Robots in news

Meet Some Robots:

• ASIMO - Say Hello to ASIMO. From Honda Motor Company. A fascinating collection of information (including FAQs, movies & teaching resources) about this humanoid robot whose name stands for Advanced Step in Innovative MObility.
• Assembly Robotics Group, part of the Institute of Perception, Action, and Behaviour in the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Home of Freddy, the Famous Scottish Robot: "Freddy (mid1960s - 1981) was one of the first robots to be able to assemble wooden models using vision to identify and locate the parts -- given a jumbled heap of toy wooden car and boat pieces it could assemble both in about 16 hours using a parallel gripper and single camera (1973)."
  • For more information about Freddy - including a photo - check out this page from the seminar: Artificial Intelligence - Recollections of the Pioneers
  • And be sure to see the segement featuring Freddy in this video available from the AAAI Video Archive.
• Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a collaborative research partnership funded by the University of Bristol, the University of the West of England and HEFCE, is the home of Ecobot II, A robot powered on a diet of flies
  • Listen to this related podcast: Chris Melhuish - Energy Autonomy. Talking Robots (August 17, 2007). "In this episode we interview Chris Melhuish, who is the director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol and the West of England in the UK. Whether for your iPod or robot, we all crave for a better energy autonomy. Batteries, solar panels and gas tanks are the usual, but what if machines could digest bugs or waste to get on the move? Chris Melhuish presents the fly-eating EcoBot, artificial gills for underwater robots and the technology behind Microbial Fuel Cells. The question now is whether these robots will be begging for food or capable of autonomously foraging for it in their environment (SlugBot). So... why don't we have humanoids sitting in our restaurants yet?"
• Kismet: A Sociable Humanoid Robot. Well-written text complemented by delightful images, not to mention several video clips, make this an excellent site for getting to know a robot, up-close and personal.
  • Meet the Humanoid Robotic Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and their other robots, including: Coco, Cog, and Macaco.
  • Check out the Robotic Life Group and their fascinating projects.
  • See this photo gallery from CNET News.com: Humanoid robots come to life at MIT (May 15, 2007).
  • Interested in an article about the theological adviser to Kismet's creators?
  • And be sure to read: The Real Transformers - Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits. Could this be the beginning of robot consciousness -- and of a better understanding of ourselves? By Robin Marantz Henig. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (July 29, 2007 cover story). "I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. ... "
    • Also listen to this related interview with the author of the article and Rodney Brooks.
• Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. " We create socially intelligent robotic creatures that communicate with us, cooperate with us, and learn from us as capable partners." Be sure to meet Huggable, Leonardo and others.
• Shakey the Robot, from SRI's innovation timeline:"From 1966 through 1972, the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) conducted research on a mobile robot system nicknamed “Shakey.” Endowed with a limited ability to perceive and model its environment, Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, route-finding, and the rearranging of simple objects. Although the Shakey project led to numerous advances in AI techniques, many of which were reported in the literature, much specific information appears only in a series of previously relatively inaccessible SRI technical reports." Those reports and other resources are now available and can be accessed from this SRI page.
• Also see this related article: Robot learns to grasp everyday chores. By Brian D. Lee. Stanford Report (November 8, 2006). "Stanford scientists plan to make a robot capable of performing everyday tasks, such as unloading the dishwasher. By programming the robot with 'intelligent' software that enables it to pick up objects it has never seen before, the scientists are one step closer to creating a real life Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons cartoon show. 'Within a decade we hope to develop the technology that will make it useful to put a robot in every home and office,' said Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science who is leading the wireless Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project. ... Stanford has a history of leading the field of artificial intelligence. In 1966, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute built Shakey, the first robot to combine problem solving, movement and perception. Flakey, a robot that could wander independently, followed. In 2005, Stanford engineers won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge with Stanley, a robot Volkswagen that autonomously drove 132 miles through a desert course. The ultimate aim for artificial intelligence is to build a robot that can create and execute plans to achieve a goal. 'The last serious attempt to do something like this was in 1966 with the Shakey project led by Nils Nilsson,' Ng said. 'This is a project in Shakey's tradition, done with 2006 technology instead of 1966 AI technology.' To succeed, the scientists will need to unite fragmented research areas of artificial intelligence including speech processing, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, machine learning and vision."
• And see:
  • Shakey's page at The Robot Hall of Fame
  • the 1972 video, Shakey the Robot, just one of the Shakey videos that can be found in the AAAI Video Archive.
• Vikia and the Social Robot Project. "The goal of the Social Robot Project is to overcome the human-robot social barrier. Towards this end, we are in the process of developing a robot which bears a personality, and which can behave according to social conventions. The idea is that communication and interaction with robots should be easy and enjoyable, both for unfamiliar users and trained professionals. We want robots to behave more like people, so that people do not have to behave like robots when they interact with them."
• "At CMU [Carnegie Mellon University], Grace serves as VIKIA's sucessor as a platform for the social robots project."
• The Robotics Institute at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Check out their collection of projects and find out who Pearl is . . . and what a HeartLander does.
• Robots in Action. From CNET News.com. "Rapid advances in robot development are leading to a whole new generation of tools and toys. [Here] are recent CNET News.com photo galleries of the mechanical wonders."
• Seven Amazing Robots That Will Change Your Life,

