all you need to know about robots ( bots, robo sapiens, humanoid robots, robotic puppies ): history, research, news....................................................
......................... shop .................. competitions .............. education ................ interviews ................... snapshots ................... history .......... contemporary
research - march 2001 - bipedal movement is essentially for real versatility. humanlike motor skills, synthetic sight, smell, hearing, and touch, plus something that approximates human intelligence. the basic idea is to raise a machine like a child, letting it learn from it's own experiences and sensory impressions, rather than feeding it with software. robotic research is currently developed at the MIT, usa the michigan state university, usa, the university of sussex, uk and the university of lausanne, switzerland. researchers everywhere are fascinated by the potential of home robots and cyber-companions: - mark w. tilden, a researcher at los alamos national laboratory, created mindless robots (they lack a microprocessor brain, they are built only with some sensors). they function on the basis of primitive survival instincts and complex behaviors have been evolved, such as dusting or clipping the grass. the solar powered mechanical insect soakes up the energy from the sun's rays and gradually learns to walk. he created a movement called 'beam' (for biology, electronics, aesthetics and mechanics) to popularize simple robots. there is a worldwide army of beam aficionados, they stage contests. http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot - rodney a. brooks, head of MIT's ai lab, created 'cog', this humanoid torso with its skinless metal skeleton has been learning to interact with its surroundings and with people. it's camera eyes track moving people and it establishes eye contact. - cynthia breazeal, researcher at the massachusetts institute of technology media lab, created 'kismet', an expressive anthropomorphic robot, which is learning to recognize human emotions and has a 'human' face to express his own moods. - hiroaki kitano, an artificial-intelligence (ai) expert, who heads the kitano symbiotic systems project in tokyo, created 'pino', which is outfitted with neural-network circuits that will one day mimic the human brain. - at the computer science department, volen center for complex systems, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa the 'golem project' (genetically organized lifelike electro mechanics), has even produced robots that design and build other robots. hod lipson und jordan pollock describe in 'automatic design and manufacture of robotic lifeforms' in nature, nr.406, 31. august 2000: 'our central claim is that to realize artificial life, full autonomy must be attained not only at the level of power and behaviour, but also at the levels of design and fabrication. only then can we expect synthetic creatures to sustain their own evolution. we thus seek automatically designed and constructed physical artefacts that are functional in the real world, diverse in architecture (possibly each slightly different), and automatically producible with short turnaround time, at low cost and in large quantities.' supplementary information: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem http://www.nature.com robot football world cup the robot-competition tests their artificial intelligence, their ability to search, through real experimentation, the conditions for the emergence of collective intelligence. such research will have applications in developing autonomous, cooperative robots for planetary exploration, military operations and domestic tasks, for example. by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot that can win against the human world champion team in soccer. the matches are open to robots between 4.5 and 50 cm high, and each will last 20 minutes, with the largest robots playing five-a-side on a pitch the area of 20 table-tennis tables. the robots must play as a team autonomously; human intervention is allowed only in cases of 'serious fouls or very abnormal behaviour. 1997 the first annual robocup soccer tournament was held in japan. the next annual robot football world cup will be held on august 2-10, 2001 in seattle, usa for mor info http://www.robocup.org --- robots competitions: http://www.robots.net/rcfaq.html http://www.battlebots.com http://www.ecsel.psu.edu/~avanzato/robots/contests/firefighting/contest00.htm http://www.trincoll.edu/events/robot/ --- / what's new / robo sapiens and their history / research and competitions --- ------- monthly designboom newsletter ------- ------- ? comments and contact us ? -------	'beam' insect 'cog' 'kismet' 'pino' 'golem project'