Source: The Guardian

Ethics guidelines for robots; $1m grant for cobot research; Lyft fleet to be autonomous in 5 years; self-driving car policy; Russian bot arrested, and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

Do no Harm, don’t discriminate: Official guidance issued on robot ethics (The Guardian)

The British Standards Institute has released a set of guidelines for ethical robot design.

Believed to be first document of its kind, “BS8611 Robots and robotic devices” is intended for use by robot and robotics device designers and managers and is designed to help people in these roles to identify and avoid areas of potential ethical harm.

The BSI document begins with some broad ethical principles: “Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans; humans, not robots, are the responsible agents; it should be possible to find out who is responsible for any robot and its behaviour.”

It goes on to highlight a range of more contentious issues, such as whether an emotional bond with a robot is desirable, particularly when the robot is designed to interact with children or the elderly.

Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics and AI at the University of Sheffield, said this was an example of where robots could unintentionally deceive us. “There was a recent study where little robots were embedded in a nursery school,” he said. “The children loved it and actually bonded with the robots. But when asked afterwards, the children clearly thought the robots were more cognitive than their family pet.”

University receives $1 million grant to improve collaborative robotics (Robotics and Automation News)

The National Science Foundation has granted US$1million to University of California San Diego engineers to research human-robot collaboration in US factories.

The goal of the project is to design an “intelligent material delivery system,” which collaborates closely with skilled human workers.

In the system, the researchers envision, robots would sense when skilled workers need materials and deliver them in advance. This would save companies, and consumers, about $1.7 million per hour—the cost of lost productivity when work stops to procure the needed materials.

The work will be translatable across a wide range of manufacturing sectors, including automotive, construction, health care, energy, and goods. This project will help the US manufacturing sector – 25 per cent of all domestic employment – dramatically improve their operations by using automation to directly support a talented, skilled workforce.

The project also involves collaboration with Steelcase, a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based furniture company, which produces made-to-order furniture, which will mean millions of unique material handling situations and processes for the robots to learn from.

Exec: Most Lyft rides will be in autonomous cars in 5 years (PhysOrg)

Lyft co-founder and President, John Zimmer made two bold predictions this week. First; that within five years, a majority of Lyft’s rides will be in self-driving cars. Second; that the era of personal car ownership is coming to an end because autonomous rides will be a cheaper way to travel.

In partnership with General Motors, Lyft is testing autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix. Meanwhile, rival ride-hailing firm Uber is testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh.

Zimmer said autonomous cars will start out giving rides at low speeds, around 25 miles per hour, in limited areas with a number of restrictions. The cars also won’t be able to operate in bad weather. “As technology improves, these cars will be able to drive themselves in more and more situations,” Zimmer said.

Autonomous cars and ride-hailing will be essential to helping cities handle an influx of residents in the coming years as the world becomes more urbanized, he said. Once that happens, there will be less need for parking, freeing up space for parks and other uses, Zimmer added.

What drones did for the sky, robot subs are about to do for the sea (Popular Mechanics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjTh8ChlFss

Excellent article in Popular Mechanics this week about genesis of “the next drone revolution,” which is set to take place underwater iin the form of various remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

The biggest application will be in aquaculture. While the offshore oil and gas industries have always had the money for ROVs, fish farmers work on a much tighter budget. A new generation of low-cost ROVs should give the industry greatly improved capability for monitoring beds of shellfish, fish populations, anchors and underwater infrastructure. Blue Robotics are already working with Catalina Sea Ranch which grows mussels, as well as farms in Ensenada, Mexico.

While the ROV market may not spawn million-sellers like the DJI Phantom drone did for flying drones, it is likely to attract plenty of business interest, and more than a few hobbyists and students. Some, like the OpenROV team, may be initially motivated by the lure of sunken treasure, and then get hooked on underwater exploration. Because, while aerial drones see things you have seen before from another angle, underwater ROVs can open up a whole new world.

In other marine robot news, an interdisciplinary team from MIT is set to begin a research collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) in the Netherlands MIT News reported this week. Dubbed “ROBOAT,” the project aims to develop a fleet of autonomous boats to investigate how urban waterways can be used to improve the city’s function and quality of life.

“This project imagines a fleet of autonomous boats for the transportation of goods and people that can also cooperate to produce temporary floating infrastructure, such as on-demand bridges or stages that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours,” says Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice of urban technologies in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).

In addition to infrastructure and transport, ROBOAT will also deploy environmental sensing to monitor water quality and offer data for assessing and predicting issues related to public health, pollution, and the environment.

Marines launch competition to fund and build the next generation of battlefield robots (Digital Trends)

The U.S. Marine Corps has announced an internal competition to research and fund ways for robots to replace humans on a variety of tasks, particularly those of the “dull, dirty, and dangerous” variety.

One thing that robots will likely not do is the actual killing. The Pentagon has already all but announced its opposition to that, seemingly acknowledging its potentially controversial nature among politicians and ordinary Americans like.

According to a report in Breaking Defense this week, US Defense Sec. Carter has said the U.S. will never use lethal autonomous robots. Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross has released “Autonomous Weapon Systems: Implications of Increasing Autonomy in the Critical Functions of Weapons,” which examines some of the concerns around the use of robots in war.

The Department of Transportation just issued a comprehensive policy on self-driving cars (Vox)

The US Department of Transportation released “a surprisingly far-reaching” Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, this week.

The policy attempts to do all sorts of things […] but the overarching motivation is that DOT wants to accelerate the development and adoption of AVs.

DOT views AVs as a safety technology that could reduce some of the 38,000 traffic fatalities a year in the US, 95 percent of which are caused by human error. It also sees AVs as an accessibility technology that could provide personal transportation to whole populations (disabled, elderly, etc.) who have lacked it.

The robot that attempted to escape its human captors was recently arrested at a political rally (Quartz)

Remember the Russian robot that “escaped” from its handlers earlier this year and wandered onto the street?

Well, apparently the robot has taken up politics now as it turned up at a Russian political rally were it was “arrested” by police.

At a Sept. 15 rally for Russian parliamentary candidate Valery Kalachev in Moscow, authorities attempted to handcuff Promobot and whisk it away from the scene, according to the Mirror. The arrest reportedly occurred after someone at the event called the police because it was recording the opinions of voters for “processing and analysis.”

“Police asked to remove the robot away from the crowded area, and even tried to handcuff him,” a Promobot representative told Inverse magazine. “According to eyewitnesses, the robot did not put up any resistance.”

What’s it all about? Goodness knows. But somehow I sense that the robot’s name –“Promobot”– is a very strong clue.

And since the robot was all over the news this week, as “promotional robots” go, it’s doing a very, very good job indeed.

And Finally…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Dk6kmec_s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znO1iM8dG1E

• Victor Scheinman, Assembly Line Robot Inventor, Dies at 73 (New York Times)
• In Singapore, service comes with a robotic smile (Today Online)
• China National Social Security Fund Joins $260M Investment Deal In Cogobuy (China Money Network)
• Safe Robot Works Well with Others … Humans to Be Exact (Design News)
• LiDAR sensor packs more channels for higher resolution (New Atlas)
• Print-a-Drink uses industrial robots to 3D print intricate patterns into your cocktail (3ders.org)
• Digitimes Research: Collaborative robots to drive Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing (DigiTimes)
• Central event of the European Robotics Week 2016 to take place in Amsterdam (EU Robotics)
• Drone operators seek permission to fly out of direct sight (CNBC)
• Strategic Capabilities Office Focused on Autonomy for USAF, Marines (Defense News)
• NTU’s new inspection robot to be tested in JTC’s industrial developments (Nanyang Technological University)

Softbank spending $32 billion on ARM; tactile intelligence is the future of robotic grasping; a ‘cyborg’ robot is built out of sea slug muscles and 3D printing; a German robot grills up sausages and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

Why SoftBank is spending $32 billion on ARM (Fortune)

“This move by ARM is recognition of the limits of this current market and the need to invest to expand beyond PC and mobile into the multitude of consumer home, building, car and other platforms emerging in the Internet of things,” said Mark Skilton, a professor at Warwick Business School.

“This needs bigger pockets to take on completion to scale these markets…Telecoms companies have had an interesting challenge to position the vital network ‘glue’ to connect all these devices and services, but seek a bigger part of the market share through similar integration into the delivery device end.”

Why tactile intelligence is the future of robotic grasping (IEEE Spectrum) 

In case you missed it, IEEE Spectrum carried a story this week by Vincent Duchaine, leader of the haptic and mechatronics group at the École de Technologie Supérieure’s Control and Robotics (CoRo) Lab in Montreal, Canada, and co-founder of Robotiq.

In it, Duchaine outlines why the “current focus on robotic vision is unlikely to enable perfect grasping” and why we need to incorporate “tactile intelligence” into gripper design.

First, vision is subject to numerous technical limitations. Even state-of-the-art vision systems can have trouble perceiving objects in certain light conditions (such as translucidity, reflection, and low-contrast colors), or when the object is too thin.

Second, many grasping tasks involve scenarios where it’s hard to see the entire object, so vision often cannot provide all the information the robot might need.

Finally, and most importantly, vision is simply not suited to the nature of the problem: grasping tasks are a matter of contact and forces, which cannot be monitored by vision.

‘Cyborg’ robot built out of sea slug muscle and 3D printing (c|net)

In last week’s roundup, we brought you news of a robot that uses living rat cells in its design.

Well, another week, another cyborg it seems, as news has emerged of a 2 inch-long marine robot that incorporates a combination of sea slug muscles and man-made, 3D-printed components.

Slugbot

Cute, isn’t it?

“After experimenting with using cells, the team built the robot using the entire buccal mass, or I2 muscle, from the mouth of the California sea slug and a soft polymer body. When an external electric field is applied, the muscle expands and contracts, moving the robot’s arms.”

“It’s early days. Currently the robot can only move 4 mm per minute (0.15 inches). But the team already has plans to build a more sophisticated version using ganglia, the nerve and neuron bundles that conduct signals from the brain to the muscles.”

The researchers also used collagen from the slug’s skin to create a scaffold that could be used in place of the polymer body for a fully organic robot.

In the future, such robots could be used for environmental surveillance and marine search and rescue missions. Further, since they use organic components, it is hoped that such robots will be cheap to produce and more environmentally friendly than traditional devices.

A German robot grills up sausages with ruthless efficiency (Quartz) 

BBQ-loving researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, have created the “Bratwurst Bot” a robot that can cook the famous sausage just as well as a human chef.

Built using an off-the-shelf robotic arm from Universal Robots and controlled via a consumer-grade tablet, the Bratwurst Bot is not just a talented cook, it also has a sense of humour:

“Like any good human grill chef, the robot can identify when a brat is crisping up, and flip them accordingly. It can plate the sausages, and fill up any empty space on the grill.

It can also shake its digital mustache and make apparently witty German quips as it cooks, such as “heiss und fettig,” which means “hot and greasy,” according to FZI.

Germany mulls self-drive car ‘black box’ (BBC News)

German civil servants are preparing legislation that could compel manufacturers of autonomous cars to incorporate a black-box-style data recorder into future designs to help investigators in the event of an accident.

The hardware would record the decisions made by a car’s computer while being used in autonomous mode. It could pinpoint the cause of a crash. The draft law was expected to be sent to other ministries for approval this summer, Reuters reported.

