lickety jackblog

This week in Robots

*Yesterday Slashdot had a link to a this story about the United States deploying the first every entirely unmanned attack squadron in the history of military conflict. The squadron, which arrived in Iraq sometime in the last 48 hours, consists of General Atomics' Predator and Predator B (also known as "The Reaper"). General Atomics, by the way, begins its mission statement by asserting that it was "conceived in 1955 at San Diego, California for the purpose of harnessing the power of nuclear technologies for the benefit of mankind." That's nice. Also from the euphemism department, one of the stated features of the Predators on those pdfs is "weapons delivery." How thoughtful! We built a nice little robot to deliver weapons direct to the Iraqis! No more hassle, no more fees, no more middle "man"!

From an Associated Press article:
"The arrival of these outsized U.S. “hunter-killer” drones, in aviation history’s first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill."

*From a different, and perhaps weirder, end of the robotic spectrum: Purdue University graduate student Christi Jacobs, a former cheerleader, has organized a summer camp geared toward high-school aged cheerleaders interested in technology. In order to get more girls interested in technology, Jacobs is blending the oh-so-synergistic fields of cheering and robotics. Who knows? Maybe she's on to something. More details on the camp can be found here and here.

Activities include (I'm quoting from the releases linked to above):
-Programming a 2-foot-tall robot to perform a choreographed dance. Students will mix their own music and will perform the same dance along with the robot. Jacobs said this activity will allow students to learn computer programming and the physics of sound.

-Of course the robots will need music to dance to. The campers will learn how to mix their own music as they also learn the physics of sound.

Cheerleading robots vs. weapon-delivering robots! Face off!

*Wired has an article about KASPAR, a robot that is being used in some British schools to help autistic children learn social skills.

"'Human interaction can be very subtle, with even the smallest eyebrow raise, for example, having different meanings in different contexts,' [Senior Researcher Ben] Robins said. 'It is thought that autistic children cut themselves off from interacting with other humans because, for them, this is too much information and it is too confusing for them to understand.'

With this in mind, the team designed KASPAR to express emotion consistently and with the minimum of complexity."

*The BBC is reporting that a more usable bionic hand invented by Scotsman David Gow has made it to market. The hand was developed by Touch Bionics (which has, for its logo, a terrifying image of the entire earth clutched in a robotic hand) and tested at the National Centre for Prosthetics at Starthclyde University.

*Also, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon have apparently developed a robot that can walk on water. The robot's design was based on the basilisk lizard, which I thought was a mythological beast that could kill you with a glance. Apparently it's also a real beast that can walk on water. Unfortunately this link also came from Slashdot and has been slashdotted to hell so I can't even look at it right now. Give it a while if you're curious.

UPDATE: Here's the Carnegie Mellon report on the basilisk-bot.

Sorry if that's too much about robots. The Jackblog had been a bit quiet.

Labels: posthuman, robots, science

posted by dan @ 9:21 AM