Tag: robotics

State of Robotics

At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: 1 robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence — and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy — is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not?

2009-03-05: Robot overview

Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future.


Compare with similar galleries from the last few years:

Robots at work and play
Robots part 3
More robots
Robots

(all put together by Alan Taylor). The progress is palpable.
2016-02-24: Don’t be fooled by the goofiness: This is amazing progress.

2023-08-31: World Robotics Conference

Bionic butterflies and performing humanoids: Beijing’s World Robot Conference – in pictures

Long range Taser

Continuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 30 meters. Previous Tasers, such as the C2 civilian model I was hit with a few months ago, are only useful within 10 meters.

crowd control 2.0

Surgical Robots

The insertion of self-assembling, remote-controlled surgical robots into the body. During insertion these devices are cylindrical but they then unfurl 2 arms for grasping and cauterising, and 2 cameras to give the surgeon stereoscopic vision.

robotic surgery is here, and rapidly improving.

that looks pretty intense. perhaps it will turn surgery into more of a science, with fewer fatal errors.

Da Vinci robots have dramaticaly increased surgeon skill. Augmented medicine is here, sadly only in very localized ways

radiologists can use real-time MRI images to guide the movement of their robotic assistant, which will provide unprecedented accuracy: “The patient lies inside the MRI scanner and the robot accesses the prostate through the perineal wall”

it’s still slower but that will be fixed quickly.

Can a robot handle the slippery stuff of soft tissues that can move and change shape in complex ways as stitching goes on, normally requiring a surgeon’s skill to respond to these changes to keep suturing as tightly and evenly as possible? The robot surgeon took longer (57 minutes vs. 8 minutes for human surgeons) but “the machine does it better”. The procedure was 60% fully autonomous and 40% supervised but it can be made fully autonomous.

2021-08-31: A few reasons this has been slow to arrive:

  1. Telerobotics is as worth paying attention to as the heavy-weight topics in this workshop like climate change or aging.
  2. Telerobotics is a tool to give people god-like abilities, not a subset of robotics that will be subsumed by advanced AI.
  3. Despite decades of work and sweet demo videos, telerobotics is not a ‘solved’ problem.
  4. Without intervention, general purpose telerobotics may never come to fruition. On the flipside, it’s possible to intervene with a coordinated research program so that it does.
  5. We can take a definite approach towards these interventions by designing ARPA-like programs to coordinate and fund this work.

Robotic Arm

only the last 10s actually show the arm, but wow!

2008-05-30:

2016-17-17:

engineers have invented a new kind of robotic hand with a human’s delicate sense of touch. The engineers’ trick was to use soft, stretchable optoelectronic (light + electronics) sensors in the fingers to detect shape and texture. (The sensors in existing prosthetic and robot hands use cruder tactile, or touch, sensors with bulky, rigid motors to measure strain.) The new prosthetic hand is a lot more sensitive. It can measure softness or hardness, how much the material stretches when touched, and how much force needs to be supplied to make the material deform.

Robowatch

This is the great mother of all battles, as predicted by the Bible. It’s going to be the fight between man and machine, between humanoid robots and their cyborgs, and human soldiers. That’s what it’s going to come down to.

oy, oy