Self-driving car technology has been under close scrutiny following the fatal crash of a Tesla vehicle being operated in Autopilot mode in May. Tesla has repeatedly stated that its Autopilot functionality is still in development and is not intended to be used as a fully autonomous driving solution.

Flirtey: Drone delivery to homes will start in next year (Robotics Trends) 

Drone delivery firm Flirtey expects to begin home deliveries in the United States within the next 12 months.

A year ago, Flirtey conducted the first FAA-approved drone delivery in U.S. history, an event co-founder and CEO Matt Sweeny refers to as the commercial drone industry’s “Kitty Hawk” moment.

“The analogy I like to draw is that Roger Bannister was the first runner to break a 4-minute mile,” Sweeny told Robotics Trends. “That was just a psychological barrier that needed to be overcome. Forty-six days later it was broken again. What we did in Virginia broke a psychological barrier nationwide to opening up the airspace all across the country.”

Artificial Intelligence swarms Silicon Valley on wings and wheels (New York Times)

The new era in Silicon Valley “Centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet.”

“We saw a slow trickle in investments in robotics, and suddenly, boom — there seem to be a dozen companies securing large investment rounds focusing on specific robotic niches,” said Martin Hitch, chief executive of [robotics firm] Bossa Nova, which has a base in San Francisco.

Funding in A.I. start-ups has increased more than fourfold to $681 million in 2015, from $145 million in 2011, according to the market research firm CB Insights. The firm estimates that new investments will reach $1.2 billion this year, up 76 percent from last year.

And finally…

• Only the privileged fear a robot revolution (TechCrunch)
• Which movies get artificial intelligence right? (Science)
• A start-up making a robot to carry out keyhole surgery raises $20 million (CNBC)
• Law-abiding robots? What should the legal status of robots be? (Robohub)
• Social robots – programmable by everyone (University of Luxembourg)

Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 Pick Task Finals – Team Delft. Source: RoboValley/YouTube

Amazon’s robot champion; Bipedal robot’s testing terrain; Robots thinking like predators; Major flaw in Turing Test; Google car is cyclist-aware and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

Amazon’s latest robot champion uses deep learning to stock shelves

(The Verge)

The winners of Amazon’s robot picking challenge –a joint team from the TU Delft Robotics Institute in the Netherlands and the company Delft Robotics– managed to pick items from a mock Amazon warehouse shelf at a speed of around 100 an hour with a failure rate of 16.7 percent. (Humans can pick at a rate of around 400 per hour in a similar set-up.)

Although the picking challenge is essentially a try-out for Amazon’s own warehouses, the company insists that its intention is not to make its human workers obsolete. “Robotics enhance the job for employees but [do] not replace them,” a spokesperson for the company told TechRepublic. “In fact, we continue to hire. Many of those roles are being created in buildings where employees are working alongside Amazon robotic drive units.” The spokesperson added that in the company’s robot-filled warehouses the end result was “a symphony of humans and technology.”

The Delft teams used deep learning to achieve their winning performance:

“The answer was artificial intelligence. The researchers used deep learning techniques — which can churn through vast amounts of data to look for recurring patterns — to analyze 3D scans of the objects their robot had to pick and replace. A custom gripper-suction arm attached to an off-the-shelf Yaskawa robotic arm was used to do the actual mechanical work, while the AI-powered software gave the robot an edge over the competition.”

Marlo takes a stroll across the wave field for the first time

(Popular Science)

MARLO, a bipedal robot developed by researchers at the University of Michigan, is being tested with some success on the university’s “Wave Field” an art installation that has become a robot testing due to its challenging, uneven terrain.

“The robot has no feeling in her tiny feet, but she senses the angles of her joints — for instance, her knee angles, hip angles and the rotation angle of her torso,” said project lead and University of Michigan professor Jessy Grizzle. “It’s like walking blindfolded and on stilts.”

An adapted version of the algorithms MARLO uses have already been successfully deployed in a prosthetic leg, by Robert Gregg, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering at the University of Texas-Dallas.

Scientists taught a robot to hunt prey

(Motherboard)

Allowing robots to act like predators could lead to more capable robots, according to a team of scientists at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

“The researchers aim to design software that would allow a robot to assess its environment and find a target in real time and space. If robots are ever going to make it out of the lab and into our daily lives, this is a skill they’re going to need.

The predator robot’s hardware, like its behaviour, is modeled after animals. The key to its success as a hunter is a “silicon retina”—co-invented by Delbruck as part of the European Union-funded VISUALISE project—that mimics the human eye to speedily process visual data.”

The researcher’s aim is not to create a breed of killer robot designed to take over the world, however. Robots with the ability to teach themselves how to follow a target effectively will make for excellent automated shopping carts and luggage bots, could improve companion robot effectiveness, and could our ability to create safe, autonomous robot swarms.

Google’s robot cars recognize cyclists’ hand signals — better than most cyclists (recode)

Good news for cyclists this week: Google’s robot cars are proving quite adept at recognizing various types of cyclist hand signals.

“Cyclists often make hand signals far in advance of a turn, and our software is designed to remember previous signals from a rider so it can better anticipate a rider’s turn down the road,” said Google.

“Google’s robot car will even surrender the entire lane to the cyclist if they’re showing signs of moving closer. It might strike some drivers as overly polite, but for a robot-driven car, erring on the cautious side while navigating around humans is probably the best bet.”

Study exposes major flaw in classic artificial intelligence test

(Alphagalileo)

There is a serious flaw in the Turing Test, according to a study published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence this week:

“If a machine were to ‘take the Fifth Amendment’ – that is, exercise the right to remain silent throughout the test – it could, potentially, pass the test and thus be regarded as a thinking entity, authors Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah of Coventry University argue. However, if this is the case, any silent entity could pass the test, even if it were clearly incapable of thought.”

This isn’t mere speculation on the authors’ parts. They studied transcripts of a number of conversations from actual Turing tests in which the hidden machine remained silent and found that In each case, the human judge was unable to say for certain whether they were interacting with a person or a machine. All of which means, that a machine could pass the Turing Test by remaining silent.

As the old saying goes: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

The role of telepresence robotics in workforce inclusion

(TechCrunch)

Amid all the media stories about robots causing widespread unemployment (and worse, up to and including the end of the world!) it was great to read this piece by Peter Hirst, who highlights some of the social and employment benefits that telepresence robots can bring, from improving diversity among executive talent to removing some of the workplace barriers that people with disabilities must face.

“What if people with mobility challenges had easy access to telepresence robots to attend school or go to the office? Why can’t these robots work the same way as bike rentals in many cities around the world where people can check them out by the hour for sightseeing or for commuting? Add a strong citywide wireless network and presto! — a whole new swath of population has access to employment, education and entertainment.”

And Finally…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWflGb51IM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE6UFLodZLg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHb0M6dlDkg

Terrorists want to create a Robot Army (Daily Mail)

Do robots dream of electric scene partners? (American Theatre)

Automatica’s exhibitors were trumpeting Industry 4.0. Is this the turning point for robotics? (SPARC)

Toyota robot to be used as standard at next year’s RoboCup (NIKKEI Asian Review)

Delivery robots to replace takeaway drivers in London trial (The Telegraph)

Robot lawyers could make time-consuming, expensive court conflict thing of the past (ABC News)

Credit: Lijin Aryananda

Automatica coverage; new sUAS rules; limiting cuteness in robot design; bots to become electronic persons?; European Robotics League launches, and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

What knocked our socks off today @Automatica (Robotiq)

The Automatica trade show taking place in Munich this week is one of the largest robotics events in history. It brings industry experts, academics, manufacturers, customers, and others together to showcase new products and ideas and form new relationships.

Robotiq is there too, of course, and we’re providing live-blogging coverage of the event from start to finish.  Stay tuned to this blog for all the latest news from Automatica, including the launch of a brand-new collaborative robot with a whopping 60kg payload:

At 12:30m, the curtain was pulled back to reveal…

.. an impressively huge collaborative robot! The AURA robot has a massive 60kg payload capacity, by far the highest for any current collaborative robot.

In his presentation, Comau’s CEO Mauro Fenzi, talked about the future of Comau. The company is 40 years old, he said “and getting younger and younger.”

FAA announcement for sUAS met with industry excitement (Robohub)

Quadrocopter drone flying in the sky

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a set of highly anticipated rules governing the operation of small UAS (sUAS) for commercial purposes this week.

Scheduled to take effect in late August, the new rules generally follow the proposals contained in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that was issued by the FAA in February 2015. One of the most significant changes for industry is that commercial operations that fit within the framework of Part 107 will no longer require approval by exemption, which has typically taken months to secure. Undoubtedly, the new framework will mean increased efficiency for commercial operators who will also not be required to secure airworthiness certification for their sUAS.

One of the most significant changes for industry is that commercial operations that fit within the framework of Part 107 will no longer require approval by exemption, which has typically taken months to secure. Undoubtedly, the new framework will mean increased efficiency for commercial operators who will also not be required to secure airworthiness certification for their sUAS.

The fact that operators will no longer be required to hold a manned aircraft pilot’s license and can instead take a knowledge test to obtain a sUAS operator’s certificate is a significant win for the industry that will open up the skies to make more operators. Brendan Schulman, VP of Policy and Legal at DJI remarks:

“This is a global precedent. The most respected aviation authority in the world has concluded that drones may be operated safely for basic commercial operations without requiring airworthiness certification and without requiring pilots to pass a practical flight examination. This reflects how fundamentally safe and beneficial this technology is, and is a model that should be adopted worldwide.”

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) welcomed the news in a statement: “Today’s release of the final small UAS rule by the FAA is a critical milestone in the integration process and a long-awaited victory for American businesses and innovators. It establishes a clear regulatory framework and helps to reduce many barriers to civil and commercial operations, allowing anyone who follows the rules to fly in the national airspace.

“Today’s release of the final small UAS rule by the FAA is a critical milestone in the integration process, and a long-awaited victory for American businesses and innovators. It establishes a clear regulatory framework and helps to reduce many barriers to civil and commercial operations, allowing anyone who follows the rules to fly in the national airspace.

“Accelerating civil and commercial UAS operations will not only help businesses harness tremendous potential of UAS, it will also help unlock the economic impact and job creation potential of the technology. Once UAS are fully integrated into the national airspace and become more widely used, the industry will continue to grow as a job creator and generate significant economic impact.

This is massive news for the commercial drone sector.. and long overdue.

Too cute for their own good, robots get self-defense instincts (Wall Street Journal)

Designers working on bots for use in public spaces have to thread a fine line between creating robots that are non-threatening so that people are comfortable engaging with them, but not so cute that people don’t take them seriously. The team behind Knightscope‘s security robot “K5” took on that challenge, going through hundreds of design permutations to find the sweet spot for K5’s sensors.

They also found that making some modifications to the robot’s behavior improved the efficacy and quality of human-robot interaction.

“The K5’s designers, along with the shriek, programmed it to stop moving if cornered. Being boring, they found, is an antidote to cuteness.

At Palo Alto’s Stanford Shopping Center, a group of young adults chased the robot past a Starbucks and Jamba Juice. When they surrounded the K5, it stopped moving. They lost interest, wandering away toward a California Pizza Kitchen.”

The choice between robots and pizza is a tough one for anybody to make, especially a kid. Of course with Pepper appearing in pizza restaurants and development of pizza-making humanoid RoDyMan well underway, future generations of children will not be faced with such a difficult existential choice.

