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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We’ve all seen the amazing capabilities of flocks of birds and schools of fish to move seemingly as one. Such collective behavior can be witnessed in almost all living systems. A lot of research is going into figuring out how swarm behavior works in order to mimic nature’s capabilities in swarm robotics. In these multirobot systems a large number of relatively simple robots can accomplish complex tasks through interdependent cooperation. The ability of an individual agent to participate in coll...

Old school robots don’t particularly like unstructured environments such as the homes of us messy humans. Objects are moved, task descriptions change and there is just no way to structure responsibilities into repetitive automated processes. Which is why they’ve mostly kept to ordered, predictable places like factories. But a new generation of robots ventures into the disorderly world of humans. In order to cope, a stand-alone robot needs a wide array of sensors to map out its changing surround...

An Internet of drones. That is what John Robb, inventor and military strategist, proposes to tackle the problems related to last mile delivery of goods. In rough terrain with few or no roads, drones can be deployed to deliver goods to dispersed groups of people. While in urban areas traffic congestion can be relieved by shifting local pickup and delivery from ground to air. Robb floats the idea of a DroneNet in a series of blog posts. The drone network operates very much like the Internet. Lite...

It does not happen often. Calling for a public debate about the desirability of a technology that is still at least 20 or 30 years away from being even possible. But that is exactly what Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic are doing with the publication of the report Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots. The title of the report leaves no doubt about the position the authors are taking: lethal autonomous robots should be stopped from ever comi...