DIY Brainless Robots Exhibit Collective Behavior

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...

In the 2005 comic book series The Surrogates (turned into a movie by the same name in 2009) people remotely operate humanoid robotic substitutes with their minds. While humans stay at home strapped to the controls the surrogates go out to stand in for their physical lives. As tech innovation speeds up fiction finds science hard on its heels. For now an international team of researchers has succeeded in mind-controlling a robot located in France, from a lab in Israel. The robot was operated by...

Attending the Robocup Dutch Open is like taking a peek into the future. Teams of fully autonomous robots compete with each other in a soccer game. The matches are as engaging as watching humans compete in sports and the teams even display particular characteristics. The German bots suck at penalties and the Iranian bots are a rough bunch frequently body checking their opponents. The Dutch Open was held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands from the 25th to the 29th of April. It is part of Robocup, a wo...

The discussion about the body-mind problem that has kept philosophers busy for over 2 millennia is re-enacted in Artificial Intelligence. Early AI systems were built based on the assumption that intelligence could only be located in the internal control system (mind), now two AI researchers argue that intelligence resides as much in the sensory-motor system (body). Body-mind problem Ever since the Greek philosopher Plato there is a dominant school of thought which not only defines humans as dua...

An autonomous wind powered robot that collects spilled oil from the ocean makes its grand debut on the World Port Days in Rotterdam on September 2. The open source, open hardware and crowd-funded project was realized in little over a year. Protei is the name of the wind-driven drone that sails the oceans unmanned. Towing a long oil-absorbent tail it collects oil from the sea’s the surface. Because oil travels downwind from the source of the spill, Protei is designed to travel upwind. Intercepti...

Robotics could be the next transformative technology. But the industry needs an open platform model to drive rapid innovation and consumer adoption, argues Ryan Calo. After computers and mobile phones personal robots could be the next big thing. Commercial robots are already widely in use in manufacturing and warfare. Assembly lines are often entirely run by computer controlled robots. In warfare drones take over surveillance tasks and even kill. Or, geared toward a more peace-oriented purpose,...