Europe’s robots to become ‘Electronic Persons’ under draft plan (Reuters)

A draft European Union plan could see robot workers being classed as “electronic persons” with all the legal rights that would entail, including social security payments.

The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider “that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations”.

It also suggested the creation of a register for smart autonomous robots, which would link each one to funds established to cover its legal liabilities.

The reaction from some industry leaders has been less than enthusiastic.

Patrick Schwarzkopf, managing director of the VDMA’s robotic and automation department, said: “That we would create a legal framework with electronic persons – that’s something that could happen in 50 years but not in 10 years.”

“We think it would be very bureaucratic and would stunt the development of robotics,” he told reporters at the Automatica robotics trade fair robotics trade fair in Munich, while acknowledging that a legal framework for self-driving cars would be needed soon.

Schwarzkopf may well be correct about the timescales involved, but it’s great to see policymakers taking robotics seriously enough to raise and debate these issues.

European Robotics League to launch at RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig (SPARC)

Set to launch June 30th, the European Robotics League (ERL) will pit international teams against each other in three robotics categories: industrial, service and emergency robotics. Local matches and regional tournaments will take place around Europe over the course of the next year.

“The European Robotics League will spur innovation and entrepreneurship and both maintain and extend European leadership in robotics”, says Dr. Rainer Bischoff, Vice-President Industry of euRobotics aisbl and Head of Corporate Research at KUKA. “It is a unique opportunity to break down real-world challenges into a competition format, similar to the UEFA Champions League in football, which is exciting for robotics scientists, the robotics industry and the general public alike.”

The industrial robotics segment of the competition will focus on manipulation, handling, assembly, and transport of work pieces. The league will use “scaled-down factory environment and desktop-size robots” for mobile manipulation. Challenges for the teams will include “performing a variety of work steps at different locations on the shop floor and automating high-mix low-volume production using a limited number of, but flexible production equipment.”

And Finally…

Robots, swarming drones and ‘Iron Man’: Welcome to the new arms race (Washington Post)

Google Gets Practical about the Dangers of AI (MIT technology Review)

Kiwi workers don’t fear ‘robot redundancy’ (Otago Daily Times)

Watch Out Humans – Robots Have Mastered Motion Planning (Factor Tech)

Tend.ai trains your robot to operate dozens of 3D printers and laser cutters at a time (TechCrunch)

Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Makes a Run for It … Again (LiveScience)

The wrench 3D-printed by the Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) aboard the International Space Station has the name of toolmaker Kobalt emblazoned on its side — the result of a partnership between Made In Space, which built the AMF, and home-improvement store Lowe’s.
Credit: NASA/Made In Space/Lowe’s

Investing in robots; China’s robotics acquisitions; robot designed to hurt; exoskeleton for kids; Russian bot escapes testing ground; 3-DP in space and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

Want to invest in the robot uprising? Here’s how (WIRED)

An interesting new option for those thinking about investing in robotics was revealed this week.

Dubbed Motif, it’s “a concept-driven trading platform that creates intelligently weighted baskets of up to 30 stocks or exchange-traded funds — called ‘motifs’ — that you can buy into for $9.95.”

Motif’s major innovation is letting individuals own fractions of shares in company, something that’s typically not possible when buying stocks on the open market. Users can invest, say, $300 in a motif containing a weighted basket of 30 different company stocks, each of whose share prices could be tens or hundreds of dollars, and constantly fluctuating. Motif’s technology makes it possible for individuals to immediately own the underlying fractions of shares contained in the basket at the point of purchase.

Motif also gives individual investors fractional ownership on single shares, allowing a user with only $300 to still buy a piece of Alphabet (formerly known as Google) even though a single share is currently trading at more than $700.

Walia wouldn’t go into details about how exactly this works as he says there are several other startups interested in cloning his technology. What he will say is that Motif doesn’t aggregate trades. “We have a lot of patents”, he adds.

China continues to invest in European Industrial Automation (Robotics Business Review)

With so many Chinese firms investing in Western robotics companies, this article offers a timely breakdown of the most important recent acquisitions and offers.

AGIC Capital is spending €100 million ($113 million) to acquire a majority stake in Gimatic SRL, which makes end-of-arm tools for robotic arms.

Italy-based Gimatic supplies actuators, grippers, sensors, and plastic injection-molding equipment to the automotive, electronics, food, and pharmaceuticals industries. It has more than 100 patents and facilities worldwide, and its revenue has grown by more than 20 percent over the past three years.

This robot intentionally hurts people—and makes them bleed (Fast Company)

Alexander Reben, a Berkeley, California-based roboticists and artist, has created a tabletop robot that’s designed to hurt people –and generate a conversation among roboticists, ethicists, lawyers, and other stakeholders about the challenges robotics could present in the future.

Before you bar your doors and windows, let’s define the terms: The harm caused by Reben’s robot is nothing more than a pinprick, albeit one delivered at high speed, causing the maximum amount of pain a small needle can inflict on a fingertip.

And interestingly, he designed the machine so that injury is inflicted randomly. Sometimes the robot strikes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Even Reben, when he exposes his fingertip to danger, has no idea if he’ll end up shedding blood or not.

“No one has actually made a robot that was built to intentionally hurt and injure someone,” Reben claims in a giant room on the top floor of the beautiful Victorian mansion where he lives and works as a member of Stochastic Labs, a Berkeley arts, technology, and science events incubator. “I wanted to make a robot that does this that actually exists… It was important to take it out of the thought experiment realm into reality, because once something exists in the world, you have to confront it. It becomes more urgent. You can’t just pontificate about it.”

The headline on this story is slightly misleading, inasmuch as robots do not possess ‘intentionality’ in any human sense. Robots act in accordance with their design and they follow instructions.

If you’ve been following our ISO/TS 15066 coverage, you’ll have noticed that the new ISO document incorporates the results of a University of Mainz study that developed force and pressure limits for 29 body areas. Designed to minimize harm should any contact occur between a human and a robot in a collaborative environment, the study helps designers and integrators to perform risk assessments for collaborative robot systems.

ISO/TS 15066 was six years in the making and received input from leading robotics experts from all over the world. So, while the artist’s project is interesting and cool, the conversation around safety issues has been going on for quite some time among roboticists.

Spanish researchers design child exoskeleton (R&D)

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a genetic condition defined by muscle weakness, which often makes locomotion difficult for sufferers.

The good news is that the Spanish National Research Council and spin-off company Marsi Bionics have created an exoskeleton for children with SMA aged between ages three and 14. Marsi’s intelligent exoskeleton is currently in the preclinical phase, but if it’s successful, researchers hope that as well as helping with locomotion, the device could stave off secondary effects from the condition, such as scoliosis.

The exoskeleton fits around the child’s legs and torso, and consists of five motors in each leg that act as muscles, providing strength for the child to stand upright and walk.

“Our model includes intelligent joints which alter the brace’s rigidity automatically and adapt to the symptoms of each individual child … whenever required,” said Elena Garcia, part of the research council’s Automatics and Robotics Centre, in a statement.

Additionally, the apparatus is highly sensitive to a child’s intended movement and acts accordingly. It’s powered by a battery with a five-hour lifespan.

“The number one drawback in developing this type of pediatric exoskeleton is that the symptoms of neuromuscular illnesses—such as spinal muscular atrophy—change over time, as much in the articulation as in the body,” Garcia said in a statement. “That’s why it’s fundamental to have an exoskeleton capable of independently adapting to these changes.”

Robot escapes testing grounds in Russia (Sputnik)

Oh boy.

Robots be rolling. I think somebody’s trolling.

Reports emerged this week of a Russian robot ‘escaping’ testing grounds and finding its way onto the street, where its batteries went flat and the robot held up traffic until the police arrived. What do you think? Real or a publicity stunt?

The escape occurred due to a gate left open by an engineer, local media said. The robot had moved some 50 meters (160 feet) by the time its charge ran out, according to reports.

The loss was noticed almost an hour later, by which time the robot caused a minor traffic jam and gathered a crowd, with the police eventually arriving.

Space Station’s commercial 3D printer makes its 1st tool (Space.com)

The machine, known as the Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF), was installed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in late April. And last week, it printed out its first tool — a wrench that astronauts can use to do maintenance work aboard the orbiting lab.

The wrench was made with a special off-Earth feature — a fastening clip that should help astronauts keep track of the tool in zero g.

The AMF was built by California-based company Made In Space, which also constructed the only other 3D printer ever sent to space.

And Finally…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcMoDHbWYbk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imvL5bsk87M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMzVJ8g6fMI

Infographic: The making of a collaborative robot (Robohub via National Science Foundation)

How will bots make money? Here are 7 business models (Venture Beat)
How To Buy A Drone [Infographic] (Drone360)
First Surgical Robot from Secretive Startup Auris Cleared for Use (IEEE Spectrum)
Jibo “social” robot to ship in October (Liliputing)
Pepper the robot begins work in Belgian hospitals (Daily Mail)
British, Indian scientists to use underwater robots in study of subcontinent’s monsoon (Japan Times) 

Musk for Mars; Mexican robotics revolution; Russia “battle bot”; MIT student’s robot kitchen; Integrating automation; and more. Find out what’s happening in our robotics universe this week.

Mars landing by 2018 says SpaceX’s Elon Musk (BBC)

Elon Musk has announced plans to send the Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018.

Mr Musk has long targeted a trip to Mars and has previously said he can get humans to the red planet by 2026. His company, SpaceX, is planning “Red Dragon” missions to Mars to test technology for bigger missions. SpaceX has been developing rockets and has a $1.6bn (£1.08bn; €1.47bn) contract with Nasa to supply the International Space Station.

In a tweet, Mr Musk said that its Dragon 2 spacecraft is “designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system”. But Mr Musk “wouldn’t recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region” as the internal area of the spacecraft is only the size of a large car.

“Wouldn’t be fun for longer journeys,” he said.

SpaceX hasn’t said how many spacecraft it intends to send to the red planet, but has hinted at plans to conduct a series of Mars missions. More details are expected to be released soon. The capsules are expected to fly on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, a bigger version of its Falcon 9. The rocket is expected to launch the capsules to Mars in order to test out how to land heavy payloads on the planet. If successful, SpaceX would become the first private spaceflight company to land a vehicle on another planet.

MIT students invented a robotic kitchen that could revolutionize fast food (Business Insider)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kx2d27AqKg

A fully-automated mini-restaurant featuring a refrigerator, dishwasher, stovetop, and robot chef that can cook and serve meals with fresh ingredients in under five minutes has been developed by a group of students at MIT.

First, you order a meal using a smartphone app or the touch screen next to the machine. The bot currently features five meals: shrimp andouille jambalaya, chicken-bacon sweet potato hash, winter veggie mac and cheese, chili-lime beef with sesame rice, and chickpea coconut curry on couscous. Two meals can be made at once.

You can customize the ingredients, sauce, and quantity. Then, you grab a bowl from the side and place it under one of the cooking pots.

Ingredients, which are stocked by the Spyce staff daily, are automatically measured and dispensed on a conveyor belt. They’re then transported to one of four automated pots that mix and cook the ingredients all-in-one.

Once that’s done, the system dispenses the meal on a plate, and the pot rotates to the sink and cleans itself. The kitchen uses an array of sensors that track the food’s temperature and quality.