What is a Robot?

Say the word "robot" and many of us will conjure up an image of the red camera lens of the malevolent HAL from the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Model B-9 Environmental-Control Robot, better known just as Robot — the "bubble-headed booby" that Dr. Zachary Smith could not get to do his malicious deeds on the 1960s television series Lost in Space. Then there are the more modern machines, such as the Terminator, Battlestar Galactica's cylons, and of course the robots from Star Wars.

The term does have its roots in entertainment, but it originated much earlier than many people think. The word robot made its debut in 1921, in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek. It comes from the word "robota", a Czech term for forced labour.

Since then, fictional robots have often been portrayed as machines that are in competition with humans, attempting to break away from their roles as servers of people to assert their independence and freedom to act and think as beings in their own right.

The noted science fiction writer Isaac Asimov didn't see them that way. In his stories, robots served humans. He penned Three Laws of Robotics, later adding a "zeroth law." They were:

• Law Zero: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
• Law One: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate a higher order law.
• Law Two: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law.
• Law Three: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a robot as:

• One of the mechanical men and women in Capek's play; hence, a machine (sometimes resembling a human being in appearance) designed to function in place of a living agent, esp. one which carries out a variety of tasks automatically or with a minimum of external impulse.
• A person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical; an automaton.

The International Organization for Standardization also has a definition. Under ISO 8373, a robot is: "An automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications."

Your microwave oven fits that bill, even though many wouldn't think of it as a robot.

We put the question to several experts in robotics. Each of them had a slightly different take on the issue of what a robot actually is.

Alan Mackworth, the director of the University of British Columbia Laboratory for Computational Intelligence and president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, says robots are goal-oriented.

"It's a machine that can sense and act and react in the world and possibly involves some reasoning for performing these actions, and it does so autonomously. By that definition a thermostat would be a robot. Though it's not 'aware' it has a goal, that awareness isn't required."

Rodney Brooks, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, thinks current notions of "robot" are too broad.

"To me a robot is something that has some physical effect on the world, but it does it based on how it senses the world and how the world changes around it. You might say that a dishwasher is a robotic system for cleaning dishes but to me it's not really. First it doesn't have any action outside the confines of its body. Secondly, it doesn't know about the dishes inside it. It just spurts hot water around and swishes it and whether there are dishes there or not doesn't affect its behaviour, so it's not really situated in the world, it's not understanding the world around it in any sort of meaningful way.

Gregory Dudek, the director of the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University in Montreal, sets three criteria for robots.

"They have to have a way of making measurements of the world, they have to have a way of making decisions — in other words, something like a computer, you could call that thinking informally — and they have to have a way taking actions. And so if a thing has all three parts, we might call it a robot."

Joseph Engelberger has been called the father of robotics. The American engineer and entrepreneur helped create the first industrial robot. In 1966, he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson along with a robot that served a beer, sunk a putt and led the band. Asked to define a robot, he once said, "I can't define a robot, but I know one when I see one."