Technut News

Imagine the scene: You’re driving your car to an office building in New York City, five minutes from a job interview. No worries. You have already dialed into the car’s memory the parking garage where it’s going to stay, and prepaid the bill. You shut the door. And off it goes. Driverless. And the chances of the car getting into an accident while it travels five or six treacherous city blocks are less than if the hopeful job applicant had tried to park it himself under time pressure.

Does it sound too good to be true? A sign of the end of civilization as we know it? Too far into the future to care? It depends on whom you ask. But some researchers, engineers, and auto companies believe that such automation is not only on the way to becoming commonplace in the next 20 years, but essential to reducing the carbon footprint of vehicles from the U.S. to China and everywhere else. Oh, and as the technology necessary to achieve the “autonomous” car arrives in stages every few years — some of it is already here, in options such as electronic stability control and blind-spot detection — it promises to sharply reduce traffic fatalities.

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There are already lots of ‘digital assistents’ in the cars already manufactured today or in the near future. The article names a few…

• Electronic stability control
• Adaptive cruise control
• Blind-spot detection
• Lane-departure warning
• Collision mitigation

Over the coming years. we will see more and more technology sneak into our cars. And the technology will become more capable. Slowly but surely, cars will go from assisting us to taking over control of the car.

There are many benefits to this. I’m looking forward to it, although I do not expect truly autonomous cars sooner than 10 years from now.

Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the “Care-O-bot® 3”.

The one-armed robot glides slowly to the kitchen table. With its three fingers, it carefully picks up the bottle of apple juice and puts it next to the glasses on the tray in front of it. Then it glides back into the lounge and serves the drinks to the guests. This is how artificial assistants might work in future.

Only 1.45 meters high, Care-O-bot® 3 is the prototype of a new generation of service robots designed to help humans in the household. The quick-to-learn assistant was developed by research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart.

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Unlike its predecessors, it can even recognize and respond to gestures,” explains Graf. Numerous household articles are stored in the robot’s databases. It knows, for example, what a cup looks like and where to find it in the kitchen. It can also learn to recognize new objects. The user simply places the unfamiliar object in the robot’s hand so that it can gain a three-dimensional impression of the item. However, the new robot does not look like a human being. “We deliberately moved away from the existing, humanoid service robots when we designed Care-O-bot® 3,” stresses Care-O-bot-3 project manager Christopher Parlitz of IPA.

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It’s a good thing they moved away from the ‘real’ human being look. The real look just isn’t real enough and that makes it creepy. And you don’t want that look for a home robot.

For everybody who does want to see creepy human like robots, have a look at this Cracked article.

The U.S. military’s small, but growing, arsenal of armed robots has a new addition. Bot-maker Foster-Miller has shipped the first of its new killer machines to the Defense Department’s Combatting Terrorism Technology Support Office.

The 350-pound MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) machine can carry a 40mm grenade launcher or a M240B medium machine gun. Or, if the robot’s operators want their killer ‘bot to be a little less-lethal, the thing can be equipped with a laser dazzler, a loudspeaker, or pepper spray.

After years of safety testing and modifications, three of MAARS kill-bot predecessors were sent to Iraq in 2007. But after nearly nine months in the field, safety concerns (among other reasons) have kept those machines from firing a shot in combat.

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Dean Kamen showed some video of the impressive, mind-controlled prosthetic robot arm he’s invented today at D6 in Carlsbad. Kamen has been showing the arm off since early 2007, usually via video clips like what he showed today. But today’s demonstration at D6 was impressive enough that it’s got the gadget blogs and the Twitterverse all aflutter today.

Deservedly so: Kamen’s arm, dubbed “Luke” (after Skywalker, I assume), is an incredibly sophisticated bit of engineering that’s lightyears ahead of the clamping “claws” that many amputees are forced to use today. The arm is fully articulated, giving the user the same degrees of movement as a natural arm, and is sensitive enough to pick up a piece of paper, a wineglass or even a grape without mishap.