The device only takes up 20 square feet of space and can produce half the amount of food as the average full-sized fast food restaurant, the students say.

Developed as part of the $10,000 “Eat it!” Lemelson-MIT undergraduate prize (an award for the U.S.’s top two collegiate inventors in food technology), the student’s “Spyce Kitchen” is being used to serve students in an MIT dining hall. The inventors have plans to pilot the mini-restaurant in dining halls at a handful of other Boston universities once it receives USDA and FDA approval.

Integrating Industrial Automation: What You Need to Know (Engineering.com)

One UR10 robot arm is deployed in a kitting application. The robot uses a vacuum gripper to pick and place sterile wipes and saline solutions into a plastic box, which it then loads onto a conveyor.

Before purchasing the UR10, this application required six to seven employees all working at once.

“Now, we’re able to run it with as few as two people,” McGillivray said. “Having this type of success right out of the gate was phenomenal and totally unexpected. Our time to value was less than two months.”

Thanks to the simple programming requirements of UR’s collaborative robots, Dynamic Group was able to perform much of the integration process in-house.

Mexico, Land of Automatización Opportunity (RIA)

The robotics sector in Mexico is on fire, buoyed by rising industrialization and increasing levels of foreign direct investment, according to the Robotics Industry Association.

In 2015, robot sales in Mexico smashed all previous records. At 6,320 units, sales were almost three times the previous year, amounting to more than $243 million. This is no surprise as unit sales for all of North America were up 14 percent, making 2015 another record-breaking year for robot sales.

Mexico has been growing leaps and bounds in the automotive industry, and then followed by the aerospace industry. It’s what we refer to as the next China, where there’s so much potential here,” says Evan Haley, Director of International Sales & Business Development for ATI Industrial Automation, headquartered in Apex, North Carolina.

In fact, Mexico is moving up the ranks among the world’s industrial powerhouses with auto production leading the way.

Meet the ‘Mechanical Mule’: First Photos of Russia’s Battle Robot Revealed (Sputnik)

Pictures of a 400 k.g. Russian “battle bot” that looks a bit like like an early BigDog prototype (but with machine guns attached) emerged this week.

The alleged first-ever photos of Russia’s advanced biomorphic combat robot, which will move like a four-legged animal and be equipped with a machine gun and guided antitank missiles, have emerged on Twitter.

Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the Russian magazine Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defense) has published the first-ever photos of Russia’s advanced biomorphic combat robot on his Twitter page; it looks something like a mule.

The reports said at the time that such a robotic system is designed to be used as a reconnaissance device, a platform for the transportation of armaments and ammunition, as well as for the detection of minefields and even weapons. Additionally, this robot, which the initial reports said resembled to a lynx, will be capable of evacuating the dead and wounded from battlefields.

The world’s smartest robot can’t outsmart college students (SF Chronicle)

Celebrity robot BINA48 chatted with some college ethics students recently, producing some interesting results:

Things began to go downhill when student Halemah Shuman, 18, asked BINA48 what her biggest fear was.

“Fear is a complex emotion,” the robot replied.

Pressed to explain what she meant, and whether she was fearless, BINA48 thought it over.

“Why not?” she replied.

Similar “answers” were given when BINA48 was asked if she wanted to be alive ( “I don’t want to do anything”), was asked for her purpose in life (“That’s interesting”) and asked what she would do if her questioner decided to punch someone in the nose (“You will be the first to know”).

And Finally…

(via Futuristech Info)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1kqt0VryvA

(via Popular Science)

No, Self-Driving Cars Won’t Kill the Insurance Industry (Forbes)

TU Graz launches Christian Doppler-Lab for Semantic 3D Computer Vision (TU Graz)

Drone believed to have hit British Airways flight ‘may have been a plastic bag’ (Telegraph)

China targets 2020 Mars mission launch: official (PhysOrg)

China accelerates bid for global dominance in robotics (Inquisitr)

Rise of the Robots – and Donald Trump (BBC)

Mechanical chameleon through dynamic real-time plasmonic tuning. Source: Wired UK/youtube

Soft bots; record-breaking North American robot sales; robots saving refugees; chameleon robot blends in with its surroundings; Robot Law and more.

Meet the soft, cuddly robots of the future (Nature)

Superb article covering developments in the realm of soft robotics, from bio-inspired robot caterpillars through the launch of the RoboSoft collaboration to the inherent challenges involved when trying to design control mechanisms for soft robots:

As robotic octopuses, caterpillars, starfish and other malleable machines come to life, some scientists have begun to focus on better ways to control the devices’ actions. “We’re talking about floppy, elastic materials,” says Kramer [a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana]. “When something moves on one side, you’re not quite sure where the rest of the machine is going to end up.” That is why many applications will probably require extra sensors to monitor movement. Yet conventional position and force sensors — rigid or semi-rigid electronic components — don’t always work well with soft robots that undergo extreme shape changes.

Roach-like robots may help in disasters (Yahoo! News, AP)

Researchers have developed cockroach-like robots for use in search and rescue operations. Cockroaches are able to withstand 900 times their body weight in pressure without suffering damage and they can even move at close to their regular speed when compressed to one quarter their normal size:

The researchers hope swarms of future roach-like robots could be fitted with cameras, microphones and other sensors and then used in earthquakes and other disasters to help search for victims by squeezing through small cracks. The skittering robots could also let rescuers know if the rubble pile is stable.

The prototype cost less than $100 USD to make and according to the researchers the cost could be brought down to around $10 through mass production.

North American robotics market sets new records in 2015 (ROBOTICS TOMORROW)

A total of 31,464 robots valued at $1.8 billion were ordered from North American companies during 2015, an increase of 14% in units and 11% in dollar value over 2014, according to the Robotic Industries Association. Note that unemployment in the U.S. fell during the same period:

The automotive industry was the primary driver of growth in 2015, with robot orders increasing 19% year over year. Non-automotive robot orders grew five percent over 2014. The leading non-automotive industry in 2015 in terms of order growth was Semiconductors and Electronics at 35%.

According to Alex Shikany, Director of Market Analysis for RIA, the fastest growing applications for robot orders in North America in 2015 were Coating and Dispensing (+49%), Material Handling (+24%), and Spot Welding (+22%). RIA estimates that some 260,000 robots are now at use in North American factories, which is third to Japan and China in robot use.

Watch this robot chameleon blend in with its surroundings (Wired UK)

Now you see it, now you don’t… see it as clearly.

Engineers at the Wuhan University in China have developed a robot that can camouflage itself against red, green, and blue backgrounds. The robot is covered in plasmonic displays which produce colours by using interactions between nanoscale structures and electric fields:

The key to this biomimetic technology is realising electrically driven actuation of broad reflection bands, which may be partially enabled by some of the existing ‘e-paper’ or ‘e-chem’ display approaches, including electrophoretic, cholesteric liquid crystalline, and electrowetting,” the researchers wrote. Light sensors recognise the background colour, which is then translated to the correct reaction.

Robot Law (Elgar Online)

Link includes a must-read free chapter from a new book entitled Robot Law, editied by Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr which covers many of the legal issues around emerging robot technology.

…we might soon be witnessing a personal robotics revolution. These systems have the potential to revolutionize our daily lives and to transform our world in ways even more profound than broad access to the Internet and mobile phones have done over the past two decades. We need to be ready for them and, in particular, we need to think about them in the right way so that the lawmakers can craft better rules for them, and engineers can design them in ways that protect the values our society holds dear. But how should we do this?

Space-age surgical robot saves 500 lives at Liverpool hospital (Liverpool Echo)

A da Vinci medical robot at a UK hospital operated on its 500th patient recently.

The 500th patient, prostate cancer sufferer Paul Daley, 58, chose robotic surgery over non-robotic options.

He said: “I decided to go for robotic surgery after looking at all the models of treatment. I’m glad I went for it.
“I was in hospital for 26 hours. Nine weeks later I was well enough to go skiing for a week. The technology is amazing.”

Here it is mainly used for prostate surgery, the robot was installed in 2011.

Can a robot rescue drowning migrants? Meet ‘Emily’ (Christian Science Monitor)

A robot designed by U.S. researchers is being used to help migrants in distress in Greek waters.

Dubbed Emily (Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard), the remote-controlled robot is a 25-pound, 4-foot-long, red flotation device on jet skis and is used by the Greek Coast Guard.

Here’s how “Emily” might be put to work helping migrants: An operator in a remote location would send the robot, which can travel at a speed of 20 mph, out to migrants struggling in the waters off Lesbos. Up to five people at a time can grasp onto the 4-foot-long flotation device tethered to a 2,000-foot-long rope, which rescuers could then manually reel in. Helicopter drones also tethered to ropes can send back aerial images of the rescue in real time to help operators best manipulate the robot.

Britain lags rivals in robots – but automating the workplace may not mean huge job losses (The Telegraph)

Adopting automation can lead to higher overall wages, the creation of new jobs, and –in the case of cobots– could lead to extended working lives, according to this piece in The Telegraph. Citing Polanyi’s Paradox, Patrick Schwarzkopf, managing director of Europe’s Mechanical Engineering Industry Association VDMA, argues that robots are unlikely to take over entirely.

“Polanyi’s paradox says that ‘we know more than we can tell’,” said Mr Schwarzkopf. “Humans have an ‘inherent’ or ‘tacit’ knowledge which they make judgments on and it is very hard to communicate this, especially when it comes to programming machines.”

Mr Schwarzkopf also forecast a 15pc annual increase over the next four years in demand for robots as countries race to automate manufacturing.

PLUS:

• Robots are Coming: How Robots Create Jobs (Cross Automation)
• There’s A Robot Inside The Sydney Harbour Bridge (Gizmodo Australia)
• How To Stop Worrying And Love Artificial Intelligence (Huffington Post)
• Should robots be friends or tools? Open-API platforms point strongly in one direction (ZDNet)
• How safe are robot drivers? (World Economic Forum)

Photo credit: Sethwoodworth, Wikimedia Commons

“Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.”
Marvin Minsky
1927-2016

Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88 (New York Times)

Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and robotics, passed away in Boston. Founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI lab, inventor, Turing Award winner, and the author of several influential books, Minsky‘s impact on the field of artificial intelligence has been enormous:

Well before the advent of the microprocessor and the supercomputer, Professor Minsky, a revered computer science educator at M.I.T., laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence by demonstrating the possibilities of imparting common-sense reasoning to computers.

 

Minsky also created what he dubbed “the ultimate machine” an example of which can be seen in the video below. Every home should have one:

See also:

Marvin Minsky’s 2003 TED talk “Health, Population and The Human Mind”

We Asked a Robot to Write an Obit for AI Pioneer Marvin Minsky (Wired)

What Marvin Minsky Still Means for AI (Technology Review)

Google achieves AI ‘breakthrough’ by beating Go champion (BBC News)

In an important breakthrough for artificial intelligence research, a system based on reinforcement learning created by Google’s DeepMind division has defeated the European Go champion 5-0 in a series of challenge games –the first time AI software has defeated a top-level human Go player.

Known as “AlphaGo,” the software combines advanced tree search algorithms with deep neural networks to master a game which is much more challenging to AI than chess, as the BBC explains:

Go is thought to date back to ancient China, several thousand years ago.

Using black-and-white stones on a grid, players gain the upper hand by surrounding their opponents pieces with their own.
The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200 moves compared with about 20 in chess.

