Tag: robotics

Rise of the machines

it seems heartbreakingly obvious that future generations will someday look back upon the last 10 years as the start of the rise of the machines, and they will see many more armed robots on patrol “in space, on land, in the air, and at sea”—robots so advanced that they make today’s Predators and Reapers look positively impotent and antique. These killer robots, though, will share one thing in common with their primitive progenitors: with remorseless purpose, they will stalk and kill any human deemed “a legitimate target” by their controllers and programmers.

Inflatable robots

We can build a much wider range of machines with 1000x less material by building them soft. We can create materials and actuators that are soft – that act more like muscles and tissues found in nature that can exert tremendous forces while being flexible and low weight.

Life in a post-work society

this is the first post-work essay i’ve seen that has a credible prescription for the time when ~0 have jobs.

This postindustrial economy will keep expanding, even though most of the work is done by bots, because part of your task tomorrow will be to find, make, and complete new things to do, new things that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots.

Building battlebots

i got a chance to go to techshop menlo park to assemble some robots with some coworkers, and then fight them. it was great fun. think of techshop as a gym with tools, amazing place.

Parrot trains human

for the first time ever, a parrot has successfully trained a human to design and build robots specifically for the parrot’s use and entertainment.

CIROS knife robot

i, for one, welcome our knife-wielding robot overlords.

Baxter

baxter, on sale for $22k in october, is the apple II of robots, the point where robots are truly here and the world will never be the same again. this is truly world-changing technology. you program Baxter to perform a task by simply moving its arms. It has embedded sensors and elastic actuators so the interface to the world is intuitive and mimics human actions. the mundane singularity is near.

our creations outrun us

Robot Soccer

i laughed. (and i hate sports in general)

the day when we can replace the idiots in the NFL doesn’t seem that far off. everyone wins: no million $ salaries for robots, no concussions, much less wasted time by “fans” and no more spandex scholarships. universities will need the savings to compete with nimbler online rivals anyway.

Festo smartbird

festo corporation is the kind of name you would give an evil conglomerate out of terminator or something. here we see their bird-like rc plane. looks like we are safe from the festo overlords, for now.