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It may have seemed like just another improbable scene from a Hollywood sci-fi flick ? Tom Cruise battling against an army of robotic spiders intent on hunting him down.But the storyline from Minority Report may not be quite as far fetched as it sounds.

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.

Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.

BAE Systems has just signed a £19million contract to develop the robots for the US Army.

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RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE’s feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.Each of RiSE’s six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.

Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

You can view a movie of RiSE in action at the source, or you can directly download it by clicking here.

Someday soon your car may be able tell you about an oncoming vehicle in your lane on a blind curve or even calm you down on a harried commute. But it may also tell your insurance company how often you drive over the speed limit or alert Starbucks when you drive by so that you can be offered a discount on a latte.Stanford professor Clifford Nass and his colleagues at the university’s CarLab are figuring how to make vehicles collect information on where you drive, how fast you go, your preferences and how you react when some jerk cuts you off. The technology could make you a better driver and even save you time and money - but it also could let insurers keep tabs on you and help advertisers reach right into your car.

Nass, who’s being funded in part by automakers, is not the only guy working on this. Microsoft wants to bring Google-style advertising to your dashboard.

“From the point of view of advertisers, the driver is a great captive audience,” Nass says. “You have the ability of knowing where the person is, so you can have very location-specific advertising.”

But if advertisers know where you are, your insurance company will too. And that’s where things get problematic.

“The insurance company could say, ‘Look, you’ve been parking in high-risk areas. I’m going to raise your collision insurance,’ or ‘We’ve detected that you’ve been driving at 80 miles per hour; that will affect your liability rates.’ So there are huge social issues about the car,” he says.

Still, Nass stresses there’s more to the technology than being spied on or pitched products. Your car could recommend a someplace to get a decent pizza, for example, and your insurance company would know you obey the speed limit and don’t speed up for yellow lights and so cut you a break on your premium.

“Insurance rates are a sensitive topic, but you could have a much more efficient insurance market with better data,” Nass says.

A thinking car also could make you a safer, happier driver. A large part of his research focuses on how a car’s voice can influence your emotional state. He believes that as the car of the future studies the driver’s voice, facial expressions and emotional state using a camera and even blood pressure monitors in the steering wheel, it could change its tone to match your mood. In other words, it’ll know when you’re about to blow your top because someone cut you off, and soothe your nerves with a friendly voice.

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A surgical team in Calgary on Friday extolled the virtues of using a robotic arm to perform groundbreaking surgery to remove a woman’s brain tumour.Paige Nickason, 21, was discharged from the Foothills Medical Centre after surgery Monday by Dr. Garnette Sutherland of the University of Calgary.

“Paige’s brain surgery represents a technical achievement in the use of image-guided robotic technology to remove a relatively complex brain tumour,” Sutherland told a press conference.

“This is wonderful and represents the beginning of something new in surgical care,” he said.

“I had to have the tumour removed anyway, so I was happy to help by being a part of this historical surgery,” Nickason said in a press release on Friday.

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Researcher Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft has developed a new, highly-advanced walking robot: Flame. This type of research, for which Hobbelen will receive his PhD on Friday 30 May, is important as it provides insight into how people walk. This can in turn help people with walking difficulties through improved diagnoses, training and rehabilitation equipment.

If you try to teach a robot to walk, you will discover just how complex an activity it is. Walking robots have been around since the seventies. The applied strategies can roughly be divided into two types.

The first derives from the world of industrial robots, in which everything is fixed in routines, as is the case with factory robots. This approach can, where sufficient time and money are invested, produce excellent results, but there are major restrictions with regard to cost, energy consumption and flexibility.

TU Delft is a pioneer of the other method used for constructing walking robots, based on the way humans walk. This is really very similar to falling forward in a controlled fashion. Adopting this method replaces the cautious, rigid way in which robots walk with the more fluid, energy-efficient movement used by humans.