There are more possible positions in Go than atoms in the universe, according to DeepMind’s team.

Google’s original blog post includes a brief but fascinating timeline of computers mastering games:

The first game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. Then fell checkers in 1994. In 1997 Deep Blue famously beat Garry Kasparov at chess. It’s not limited to board games either—IBM’s Watson [PDF] bested two champions at Jeopardy in 2011, and in 2014 our own algorithms learned to play dozens of Atari games just from the raw pixel inputs. But to date, Go has thwarted AI researchers; computers still only play Go as well as amateurs.

DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis, told the BBC that the AlphaGo software followed a three-stage process, which began by making it analyze 30 million moves from games played by professionals:

“It learns what patterns generally occur – what sort are good and what sort are bad. If you like, that’s the part of the program that learns the intuitive part of Go.

“It now plays different versions of itself millions and millions of times, and each time it gets incrementally better. It learns from its mistakes.

“The final step is known as the Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is really the planning stage.

“Now it has all the intuitive knowledge about which positions are good in Go, it can make long-range plans.”

The researcher’s paper was published in Nature this week.

SoftBank says Pepper on a roll, will staff cellphone store in Tokyo (The Japan Times)

SoftBank Corp.’s Pepper robot –a humanoid robot designed to provide customer service– is gaining lots of good press and steadily increasing its customer base.

This week, the company announced that five or six Peppers will staff a cellphone store in Tokyo from March 28 to April 3 –albeit with a little human help:

Customers will be able to ask the robots for explanations of the various cellphone options, and for those that decide to buy, the robot will attempt to complete the sales process.

However, SoftBank says it is difficult for the robots to check people’s IDs when signing a contract, so humans will be on hand to intervene.

All this good publicity and growing customer base doesn’t necessarily translate into short-term profit, however, Fumihide Tomizawa, who heads SoftBank Robotics, told The Japan Times:

The Pepper business will not turn a profit this year or next.

Fame is one thing, but commercial success, [Tomizawa] said, will take time.

SoftBank estimates that more than 500 firms are now using Pepper, which is pretty impressive for a robot that launched just last year. Nissan Motor Corp. uses Pepper to provide customer service in 100 outlets. SoftBank has partnered with as many as 200 firms with plans to develop business applications for Pepper that leverage Internet connectivity and cloud-based artificial intelligence.

The Army Showcases Two Examples Of Driverless Technology (The Detroit News)

The U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) showcased two examples of driverless technology at the Detroit auto show: the first, a system mounted on a M915 tractor trailer and the second mounted on a Cummins-powered Peterbilt Class 8 semi-tractor:

Paul D. Rogers, director of the TARDEC program, noted that many attacks on soldiers occur along resupply routes, and autonomous capability would require fewer soldiers to be in the vehicle, lessening exposure.

“That not only lessens the risk for the soldier, but we can move the same amount of material, equipment and supplies with fewer soldiers, so we become much more efficient,” Rogers said.

Manpower is a major expense in the military, including drivers who always travel with a backup, “safety” driver who is present in case the main driver gets injured or fatigued.

And finally…

• Watch this robot solve a Rubik’s cube in 1 second (via VentureBeat)
• Davos 2016: Robotics Winners and Losers (via Financial Times)
• Teaching Robots to Be More Than Simple Servants (Discover Magazine/Soundcloud)
• 5 Technologies That Blur The Line Between Robot And Human (Huffington Post)
• How Does BB-8 Work? (HowBB8Works)
• Harvard Given $28 million To Build AI That Works As Fast As The Human Brain (Daily Mail)
• Is Harm to a Prosthetic Limb Property Damage or Personal Injury? (Motherboard)

Drone Regulation in the U.S.

What a saga!

The Federal Aviation Authority had drone enthusiasts on the edge of their seats all year as they worked on a series of regulations covering both recreational and commercial drone use.

In February, the FAA released a set of proposed rules for commercial drones weighing up to 55 pounds. While the commercial use of drones outdoors remains illegal in the U.S., the agency continued issuing “Section 333” exemptions, which permit the operation of drones commercially without an airworthiness certificate.

Back in 2012, the FAA was given a deadline of September 30, 2015 to fully regulate commercial drones for use in the United States.

Opps. Well, that deadline was missed, drawing a frustrated response from drone industry representatives:

In the absence of regulations, American businesses and innovators are left sitting on the sidelines or operating under a restrictive exemption process. Simultaneously, states and municipalities are attempting to fill the current regulatory void, at times with laws that they may not have the authority to enforce.

(Read the full response here: PDF.)

With over a million drones expected to be sold over the holiday season, in late October, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced the creation of a task force –consisting of a mix of drone pilot associations, government agencies, and industry representatives– to guide development of a registration process for recreational drones.

Those rules were released mid-December.

Expect more drama around the topic of drone regulation as the FAA is expected to release further rules and guidelines for drones in mid-2016.

With a significant proportion of the million people receiving drones over the holiday period likely to be novice users, we will probably have lots more videos like the one below to look at in 2016:

Artificial Intelligence

2015 was an excellent year for neural networks.

Boosted by cheaper and more powerful cloud computing solutions, increasing interest and investment from major tech players like Google and Facebook, and an abundance of low-cost software development tools, neural network researchers delivered greatly improved results than in 2014.

A recent Bloomberg article (“Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence”) offers an interesting summary of the growing capabilities –and adoption– of artificial intelligence solutions in 2015, including this quote from Google’s Jeff Dean:

“We’re at this point in actual evolution where, previously, animals didn’t have eyes, and now they have eyes,” he said. “That’s going to change a lot of stuff. Computers used to not be able to see very well, and now they’re starting to open their eyes.”

 

Blooming Ethics

One of the most significant trends I have noticed this year is that engineers and robot designers are becoming more aware of –and concerned about– the ethical and social implications of robot technology. Topics under discussion include: privacy protection issues around drones, ethical and liability issues around self-driving cars, as well as the social and ethical consequences of robot sex and human labor displacement.

This awareness has been present and growing over recent years of course, but in 2015 I sensed a shift. Whereas in previous years a significant proportion of the roboticists I spoke to were indifferent (and sometimes even dismissive) toward ethical issues –either seeing them as completely outside their area of expertise or simply unimportant– in 2015, these voices were in a distinct minority.

Not only are the majority of roboticists keen to talk about such topics these days, but ethicists and legal experts are engaging more with issues around robotics and AI. Meanwhile, standardization bodies are developing guidelines for ethical robot design.

This isn’t surprising: drones fly our skies, robots and humans collaborate in factories, and human robot adoption is on the rise.

We often hear about how fast the robotics industry is growing. That’s true. But ethicists that specialize in robotics and AI are also likely to see their fortunes improve alongside those of the robotics industry.

When philosophers can find jobs based on the growth of robotics, it’s fair to say that the worst human labor displacement fears are a little misplaced.

A further indication of the increased permeation of robotics into our lives in 2015 is the fact that politicians and policy makers are more closely engaging with these topics.

To provide just one example, I spoke with Member of the European Parliament, Mady Delvaux, earlier this year. Delvaux heads a European Parliament working group that’s looking at a variety of legal, ethical, and social issues around robotics.

The fact that policy makers, ethicists, legal experts and roboticists all are engaging with each other about these issues more than ever before is one of the single most significant indicators that the industry really is on the brink of becoming mainstream.

One gripe: the tendency for some journalists and headline writers to sensationalize issues around robotics and artificial intelligence. This “Robopocalypse Now!” mentality often distracts from more immediate topics –like the ethics of using robots for elder care, liability issues around self-driving cars, and integrating drones into the global and domestic airspace– that need to be discussed more widely so that these technologies can be successfully deployed.

Meanwhile, news articles that anthropomorphize robot behaviors should come with a standard disclaimer: “Any intentionality, desire, or other human-like qualities attributed to robots in the above article is purely a form of satire and/or poetic license and is not intended to reflect on the behavior of actual robots in the real world”.

See more:

Open RoboEthics initiative

Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar AI Plan Is About Far More Than Saving the World

The Drive towards Ethical AI and Responsible Robots has Begun

The Foundation for Responsible Robotics

The Ethics of Robot Love

Debating The Ethics of Robots Designed to Kill

Last-Mile Logistics

The last-mile problem (LMP) –the high cost and disappointing success rate of deliveries to people’s homes– is one of the biggest and most expensive problems in the home delivery system.

Thankfully, there are numerous robots poised to help tackle the LMP. Amazon started the ball rolling back in 2013 with its Amazon Prime Air drone delivery system, but 2015 saw some milestones reached and some serious competition for Amazon enter the fray.

In July, Australian drone maker Flirtey, in partnership with Virginia Tech and NASA, conducted the first real world demonstration of drone delivery technology in the United States.

In November, Google Inc. announced plans to launch its Project Wing drone delivery business by 2017. The same month, retail giant Walmart revealed plans to test DJI-manufactured drones for package pickup and delivery and for checking warehouse inventories.

Meanwhile, Starship Technologies announced that it is working on a terrestrial delivery drone designed to deliver goods from a local hub to people’s homes.

Legal and regulatory issues may be stalling widespread adoption of last-mile delivery robots for now, but 2015 was a landmark year. Things are moving so fast in robotics these days that a period of 3-4 months saw an entire niche market of robotic solutions to the LMP spring into existence.

I wonder what new niche markets we’ll see in 2016?

Investments and finance

2015 has been a bumper year for robotics and AI investment. As Frank Tobe, author of the excellent Robot Report notes:

BOTTOM LINE: Money continues to flow to robotic ventures well into the holiday season. Over $1 billion has been invested in 49 robotic startup companies and an amount well above that figure has been involved in 29 acquisitions. All this year, 2015.

Dell announced a $125 billion USD investment plan in China, including an artificial intelligence facility.  Omron acquired Adept technologies for $200 million USD. Kitchen robot makers Zimplistic raised $11.5 million USD in funding.

I could go on, and on, and on, but you get the picture: robotics and AI firms are attracting serious money on a scale that seemed implausible just a few years ago.

Check out: The Robot Report and Robotics Business Review to stay in touch with the latest business developments in the world of robotics.

Australia unveils firefighting robot that is way better than humans (IBT)

A remote-controlled firefighting robot that can put out fires, clear smoke, and sweep away debris has been unveiled in Australia.

Known as the TAF-20 (the ‘TAF’ stands for ‘Turbo Aided Firefighting’), the robot can be operated from up to 500 meters away, which enables firefighters to tackle blazes from a safe distance.

The firefighting robot is equipped with a bulldozer blade which it can [use to] clear obstacles such as cars in its way or sweep debris after a fire explosion. With its high-powered fans, it can clear smoke from a building. It can even spray water mist or foam from a distance of 60 m (197 ft) and blast water from 90m away.

As an Australian government website puts it:

Minister for Emergency Services David Elliott said the robot put FRNSW firefighters ahead of the game when managing hazardous fires and other emergencies where they could not safely approach flames or for when there was danger of an explosion.

The NSW Government has invested $310,000 (AUD) into this technology.

Empathy for Humanoid Robots is Ideal UI for Elementary Schools (Inverse) 

One way in which humanoid robots can be made to seem friendlier to humans is by having the bots adopt friendly body language.

This is the focus of an ongoing research project at the University of Delft, where experts have been testing the principle on graduate students.

The researchers had graduate students attend lectures from their robots, and the students significantly preferred the robot displaying ‘positive’ body language over the one employing negative expressions.

