Robots to the Rescue

Land, sea and air robots have gathered in Italy this week to compete in the euRathlon 2015 Challenge, the European emergency response robotics competition.

Amidst all the talk about the dangers robots can pose to humanity, two Japanese research groups examined the opposite eventuality of interspecies violence: people abusing robots. Unsurprisingly, a couple of days at a shopping mall gave them more practical material to work with than the theoretical ponderings of robot-fearing folk. Barring science fiction, the first instance of robot on human intentional violence has yet to be recorded, whereas thousands of years of human history firmly establi...

“Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. […] Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.” These are the opening words of an open letter signed by over a 1000 AI and robotics researchers urging the United Natio...

Researchers want to connect the outdoors to the Internet of Things by slapping RFID sensor tags on bridges, buildings and farmland. Rather than hooking up the entire earth to WiFi, mobile robots visit the tags on a regular basis to collect the data. The rapid price drop of Radio Frequency Identification tags brings massive distribution within reach. RFID tags, currently mostly used to keep track of goods in transit, can, when outfitted with sensing capabilities be utilized to monitor infrastruc...

A year from now, on a battleground yet to be determined, giant robots will fight each other. Last week the Americans challenged Japan to a robot duel   This week the Japanese answered Image: Kuratas by Suidobashi Heavy Industry

The current discussion surrounding the question 'Will robots take our jobs?' has led to a variety of predictions about the future ranging from positively dystopian to well, nothing ever changes really. But technology is not a blind force that determines our future while we stand idly by and watch. When it comes to shaping society, humans are still in the loop. In the article The Future of Employment, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne calculate that 47% of US employment is at risk of being replaced...

Lethal autonomous weapon systems become feasible in a matter of years not decades. As technological development steamrolls on, an international treaty to regulate such killer drones is still wanting, says computer science professor Stuart Russell. Last week I attended the HITB Haxpo in Amsterdam, the expo arm of the Hack In The Box security conference where hackerspaces, makers and companies showcase their latest inventions and hacks. One of the hackerspaces had brought a toy gun hooked up to a...

The fourth Global Conference on Cyberspace is currently taking place in The Netherlands. Hosted by a different government each year the conference aims to promote international collaboration on all things internet. One of the issues on the agenda, the emergence of algorithms, was extensively explored during the panel discussion The Ethics of Algorithms [working paper PDF]. Awareness about the power of algorithms reached a wider audience last summer when researchers published a study about the...

PLEN2 is a highly versatile robot that comes as a DIY kit. Its predecessor PLEN became a Youtube star showing off its skateboarding skills in 2006. Enhanced with Arduino compatibility and 3D printable components, PLEN2 aims for scoring points on hackability. Back in 2006 - Youtube was only a year old - the adorable remotely controlled PLEN robot drew a lot of attention with its agile skating and skateboarding abilities. You'd think the exposure would result in a commercial hit but it wasn't t...

Researchers with the OpenWorm project have uploaded the digital copy of a worm brain to a wheeled LEGObot. Without additional programming or learning the bot displays the behavior of a C elegans roundworm. The OpenWorm project aims to create the first digital organism using the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm as a model. The tiny 1.5 mm creature is the only life form to date who's connectome – a wiring diagram of neural connections in the brain – is entirely mapped out. A task that took scien...