PhD student Daan Hobbelen has demonstrated for the first time that a robot can be both energy-efficient and highly stable. His breakthrough came in inventing a suitable method for measuring the stability of the way people walk for the first time. This is remarkable, as ‘falling forward’ is traditionally viewed as an unstable movement.

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Brain specialists at The Neuroscience Institute at University Hospital and the University of Cincinnati have taken a significant step forward in their quest to treat difficult tumors while preserving areas of the brain that are responsible for speech and movement. The Cincinnati specialists are among the first in the country to use new technology that integrates functional MRI (fMRI) data into high-tech surgical navigation systems.The fMRI data, which pinpoint language, cognition, and mobility centers of the brain, allow neurosurgeons to remove tumors to the greatest extent possible without harming areas that are critical to the patient’s quality of life.

Functional MRI creates a series of images that capture blood oxygen levels in parts of the brain that are responsible for movement, perception, and cognition. Functional MRI, which reveals the brain in action, differs from standard MRI, which provides a static image.

“This is a quantum leap in what we’re able to do,” said Dr. James Leach, a brain-imaging specialist (neuroradiologist) with UC Radiology and The Neuroscience Institute. “It has significantly affected how neurosurgeons plan to do neurosurgery and how much tumor they can remove while still avoiding critical areas of brain function.”

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Japan Gears Up to Become a Full-On Robot Nation

If you’ve noticed an unusually large number of utilitarian humanoids hailing from Japan in the last few years, then you probably won’t be surprised to hear about the country’s official robot initiative. Right now, Japan is in the midst of executing a grand plan to make robots an integrated part of everyday life. To compensate for the shortage of young workers willing to do menial tasks, the Japan Robot Association, the government, and several technology institutions drafted a formal plan to create a society in which robots live side by side with humans by the year 2010. Since 2010 is just a couple years away, I called up a roboticist at the forefront of this movement to find out how it’s going.

Scientists teach a computer to recognize attractiveness in women

“Beauty,” goes the old saying, “is in the eye of the beholder.” But does the beholder have to be human? Not necessarily, say scientists at Tel Aviv University. Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences, has successfully “taught” a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women.

Kagian published the findings in the scientific journal Vision Research. Co-authors on the work were Kagian’s supervisors Prof. Eytan Ruppin and Prof. Gideon Dror. The study combined the worlds of computer programming and psychology, an example of the multidisciplinary research for which TAU is world-renowned.

But there’s a more serious dimension to this issue that reaches beyond mere vanity. The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for the software could be in plastic and reconstructive surgery and computer visualization programs such as face recognition technologies.

Eye-controlled robot may make heart surgery safer

British researchers are developing a medical robot which can work out the intentions of a surgeon performing an operation, making surgery easier and more precise.

They hope new software will lead to less invasive operations, for example when conducting a cardiac bypass or tumour removal, allowing patients to recover more quickly.

The improvements have been made to the most advanced robotic surgeon on the market, the Da Vinci. It allows surgeons to sit at a viewing console directing the movement of the robot’s mechanical arms inside the patient’s body. The research team is working on using the surgeon’s eye movements to direct the robot, getting the best out of both human and machine.

“We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous,” said computer scientist Professor Guang Zhong Yang, of the Hamlyn centre for robotic surgery at Imperial College London.

Sensors for bat-inspired spy plane under development

A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time.

That’s the Army’s concept, and it has awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five-year, $10-million grant to help make it happen. The grant establishes the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, called COM-BAT for short. The grant includes an option to renew for an additional five years and $12.5 million.

U-M researchers will focus on the microelectronics. They will develop sensors, communication tools and batteries for this micro-aerial vehicle that’s been dubbed “the bat.” Engineers envision tiny cameras for stereo vision, an array of mini microphones that could home in on sounds from different directions, and small detectors for nuclear radiation and poisonous gases.