got no qualms with the wonders of old school animation)

Is ok, I knew it was a joke but I thought you might not
know who Prince Planet was.

Indestructable Man -

That robot is AWESOME!!!
I gotta get me one of those!!!!

But only if I can program him
to say, " Danger, Danger Will Robinson! "

I'm going to program it to say "Whatchutalkin' bout Willis?"

I love that robot too, Beardguy.

He has an enduringly cool and futuristic look, and a lot of personality.

As I'm sure you're aware, he was first introduced in the movie Forbidden Planet(1956)



I also like this publicity illustration from the movie:



http://www.100megsfree3.com/glaw/robby/robby9.jpg

Hot women, short skirts, hot legs, and robots... what a combo !





~

I also love the robot from This Island Earth(1955) which beyond the robot is a terrific story, and a science fiction classic .



-------

**UPDATE** Ooops !

I meant to say the robot in Day the Earth Stood Still(1951):



Which is a great movie, with a mysterious and powerful alien robot (and referred to, with clear story parallels, in Alan Moore's WATCHMEN ).







This Island Earth is a great movie too, with lots of cool aliens and spaceships, but no robots. My mistake.





http://www.scifimovies.com/movies/mov0002.shtml

Oh man -- the robot accidently killed ANOTHER hooker!

Danger! Danger! The robots are all pissed off because
you are all ignoring them......

RoboSapien?

Engineer Builds Robot That Walks on Water
By MIKE CRISSEY, Associated Press Writer

PITTSBURGH - It could be called a mechanical miracle — a robot that walks on water. With inspiration from nature and some help from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research team led by Carnegie Mellon engineering assistant professor Metin Sitti has built a tiny robot that can walk on water, much like insects known as water skimmers, water skaters, pond skaters or Jesus bugs.

Although it's only a basic prototype, Sitti and other researchers imagine that his water-skimming robot could be used on any still water. With a chemical sensor, it could monitor water supplies for contamination or other toxins; with a camera it could be a spy or an explorer; with a net or a boom, it could skim contaminants off the top of water.

Sitti, who runs Carnegie Mellon's NanoRobotics Lab, said he has long been fascinated by water striders and what it would take to build one.

"I think it is the final challenge of microrobotics if you can make this thing," Sitti said. "It needs to be so light and so compact. Look how this animal stays on the water in that kind of miniature, very lightweight body."

For their size — a half-inch on average — the insects can move. Water striders skim across the water as fast as a meter per second; the human equivalent of going 400 miles per hour. They're also very mobile.

For now, Sitti's robot is little more than a half-inch boxy-body made from carbon fibers and eight, 2-inch steel-wire legs coated with a water-repelling plastic (technically making it a water spider).

It also doesn't have a brain, any sensors or a battery. Its "muscles" are three flat-plate piezoelectric actuators — special pieces of metal that change shape when electricity is run through them. The actuators are powered by wires and controlled by three circuits connected to a power supply.

But it can stand on water — it doesn't float — and can skim backward and forward, propelling itself with two legs that act like oars. Although simple now, Sitti said he could build a more complex water-skimming robot within six months without too much trouble.

"These insects are really dumb," Sitti said. "Think about the economy of power, if you are so small why should you need a brain like us to plan everything. These insects have such simple controls."

Sitti's prototype is especially impressive considering researchers didn't really know how water skimmers actually walked on water until last year.

The bugs support themselves on water because they're not heavy enough to break the surface tension of water, like a needle that floats.

It was long thought the insects used their legs to create waves to push themselves forward, like a wave hitting a boat.

In 1993, Mark Denny, a Stanford University marine biologist, pointed out a problem: If water skimmers moved by creating waves, newly hatched water skimmers would be immobile because they weren't strong enough to create waves. In reality, newly hatched water skimmers move just as well as full grown adults.

Last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician John M.W. Bush and two graduate students solved the riddle by placing dyes and particles in water and using a high-speed video camera.

Bush and the graduate students discovered that water striders move by pushing down on the surface of water enough to create valleys but not enough to break the surface. The water then bounces back like a trampoline to push the insect forward.

Beside the physics and mechanics of walking on water, Sitti's prototype also shows how far robotics has come with the help of lighter and stronger materials.

"If you had asked us 10 years ago to build a water bug, I don't think we would have done it," said Mark Cutkosky, an engineering professor at Stanford University who has been building roach-like robots.

Sitti's robot weighs about a gram, or half of a dime. And so far, it's cheap. Sitti estimates his spartan prototype cost about $10 in materials to make.

Carnegie Mellon University's NanoRobotics Lab

A robot that walks on water, eh? What's next, a robot that can change water into wine?

Today's New York Times reports that "Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits."

• At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code. Today’s humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. They are not the docile companions of our collective dreams, robots designed to flawlessly serve our dinners, fold our clothes and do the dull or dangerous jobs that we don’t want to do. Nor are they the villains of our collective nightmares, poised for robotic rebellion against humans whose machine creations have become smarter than the humans themselves. They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.
  
  But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.