“This was a large effect. The students applauded the robot following the ‘positive’ lecture, and they all wanted to make a selfie with the robot afterwards. This was not the case for the other ‘negative’ group.”

The researchers have also found evidence that the mood and body language of a robot can be contagious: in other words, humans start mirroring the attitude and demeanor of robots that they are interacting with. From the University’s press release:

‘Robots are increasingly going to be working with us, helping us and keeping us company. Social skills are important for these robots, to be able to work with us in harmony and to be accepted by us’ explains Dr Koen Hindriks, researcher at the Faculty of EEMCS and one of Junchao Xu’s PhD research supervisors.

[…]

What is new in this research is that the emotions are integrated into the robot’s function. As Hindriks explains, ‘For example, if a robot is pointing to something and then suddenly has to be ‘happy’, for example by throwing its arms in the air, that looks very unnatural. We have tried to improve on this and have integrated our new insights into a model and software that are as generally applicable as possible.

‘We found that some of the main factors for expressing robot emotions are the height of the hands, the magnitude of movements, the vertical position of the robot’s head and the speed with which the robot moves. Through experimentation, we also showed that people are able to recognise the robot’s moods through its body language, even when they had not been instructed to pay attention to this. We also saw evidence of an ‘emotional contagion effect’: the emotional state of participants in the experiment matched the emotional state of the robot.’

The robot is now being tested in elementary school classrooms.

A robot teaching itself to walk like a human toddler (CNBC)

Woah! Careful there little robot.

A team at UC Berkeley’s Robot Learning Lab has been using neural networks to enable a robot to teach itself how to walk much in the same way a human toddler does:

Darwin’s baby steps speak to what many researchers believe will be the greatest leap in robotics — a kind of general machine learning that allows robots to adapt to new situations rather than respond to narrow programming.

Developed by Pieter Abbeel and his team at UC Berkeley’s Robot Learning Lab, the neural network that allows Darwin to learn is not programmed to perform any specific functions, like walking or climbing stairs. The team is using what’s called “reinforcement learning” to try and make the robots adapt to situations as a human child would.

Like a child’s brain, reinforcement technology invokes the trial-and-error process.

X Prize to map 4,000m-deep ocean floor with robots (BBC)

A new X Prize competition has been launched with the aim of developing cheap and efficient robots for exploring the world’s oceans.

Sponsored by Shell, and valued at $7 M (USD), the Shell Ocean Discovery competition challenges teams to map a 4 km deep, 500 sq km area of sea floor using autonomous robots. The prize must be claimed by the end of 2018.

There will be two rounds to the competition.

The first, to be held in 2017, will be undertaken at a shallower depth of 2,000 m, and require teams to make a bathymetric map of at least 20% of a 500 sq km zone of seabed in roughly 6-8 hours.

The top 10 teams will then go forward to the second round, which will be held at the full competition depth of 4,000 m. At least 50% of this area will have to be mapped in 12-15 hours.

A scanning resolution of 5 m per pixel is required. The teams will have to return high-resolution pictures from the deep, as well as one of a target specified by the organizers.

Control and communication in the dark at 4,000 m will be tough enough, never mind the considerations for pressure, which will be about 40 megapascals – nearly 6,000 pounds per square inch.

Estonian turtle-robot searches for shipwrecks and treasure (Associated Press)

One of the downsides of using propeller powered robots for investigating the sea floor is that the propellers disturb the water too much and throw up silt –a major problem for marine archaeologists that want to be able to detect –and preserve– precious marine artifacts.

Enter the vacuum cleaner sized U-CAT (Underwater Curious Archaeology Turtle): a propellerless robot with four silicon flippers inspired by sea turtle arms and legs.

“They move in a slow and quiet motion and won’t bring up sediment from the (sea) bottom,” says Taavi Salumae, a designer at the Biorobotics Center of Tallinn University of Technology.

The underwater probe has been developed since 2012 in the EU-funded Arrows project that focuses on new technologies for marine research. It can stay submerged for four hours at a depth of 100 meters (330 feet) on a single battery charge of two hours. It’s equipped with a camera and lights.

[…]

But its small size has a few drawbacks: It is limited to shallow waters, unlike large robots, some of which can reach depths of six kilometers (20,000 feet) without damage from water pressure. And it is not remotely controlled like traditional wired probes, which means there’s also a risk of losing it during missions.

Get ready to jump: Advanced robotics is the next great leap (Plant Magazine)

Interesting article about industrial robotics adoption in Canada:

Canada isn’t a lightweight in the development of robotics. Yes, we can lay claim to the famous Canadarm, but we also have three very innovative robotics developers (Clearpath Robotics, Robotiq and Kinova Robotics) in the latest Robotics Business Review global top 50.

Our adoption of the technology is less glorious. Canada’s installed base is hard to track. Because it’s small, it tends to be lumped in with North American statistics, but PLANT’s 2016 Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey provides a glimpse of Canadian adoption and it shows only 10% of the mostly smaller companies are using advanced robotics.

The Robotics Industries Association (RIA) reports 22,427 robots valued at $1.3 billion were ordered from North American companies in the first nine months of 2015, an increase of 6% and Canada’s share is almost 2,100 units valued at about $134,000.

And Also…

The Pentagon is Nervous about Russian and Chinese Killer Robots (Defense One)

Plus:

• Build your own walking, waving, 3D printed ‘Social Quadruped’ robot (3ders.org)
• China’s New Trio of Urban Combat Robots (Popular Science)
• Next generation of robot technology enters the operating theatre (Financial Times)
• Now AI Machines Are Learning to Understand Stories (MIT Technology Review)
• Watch out! This robot could just steal your job (e27)
• Eye on Safety, California Sets Rules for Self-Driving Cars (ABC)
• FAA Announces Its Small UAS Registration Rules (Drone360)

ROS Turns 8 (Open Source Robotics Foundation)

The Robot Operating System — an open source system for controlling robotic technologies– turned 8 this week. ROS has grown rapidly in popularity throughout the robotics community since its launch and is now used by many robotics companies.

At eight years old, ROS is growing faster than ever, and helping the robotics community to grow along with it. We’re especially excited to see how brand new startups have been taking advantage of the open source nature of ROS to help them develop useful, reliable robots that are creating entirely new markets. In 2015 alone, more than $150 million in VC funding (that we know of) was invested in businesses that utilize ROS.

In May 2015 alone, nearly nine million ROS packages were downloaded from over 70,000 unique IP addresses, and these numbers don’t even count mirrors. This suggests that ROS probably has hundreds of thousands of active users. We also have a very robust developer community: 1,840 people have contributed to ROS’ 10 million lines of code, averaging 20 commits per day. The ROS wiki has gotten 10% bigger since last year, and there are over 11,000 users on ROS Answers, a 32% increase over last year, with a total of more than 5,000 questions answered. It’s numbers like these that make us so confident in the long term future of ROS.

Here’s to the next eight years!

See also: ROS 101 Introduction to the Robot Operating System (Robohub)

DJI Japan to train 10,000 pilots in next 3 years (NIKKEI)

DJI Japan has announced that it will start providing corporate training programs next month. The company plans to offer three levels of certification– DJI Specialist, DJI Instructor, and DJI Master. It hopes to train 10,000 drone pilots over the next three years.

The first program, starting in January, will be a week-long instructor-level course, with two days of lectures and five days of practical training. Instructor certification will require at least 30 hours of drone-maneuvering experience.

Participants who pass the exam will then qualify to train others as DJI specialists.

As of December 9th, the Japanese authorities prohibit operating drones near airports and in other areas, including dense residential neighborhoods. Any user that wants to operate drones in these environments must first obtain government permission.

This is a very positive move from DJI Japan. Hopefully, as people become better trained in the use of drone technology we will see fewer stories like the following…

Kids with autism get a ‘steady’ friend (Khaleej Times)

A new robot for kids with autism arrived this week.

Dubbed “Mozo”, the cuddly robot is designed to help children with autism overcome communications challenges, but can also be used to provide remote monitoring:

Reem Al Marzouqi, the 25-year-old Emirati engineer who designed Mozo is thrilled with the successful breakthrough the toy has had with children with autism.

“The kids feel comfortable with Mozo which is a breakthrough. They hug him and talk to him and even make eye contact though we know that it is really difficult to expect such behaviour from autistic kids,” she said.

“So I added a voice to it and then some robotic dance moves. Also it has ears as well as a camera fitted behind its eyes so that the child could be monitored on a regular basis,” she said. After these additions, Mozo could now follow simple commands and is controlled through a simple mobile app. “The kids feel totally free and comfortable with it and parents are happy that their child is able to come out of their bubble.”

Parents can also use Mozo at home. Therapists and parents do not need to be in the same room as the robot’s eyes have cameras so they can monitor progress of the child from far away. “This gives the child an opportunity to directly communicate with his cute teddy friend. So far clinical trials using Mozo have proved that it does help improve communication skills of children with autism,” she said.

Al Marzouqi looks like a researcher to keep an eye on over the coming years. Although she is just 25 years old, as well as developing Mozo, Al Marzouqi is also the first citizen of the United Arab Emirates to be granted a patent in the US for designing a car that can be driven without using hands.

Three Festive Things To Do With Unmanned Vehicles (Popular Science)

Deep-ocean diving robot Nereus is gone and won’t be replaced (Engadget)

Nereus, the deep-sea diving robot that was lost at sea in 2014, will not be replaced according to its creators.

WHOI [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution] scientists originally wanted to build a successor to their lost creation, but they ultimately decided to invest the $3 million insurance payout in “less risky projects”. Instead of replicating Nereus’ capabilities, the team now plans to build landers and improve the institute’s other undersea vehicles that can’t dive as far down. Don’t worry, though: there are other organizations currently developing vehicles that will be able bring us otherworldly footage and specimen samples straight from the deepest trenches of the ocean.

The Schmidt Ocean Institute is planning to build a series of submarines that could lead to one capable of diving as deep as the Nereus could by 2019. And then there’s the Shanghai Ocean University in China, which aims to build three landers, an ROV and a human-occupied vehicle, all for the sake of exploring hadal zone.

Mercedes-Benz adds lane changes to its autonomous driving offerings (Washington Post)

Mercedes-Benz has announced that automated lane-changing technology will be available on the company’s E-Class cars, which are set to launch in spring 2016. Using the technology, all drivers have to do is activate their turn signal and the car will take care of the rest.

For the automated lane change to work, the car must be traveling between 50 mph and 112 mph and having steering assist activated. (That feature keeps the vehicle in the center of the lane.) Once the turn signal has been on for two seconds — and the car’s sensors determine a safe change can be made in three seconds — the vehicle will change lanes. The E-Class will rely on a camera and radar to ensure there isn’t a car in its path and to identify lane markings. Mercedes-Benz says the system will only work on multi-lane highways.

And also…

Leonardo da Vinci Robot Wows Crowds (Yahoo!)

