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Looks like this drone fad is catching on.

From Singularity Hub:

According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, nearly one in three US warplanes are drones…and those machines are changing the way the world wages war. US soldiers in Afghanistan rely more and more upon intelligence gathered from drones, and President Obama recently lauded the precision and success of deadly drone-strikes against top terrorist targets in Pakistan. Meanwhile all advanced militaries in the world, from Israel to Russia, seem to be improving their own drone capabilities.

And the military isn’t the only one getting in on the action.

According to a New Scientist article called Civilian Drones to Fill the Sky After Law Shake-Up:

For the moment, the law stands in the way. The US Federal Aviation Administration allows for recreational use of remote-controlled air vehicles, but the Columbia Packing case blurs the line because the UAV became a surveillance tool. Commercial use is also illegal – last week real estate agents in Los Angeles, California, were ordered to stop using helicopter drones to shoot aerial movies of properties they are selling. “Although the FAA allows hobbyists to fly model airplanes for recreational purposes, that authority does not extend to operators flying unmanned aircraft for business purposes,” the Air Division of the Los Angeles police department reminded the California Association of Realtors.

That could soon change. The FAA plans to unveil a new set of rules this year that will cover the burgeoning interest in flying commercial and private UAVs.

New Scientist’s editorial is ”High time to welcome the friendly drones.”

Our eye in the sky.

Has there ever been a time when people could, in their backyard, build something that comprised 30% of a superpower’s air-force?

We’re in uncharted territory.

This is, doubtless, old hat to many of my readers. But, during a recent conversation about what the collective noun for drones should be ["an argus of drones" -- book it]  it was brought to my attention that many people have never heard anything about the civilian uses of this technology.

Here’s a stark outline:

The police buy drones. Not cheap – $50,000 for one.

The people build their own. Very cheap. Out of a Polish RoboCopter kit and a video camera.

You can build something similar for $199.

The only comparison that really springs to my mind is how the British Navy, by adopting steel ships rendered their wooden fleet suddenly obsolete. It sacrificed years of naval supremacy and engaged itself in an arms race. Just by the power of its new advance. Power sometimes overthrows itself.

Technological power often does.

(This is why a lot of countries refused to engage in biological weapons research. Not out of the goodness of their hearts but, because, like the nuclear bomb, it costs a fortune to be the first to develop the tech and not nearly so much to steal or reverse engineer it.)

But even they –at that time– were in competition with other nation states. This is the military power of the state in conflict with the power of backyard inventors and hobbyists.

It reminds one of the ongoing struggles between old media and new.

If you thought old media was slow to adapt to the DIY challenges from filesharing, blogs and whathaveyou, just remember — their corporate model is held to be the picture of efficiency, adaptability and quick thinking when compared to government bureaucracy.

The skies are getting strange. And just wait until these happy little fellows are flying down your street.

You won’t be waiting as long as you think.

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DARPA funded researchers have made some paper robots powered by air.

Wired reports:

Powered by nothing more than puffs of air, robots molded from paper and silicone rubber can bend, twist, grip and even lift more than 100 times their weight.

Lifting 100 times their weight is impressive because they’re made out of paper and air. It also sounds kinda useless because paper and air are very light. These things would have to be huge before they can carry your luggage.

Nonetheless . . .

“If you want to go through a winding tube or rubble or some other tough environment that’s difficult to reach, you need to be flexible,” said chemist Xin Chen of Boston University, member of a team who describes their work in a Feb. 9 Advanced Functional Materials paper.  “Soft robots can go a lot of places where hard robots cannot go.”

What’s with robotics and rubble? Every time a scientist describes what his robot/cyborg can or will do, it always seems to be about crawling through rubble. But I’ve been outside. I’m not even seeing a lot of robots on the sidewalk. Rubble? Just what do these guys have planned? Why do they all expect so much rubble?

Then one remembers the DARPA funding. The military is in the rubble creation business. There even seems to be a robot rubble industrial complex. Robots to create rubble, robots to work in rubble. Every bot measured against a post-apocalyptic  wasteland.

This is a shame. Because, these paper bots are pretty. Just look at the video.

Instead of having them go through a bunch of rubble, they should be sent to David Cronenberg for some tweaks and become slightly functional household decorations.

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"We will no longer lick the crumbs from your table, puny human."

For the interested, here’s a paper on Robot Vacuum Cleaner Personality and Behavior.

Abstract: In this paper we report our study on the user experience of robot vacuum cleaner behavior. How do people want to experience this new type of cleaning appliance? Interviews were conducted to elicit a desired robot vacuum cleaner personality. With this knowledge in mind, behavior was designed for a future robot vacuum cleaner. A video prototype was used to evaluate how people experienced the behavior of this robot vacuum cleaner. The results indicate that people recognized the intended personality in the robot behavior. We recommend using a personality model as a tool for developing robot behavior.

