menu
All items in category Robotics & AI
Do We Need New Laws to Govern the Age of Robots?
December 5, 2014 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Do We Need New Laws to Govern the Age of Robots?

Transformative technologies raise new questions for age-old institutions like the legal system. As robots move out of the confines of factories and into our homes and public places, do we need to revisit our laws? With the rise of robotics we are presented with a entirely new class of technology. Robots combine the torrent of data coursing through our information networks with the ability to perform actions in the physical world, they're set to become the arms and legs of the Internet. As the d...
Participate
Open Source All-terrain Robot Chassis
November 20, 2014 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Open Source All-terrain Robot Chassis

Transcend Robotics has created a mobility platform that can negotiate stairs and obstacles. Makers can build their own robotic project on top of the chassis. Creating a robot chassis that can climb stairs is difficult and not everybody who is in to building robots wants to focus on the mobility aspect. The folks at Transcend Robotics (TR) have developed a robust mobility platform that can move around in a rough unknown environment. The platform is aimed at both hobbyists and roboticists to int...
Participate
Printed Self-assembling Robots Offer a Peek into the Future of Manufacturing
August 14, 2014 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Printed Self-assembling Robots Offer a Peek into the Future of Manufacturing

A team of engineers and computer scientists have created a robot that transforms itself from a sheet of paper with embedded electronics into a machine that functions without human intervention. The robot is a step on the road toward self-manufacturing electronic systems. The robot assembles itself in under four minutes and crawls away once it has reached its final state. The system is made from paper coated with polystyrene, and about $80 in electronic components. The robot is a project of Ro...
Participate
Is Energy Cost The Limiting Factor To Creating Artificial Intelligence?
August 7, 2014 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Is Energy Cost The Limiting Factor To Creating Artificial Intelligence?

One of the roads currently being explored to create human-equivalent AI is to mimic biology and evolve it. Artificial evolution is a source of optimism for AI researchers who hope to one day be witness to technological singularity. But if human evolution which has required a colossal amount of energy is any indication, argues electronic engineering professor Alan F.T. Winfield, than energy cost may thwart those aspirations. In his paper Estimating the Energy Cost of (Artificial) Evolution, prof...
Participate
Evolutionary Robotics, Self-reproducing Evolving Robots
October 3, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Evolutionary Robotics, Self-reproducing Evolving Robots

A new approach to robot development mimics the cycle of life. Recombining their code, two parent robots create a unique baby-bot embodied in hardware. Evolutionary robotics is on the rise. Instead of robots being designed by human beings, machines run iterative processes to produce new code for the robot's controller. A team of international scientists from Germany, The Netherlands, France and the UK are proposing a new framework called The Triangle of Life. Their aim is to bring the developme...
Participate
Lego Robot Mechanically Removes DRM from eBooks
September 12, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Lego Robot Mechanically Removes DRM from eBooks

Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology, has built a Lego robot that strips DRM off Amazon's eBooks. Purgathofer used a Lego Mindstorm robotics kit to create a contraption that controls both a Kindle and a MacBook. The robot flips through the pages of the eBook by pressing the ‘next’ button. It then hits the space bar of the Mac to activate the camera and snap a picture. The files are sent to a cloud based text recognition service that converts the image...
Participate
Integrity in Intelligence
August 2, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Integrity in Intelligence

Intelligence gathering and whistleblowing are hot topics on OHM2013, the biggest outdoor hacker festival in Europe . The programmers, security experts and activists gathered on a field 40 kilometers North of Amsterdam discuss the state of the Internet as the Snowden disclosures continue to expose the unparalleled vastness of signal intercepts. In a time when the intelligence community seeks total informational awareness whilst at the same time operating in obscurity without proper democratic ov...
Participate
Can We Control Superior Artificial Intelligence?
July 2, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Can We Control Superior Artificial Intelligence?

Developments in Artificial Intelligence may one day lead to the creation of superintelligence. The inherent difficulty of controlling a system with an intellect far superior to our own is important to address, says philosopher Nick Bostrom. Professor Bostrom is founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His work covers such subjects like the consequences of future technologies and the concept of existential risk: dangers that threaten the continued existe...
Participate
Linkbot: The Hackable Modular Robot for Everyone
June 5, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Linkbot: The Hackable Modular Robot for Everyone

Linkbot is a modular robotic platform designed to be easy enough for kids and beginners yet challenging enough for advanced designers creating their own complex robotic systems. There are two kinds of DYI robotic systems according to Linkbot developer Graham Ryland, those which are easy to understand but have limited capabilities and those which are versatile but difficult to master. The goal of Linkbot is to bridge the two extremes. Linkbot is the brainchild of Engineering professor Harry Ch...
Participate
Artificial Skin Could Give Robots Sense of Touch
May 1, 2013 by Tessel Renzenbrink

Artificial Skin Could Give Robots Sense of Touch

Tactile sensing is an important component to make robotic end effectors more versatile and adaptive. As robots move into the human environment they need to handle a broad range of objects and physically interact with people calling for more resourceful grippers. However, creating an artificial sense of touch has proven more difficult than simulating hearing or seeing. But now researchers have created a tactile sensing system they say is as sensitive as the human fingertip. For their sensing sys...
Participate