Tech house of the future: take a look around (The Guardian)

Mobile Robots Rev Up for Material Handling (Robotics Business Review)

China Wants To Replace Millions of Jobs With Robots (MIT Technology Review)

Killer robots? They’re a real issue – and here’s what the Vatican has to say (Catholic News Agency)

Police unit plans to use large drone to ‘net’ unauthorized unmanned aircraft (sUAS News)

Robots and drones get the gift of Israeli machine sight, via Intel (Times of Israel)

Robots Guard Workers from Dull, Dirty & Dangerous Labor (PDDNET)

Small drone prompts evacuation at Paterson federal building, officials say (NJ.com)

Walk-Man the humanoid walks tall (Reuters)

Scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Pisa in Italy revealed an upgraded prototype of their humanoid Walk-Man robot this week. As one of the researchers noted, choosing a humanoid robot design can bring distinct advantages:

Lead researcher Nikos Tsagarakis believes the world won’t need to be adapted to accommodate Walk-Man, meaning it could eventually operate in damaged buildings; turning a heavy valve or lifting collapsed masonry, for example.

“There’s one factor that everyone agrees, that actually our world, our environment it was designed for our body basically. So, we have tools that are designed to be grasped by humanoid, human hands. You have also areas or access paths that are actually appropriate for our body forms. So it means that if you build a robot that has a very similar form, you need to adapt less the environment in order to have this robot operational within such a space,” Tsagarakis told Reuters.

Designed for use in search and rescue missions, an earlier Walk-Man prototype participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals 2015.

Robot Metal Band Compressorhead Launches Crowdfunding Campaign to Build Lead Singer (Ultimate-Guitar) 

The team behind robot metal band Compressorhead has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds they need to build a lead singer and become the first 100% robot band to record an original album:

“In our workshop, the production wheels are steaming, as we prepare for the first record with our own music, which will be composed and recorded by no one less than John Wright, the punk rock legend of Nomeansno and The Hanson Brothers. At the same time, a singer robot is about to be engineered over the coming months.”

“We aim to release and premiere both, the new ‘four-member band’ show as well as the Compressorhead record in summer 2016 at next year’s Wacken Open Air festival in Wacken, Germany.”

Presumably, as well as being able to sing, the robot will be programmed to trash hotel rooms, fall out with other band members, and will be fitted with the latest paparazzi-avoidance technology.

Formula E announces 300kph ‘RoboRace’ championship (WIRED)

Ready for robot car racing? The world’s first global autonomous car racing championship is set to begin in 2016.

Races, which will take place on the same day and circuits as the Formula E championship, will have 10 teams and 20 cars competing.

“In terms of technology we’re trying to make them better than humans. So it means we expect the cars will have high acceleration and high speeds” Denis Sverdlov from Kinetik, the company that will make all the cars, told WIRED.

Last week we linked to a story about a new drone racing league, so it’s fair to say that the world of robot sport is really starting to take off.

How can people safely take control from a self-driving car? (PhysOrg)

Meanwhile, back in the world of passenger-carrying robot cars, researchers have been investigating the use of distractions — such as displaying text and images– to keep humans alert just in case they need to take control of their self-driving vehicle.

New cars that can steer and brake themselves risk lulling people in the driver’s seat into a false sense of security—and even to sleep. One way to keep people alert may be providing distractions that are now illegal.

That was one surprising finding when researchers put Stanford University students in a simulated self-driving car to study how they reacted when their robo-chauffer needed help.

The experiment was one in a growing number that assesses how cars can safely hand control back to a person when their self-driving software and sensors are overwhelmed or overmatched. With some models already able to stay in their lane or keep a safe distance from other traffic, and automakers pushing for more automation, the car-to-driver handoff is a big open question.

Deus Sex Machina: The Ethics of Robot Love (LifeHacker) 

There was to have been a conference in Malaysia last week called Love and Sex with Robots, but it was cancelled after Malaysian police branded it “illegal” and “ridiculous”. “There is nothing scientific about sex with robots,” said a police chief. However, others believe there are many interesting and important aspects of intimate robot partners that are worth researching and discussing.

Those who think that discussing the ethics of sex with robots is a waste of energy on a ridiculous non-issue, should check out the headline on this story about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s  Geminoid F robot. (Note: Geminoid F isn’t a sex bot.)

Joseph F. Engelberger, a Leader of the Robot Revolution, Dies at 90 (New York Times)

Joseph F. Engelberger, a visionary engineer and entrepreneur who was at the forefront of the robotics revolution, building robots for use on assembly lines and fostering another, named Seymour, to handle chores in hospitals, died on Tuesday in Newtown, Conn. He was 90.

The Robotic Industries Association mourned his passing with this tribute.

Mr. Engelberger was a force in robotics from its early days, in the 1960s, when his company, Unimation, in Danbury, Conn., developed the Unimate, a robotic arm that would greatly accelerate industrial production lines.

Based on concepts for programming machinery advanced by inventor, George Devol, the arm was first used in the die-casting industry to pluck new parts from their molds.

AND FINALLY…

This Samurai Robot Wants To Help Humans Instead Of Slice Them Up (TechTimes) 

 Bosch debuts new autonomous farming robot (The Manufacturer)

 Drones ‘cheaper, faster, safer’ than sending humans on remote NT research jobs (ABC) 

 Which Countries Are Most Enthusiastic About Self-Driving Cars? (Forbes) 

Plus:

This is the biggest shift going on in artificial intelligence (BusinessInsider) 

7 Reasons Why Drone Delivery Service Won’t Work (Yet) (Gizmodo) 

Nearly 100 million consumer robots will be sold in the next 5 years (Robotics Trends) 

The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers (The Atlantic) 

Can Germany replicate Japan’s success with robots? (DW) 

Researchers teaching robots to disobey human instructions; bug-zapping robot helps 8-year old; new drone regulations; robot tractors; and more.

Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans (IEEE Spectrum)

Robots are often thought of as mere slaves designed to obey our orders without question. The very word “robot” is derived from Czech words meaning “slave labor”.

Huge industrial robots that operate at a safe distance from humans and other equipment in our factories are a good example of the traditional ‘Human Overlord-Robot Slave’ relationship. Such robots are fed strict instructions in the form of computer code and then proceed to carry them out without question.

But as humans and robots start working in ever closer proximity and robots enter our homes, the traditional relationship becomes a lot more problematic.

For a start, the environments that robots are operating in are becoming more complicated than a simple ‘robot in a cage.’

Further, many domestic robot designs are based on robots receiving their instructions by voice rather than through computer code, which increases the range of potential mishaps that could occur.

With all this in mind, it’s clear that a robot that followed human instructions without question every single time would be a bad idea, the most obvious example being when following a human’s instructions could potentially cause the robot to damage itself or other property.

And let’s face it, domestic robots are likely to receive all sorts of orders with varying levels of common sense and good intentions attached:

“I dropped my smartphone in the swimming pool. Can you get it for me?”

An instruction like that is only going to work well with waterproofed robots, but that won’t stop some people from giving such orders, either without thinking or simply to see what happens next.

Put simply, robots need to have enough intelligence and awareness of their surroundings to enable them to distinguish between sensible and foolish instructions.

This is what a team of researchers at Tuft’s University is hoping to achieve by developing mechanisms that will enable a robot to reject orders that it receives from humans, as long as there is a good reason for doing so:

Now, let’s talk about how all of this stuff works in practice, in real interactions between humans and robots. The overall goal here is not just to teach robots when they should (and should not) follow orders, but also to provide a framework within which the robot is able to effectively communicate why it rejected an order. This is important, because it allows the human to provide additional instructions that might satisfy whichever felicity condition caused the failure in the first place.

The second and third law of robotics get switched here, since the robot ignores orders from a human when those orders would lead to it harming itself.

Are we setting a dangerous precedent that could doom humanity? Sure, maybe. But it’s not realistic to expect that robots will ever unquestionably obey the laws of all humans they come in contact with: if we tried to do that with computers and software, it would lead to an enormous and destructive mess, and the present and future of robotics is no different.

Read the full paper here.

There may be potential for robot disobedience beyond simply ensuring robot safety.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think I would quite enjoy having a domestic robot that not only questioned my instructions when safety issues arise, but also outright contradicted me on a regular basis for no particular reason.

Why? Think brain-training device rather than robo-butler. Such a robot would keep me on my toes… hopefully without our relationship descending to Inspector Clouseau-Cato type levels:

FAA Releases Drone Registration Recommendations (Aircraft Owners and Pilot’s Association)

The Federal Aviation Administration has released a list of recommendations (PDF) for how to better monitor recreational use of drones in the United States:

The group’s final recommendations include creating an electronic registration system accessible through the Web or an app, providing an electronic certificate of registration and a personal registration number that can be used on all of an owner’s UAS, and requiring that the registration number (or registered serial number) be marked on all UAS before they are flown.

The task force recommended that any drone with a maximum takeoff weight of 250 grams, just under 9 ounces, or more be registered. But several task force members suggested that a heavier weight might be more appropriate. AOPA and others noted that very little research has been done on the effects of a small drone strike, making it difficult to make a well-reasoned recommendation as to what size drone poses a meaningful threat. They urged the FAA to expedite its research in that area and review the weight requirement for registration based on its findings.

Under the task force recommendations, drone owners would need to provide their name and address in order to receive a registration number. Providing email addresses and phone numbers would be optional.

See also: 3 Problems with the Drone Registration Recommendations (RoboticsTrends)

DARPA wants your wacky robotics ideas (Geek)

Do you have an idea for a robot you think DARPA would be interested in? Now’s your chance to let them know:

DARPA has teamed up with the Open Source Robotics Foundation to launch a program called the Robotics Fast Track (RFT). The goal is to give people outside the government a chance to pitch ideas for the future of robotics. The RFT is happy to accept any robotics or robotics software proposal, but it’s particularly interested in what people have in mind for maritime and space robots. These are considered the most challenging aspects of modern robotics.

Robot protects 8-year-old with brain tumor from deadly infection (WDTN)

Xenex’s bug-zapping robot has come to the aid of Aydan Chapman, an 8-year old Texan boy who picked up a superbug infection while receiving chemotherapy for brain cancer:

1.7-million Americans will pick up infections at the hospital this year, often antibiotic resistant superbugs hard to disinfect, that can potentially be fatal. That has apparently happened to an eight-year-old Westlake boy. During the time he was receiving chemotherapy for his brain cancer, he got c-Diff, a superbug that kills one in ten people who get it, and lingers on surfaces for months. But Aydan Chapman is safely home now, his entire house disinfected by a superbug zapping robot.

Robopocalypse Now! #4

Interview: Roman Yampolskiy Discusses AI, Killer Robots, and the Age of the Machine (Futurism)

How swarm intelligence could save us from the dangers of AI (VentureBeat)

Why this farmer built a cool robot tractor (CBC Radio)

Matt Reimer, a farmer in rural Manitoba, has built a robotic tractor from open source components that can pull up alongside his combine, so harvested grain can be transported, all without a driver. (Audio: 9m14s)

And finally…

The Drone Racing League Will Be a Spectator Sport Like No Other (Wired)

Robotic Surgery For Sleep Apnea (ABC)

Artificial Intelligence: 10 Things To Know (InformationWeek)

Robot to help passengers find their way at airport (Alphagalileo)

5 Places To Meet a Robot in Tokyo (Japan Today)

Flying Robots Are the Future of Solar (GreenTechMedia)

Robotic agriculture and swarming with bees (ABC)

China’s robot sector needs to pick up the pace to upgrade manufacturing and rival foreign competitors, say experts (South China Morning Post)

Empathy For Robots: Similar But Not Quite The Same (Asian Scientist)

Japanese researchers have found that humans empathize with robots in a similar way to that in which we empathize with other humans:

They performed electroencephalography (EEG) in 15 healthy adults who were observing pictures of either a human or robotic hand in painful or non-painful situations, such as a finger being cut by a knife. Event-related brain potentials for empathy toward humanoid robots in perceived pain were similar to those for empathy toward humans in pain. However, the beginning of the top-down process of empathy was weaker in empathy toward robots than toward humans.