I love this sort of brass tacks research into human robot interactions.

It reminds me of this old paper that I’ve lost. It was some sort of study about robot child interactions that, I think, veered into a study about manufacturing cute.

Can you guess what country that was out of?

Continue reading »]]> South Korea has developed robot prison wardens. And they’re actually kinda cute.

BBC Reports:

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies.

It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

I’m surprised that these things have cameras and sensors rather than machine guns. It’s almost like South Korea is ignoring the robot script.

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pic nicked from here

The Canadian National Robot Games have been cancelled due to lack of interest.

CBC reports:

Steve Jones said attendance to this weekend’s competition, which was scheduled to take place in Toronto at the Ontario Science Centre, was going to be down to half its normal number.

“Kids aren’t interested what’s inside the robot, what’s inside the box, what’s inside the IT chip,” said Jones, who heads the Canadian National Robot Games.

“It’s very sad. That’s part of my frustration. I don’t know what it would take me now to spark that interest.”

Jones also said he believes children are now more interested in the instant gratification of playing with a new toy instead of building toys or models.

In other news, kids prefer cookies to broccoli and I still have no idea why children are allowed to decide what’s good for them.

Continue reading »]]> I’m gonna file this one under – when it’s not evil to blog straight off a press release . . .

Continue reading »]]> A language evolving robot called a Lingodroid has been invented in Australia.

These Lingodroids can invent words when they need one then share that word with other robots. Below, two Lingdroids meet in a new location. One names it “Pize” and informs the other robot.

The other robot thinks the name is nice. That’s good news.

Much of human conflict is about using different names for things. (Who can forget that whole God or Allah kerfuffle?) We’ll see how it goes when separated robots develop different languages and disagree about what the new location is called and who has the right to call it that.

My guess is that the robots start inventing some pretty colorful names for each other.

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The Office of Naval Research has given a team from Northeastern University $600,000 to develop micro-robots to find underwater mines.

Professor Joesph Ayers directs the program.

Over the last seven years, the synthetic biologist has become famous for designing the RoboLobster and RoboLamprey — autonomous underwater robots that mimic the neurophysiology and behavior of their real-life counterparts.

Designing a fully autonomous robot — or system of smaller robots — is the ultimate goal of the research, says Ayers, who has also created a robotic eel that uses synapses and neurons rather than circuits and computer chips.

For his current project, Ayers will work with researchers at MIT, Boston University and Harvard Medical School to create micro-robots using bacteria that have been reprogrammed to detect explosive materials, such as C4 and TNT, that have seeped from underwater mines into streams, rivers and oceans around the world.

RoboLobsters, Ayers says, would serve as “chaperones” for the mini mine-seekers, which will light up when they detect explosives. “It is an engineering approach to molecular biology,” he says. “What we’re doing is basically adding sensor or reporter genes to bacteria and giving that bacteria a limited computation ability.”

The micro-robots will be able to process information in a matter of milliseconds without relying on specific algorithms that may limit their movements.

“Animals never get stuck and can wiggle and squirm to get out of a tough spot,” Ayers says. “What we think animals are doing is increasing the chaos in their nervous system and getting themselves out of tight spots.”

There’s a lot about this story to feel all oogey about. (Military grants to create bacterial robots to prowl the ocean. Creepy creatures stuck halfway between life and machine. Lampreys and lobsters and bacteria.) But one can only hope that this team will find and destroy the lost mines and avoid making a bigger mess in doing so.

After all, even mines were created with solving another problem in mind.

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pic nicked from here

German scientists have made a robot that can imitate the waggle dance that bees use to communicate.

RoboBee is stuck to the end of a rod attached to a computer, which determines its “dance” moves. The rod is also connected to a belt which makes it vibrate. Like a real bee, it can spin, buzz its wings, carry scents and droplets of sugar water, and give off heat.

When RoboBee told real bees where to forage for food, the bees responded by leaving their hive but went to the wrong feeders. They foraged but failed to understand the rest of the directions. Or were being obstinate. Who really knows? They’re fucking bees.

But this tiny robot dancer has shown some holes in the knowledge of bee dances and that’s a good thing. The grand point of robotics is often not to build a working replica of something but to come to a deeper understanding of the thing by trying to replicate it.

Besides, the power to communicate with bees might be a bit more than people are ready to handle. Next thing you know, you’ll have schoolboys hacking hives and sending the bees to chase pretty girls as some sort of strange pre-adolescent flirting ritual.