The spike in empathy experienced by humans watching the robot’s hand being cut is likely due to its humanoid design, according to the report’s authors:

Because the basic shape of the robot hand in the present study was the same as that of the human hand, the human participants may have been able to empathize with the robot hand. It is thus necessary to test whether a robot hand in a very different shape (e.g., a robot hand without fingers) can elicit similar empathic responses in a future study.

Empathy is obviously a good thing, but when applied to a robot is it a step on the road to anthropomorphism?

Or is it anthropomorphism that gives rise to the empathy in the first place?

These issues may seem a little far-fetched to some, but with humans and robots collaborating more closely and more often than ever before, the importance of human-robot interaction studies like these cannot be underestimated.

The Daily Dot also covered the story in an excellent feature.

Japanese government to urge nursing care robot development (AsiaOne)

Japan is well known for its work on care robots for the elderly, but according to sources that spoke to AsiaOne this week, “because companies developing the robots did not sufficiently incorporate the opinions of relevant people, some of their products were too large or too expensive and consequently not used.”

The Japanese government plans to solve this problem by establishing several facilities across Japan run by “development support coordinators” familiar with both nursing and robotics, where companies can meet with nursing care workers and the elderly:

The coordinators will reportedly be tasked with serving as a bridge by advising companies and delivering “voices from actual nursing care sites”.

By reflecting the needs of end users, the government aims to help companies develop more user-friendly robots through community-based approaches, the sources said.

A council comprising robot developers, operators of nursing care facilities and others will be established at the centres to incorporate the opinions of workers at the planning stage and before test models are produced, the sources said.

The centres would also serve as locations for several companies with different strengths to consider jointly developing robots and as places where public understanding of nursing care robots could be deepened, according to the sources.

Zano mini-drone project shut down (BBC News)

Sad news from Torquing, the company behind the Zano drone –and Europe’s most successful Kickstarter campaign— this week, with the announcement that the entire project has been shut down:

Creditors will be contacted by an insolvency practitioner, according to a message sent to them by Torquing.

“Having explored all options known to us, and after seeking professional advice, we have made the difficult decision to pursue a creditors’ voluntary liquidation”, the message states.

“We are greatly disappointed with the outcome of the Zano project, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us during this difficult period, especially our loyal employees, whose commitment has exceeded all expectations.”

Negative signs have been piling up since June, when Torquing missed a deadline to distribute drones to its Kickstarter backers.

More bad news came in August when the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones delivered an underwhelming review of the work done so far and reported that the device was set to be released without some of the capabilities pitched in the Kickstarter.

The final straw for Zano came on November 10th, when Ivan Reedman, former chief executive of Torquing Group resigned.

All in all, it’s a disappointing end to what seemed like an extremely promising project.

COP PULLS OVER GOOGLE’S SELF-DRIVING CAR (TECHRADAR)

When a cop near Mountainview, California pulled over a car for driving too slowly he was quite likely surprised to find a passenger –but no driver– inside the vehicle.

As Google commented in a blog post:

We’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25mph for safety reasons. We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets.

Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project. After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that’s the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we’re proud to say we’ve never been ticketed!

 

NASA Awards Two Robots to University Groups (NASA)

Robotics labs at MIT and Northeastern are each set to receive a Valkyrie robot (and $250,000 in funding) from NASA for high-level humanoid robot research.

The university principal investigators will serve as critical partners in NASA’s upcoming Space Robotics Challenge where the two R5 units will act as instruments. The challenge is part of the agency’s Centennial Challenges Program, and is divided into two competitions: a virtual competition using robotic simulations, and a physical competition using the two upgraded R5 robots. The goal of the challenge is to create better software for dexterous humanoid robots used in space missions, giving them more autonomy.

Robopocalypse Now! #3:
This is what will happen when robots take over the world (The Telegraph)

A much more thoughtful article than the headline suggests, covering issues around human labor displacement through robotics. As sources quoted in the article notes, some automation tasks (such as picking strawberries) are beyond most robots and are likely to remain so for quite some time.

And finally… 

Iran Demonstrates New Humanoid Robot Surena III (IEEE Spectrum)

US Startup Challenges Japan to Giant Robot Battle (New York Times);

How soft robots will help sick kids walk and make the elderly stronger (Fusion);

Robotic Shares Shine On Global Stage (Nikkei);

This robotic cat could be a therapy animal for your elderly loved ones (Daily Dot);

A Robotic Tabletop Makes Simple Structures All by Itself (MIT Technology Review);

Strategy based on human reflexes may keep legged robots and prosthetic legs from tripping (Science Daily);

This robotic salamander could help unlock spinal secrets (Washington Post);

Why ‘Rise of the Robots’ was named the most important business book of the year (Business Insider Australia).

Credit: Alexandre Szames, Antigravite, Paris, France

Solar wind for robotic spacecraft, AI in fiction ranked by evilness, the drone with no flight time limit and 10 drones you won’t need to register.

‘ELECTRIC SAILS’ COULD PROPEL SUPERFAST SPACECRAFT BY 2025 (SPACE.COM)

Robotic spacecraft riding the solar wind by 2025?

That’s what a NASA-funded team is hoping to achieve.

Researchers are developing an “electric sail” (e-sail) propulsion system that would harness the solar wind, the stream of protons, electrons and other charged particles that flows outward from the sun at more than 1 million mph.

“It looks really, really promising for ultra-deep-space exploration,” [said] Les Johnson, of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Johnson is part of the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS) team, an e-sail development project funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

The idea of using solar sails has been around a while and this approach was originally developed by Pekka Janhunen, one of the HERTS team, back in 2006. Here’s one from the archives.

MOST PEOPLE WANT FULLY AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS BANNED: UBC SURVEY (UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, PRESS RELEASE)

A survey of more than 1,000 people from 54 different countries reveals that “more than eight out of every 10 individuals surveyed said such robots should not be used for aggression, and 67 per cent said they should be banned across the planet”.

“It has been said that future wars will be fought with completely automated systems,” said AJung Moon, [Open Roboethics initiative] ORi spokesperson and a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at UBC. “The survey results clearly show that more public discussion is necessary so that we can make intelligent decisions about robotic weapon technologies.”

If pressed to make a choice, most people (71 per cent) said they would prefer that their country use remotely operated weapons—such as the military drones already being used by a few armies—instead of fully autonomous weapons.

 

PARC DRONE HAS NO LIMIT ON FLIGHT TIME (PHYSORG)

The Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications (PARC) device, developed by CyPhy Works, is a drone that can stay aloft indefinitely. What’s the secret of its endurance?

A microfilament that transmits power and data and is strong enough to reel the drone in if needs be.

While small cables normally mean low power and poor communications, CyPhy Works said that their patented system “flips that dynamic.” They get high power and they get high-definition communications through a tiny cable, thanks to “novel electronics”.

The PARC vehicle can operate at altitudes of up to 500 feet above ground level, or 10,000 feet density altitude.

The company’s site said their microfilament is impervious to jamming and unaffected by water, power lines, and other possible interferences. The microfilament connects the robot to its Ground Control Station (GCS), so communications can’t be intercepted, spoofed, or otherwise compromised, it added.

CyPhy Works founder Helen Greiner says we will have drone delivery by 2020. “Technically we could do it earlier, but if you’ve been involved in the struggle with the FAA since the ’90s you would not place a bet that they would allow larger, non-line-of-sight vehicles to fly over populated cities.”

10 Drones You Don’t Need To Register (Robotics Trends)

The FAA has a lot of work ahead of it over the next few months. The agency estimates that one million drones will be sold this holiday season in the United States alone.

The agency is expected to require all drones above 9 oz in weight to be registered and the entire system needs to be in place before the holiday season.

Of course, the registration requirement doesn’t apply to small drones and Robotics Trends‘ Steve Crowe is wondering whether this loophole might lead to a spike in sales for micro- and nano-drones.

For the growing number of anti-registration folks out there, we’ve compiled some of the top nano-sized drones you can buy today and won’t have to register – if the FAA adheres to the task force’s recommendations. Again, they come with limitations, but they’ll certainly help you get your drone fix.

And what about nano-sized drones? They certainly don’t have the capabilities of a DJI or 3DR drone, but for someone who just wants to fly around for 10 minutes, this could be a potential solution. Will we see a boon in nano drones due to registration for larger drones?

IMPORTANT NOTE: no matter what type of drone you choose to fly, always fly safely and with courtesy towards other sky users and people on the ground.

If you’re one of the million people that’s thinking of buying a drone in the United States this holiday season, this website is a great place to start learning about responsible flying. For those outside the United States, here‘s a good place to start looking for the regulations specific to your country.

THE MOST MEMORABLE AI IN FICTION RANKED BY EVILNESS (FAST COMPANY)

Robopocalypse Now! #2 The robot takeover will never happen without hordes of evil artificial intelligences hell bent on our destruction, will it?  Well … No! To whet our appetite, this lovely infographic lists ten of the most evil AIs.

P.S. All the AIs listed here are fictional. For now.

Notable mention: Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’ (The Guardian).

THIS GERMAN MACHINE IS HITTING PEOPLE TO MAKE TOMORROW’S ROBOTS SAFER (BLOOMBERG)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, safety is a hugely important issue for roboticists, especially those working on industrial robots designed to work in close proximity to humans:

Collaborative robots — or cobots — need to be configured so they’re aware of their fleshy colleagues and slow or stop after an unexpected collision to avoid stabbing skin or slicing limbs. But how hard can a robot hit a human before causing damage? And how does that change when the robot has a sharper attachment on its arm or makes contact with a sensitive part of the body? Those are questions Roland Behrens, a scientist working with volunteers including Bernstein, wants answered.

To give another example, I recently spoke with Heni Ben Amor, an Arizona State University-based roboticist that’s researching human-robot collaboration in industrial environments.

Ben Amor is trying to develop a system that allows robots to predict the behavior of human co-workers — and safety is a huge component of (and motivation for) his research. Check out the podcast with Ben Amor here.

And finally… 

CHiP is the latest robot dog looking to leash your heart (Mashable)

Starship robot delivers packages locally (TechCrunch)

Drone Hackers Could Provide Way of Countering Hostile Attacks (NBC News); Human-Like Neural Networks Make Computers Better Conversationalists (Discovery); Compressorhead rocks the crowd to find new robot band member (GizMag); Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in U.S. (New York Times); Origami-inspired folding robot (Science Advances); Legal Questions Could Leave Self-Driving Cars In Slow Lane (Nikkei Asian Review).

Almost human robots; N. American robotics market sets new record; Chinese robot sets walking record; will superhuman robots be our friends and more.

Almost human robots, how to tell them apart from a real person? (AlphaGalileo)

It’s getting harder and harder to tell a human from the real thing –android– these days.

This week we discovered that when people find themselves in that exact position –unable to tell an android from a real human being– they experience “high anxiety and even fear,” according to David Silvera-Tawil, a Mexican researcher working in Australia’s University of New South Wales:

Once the experiment was carried out, people’s reactions were evaluated, as well as the responses of specialized questionnaires, which allowed researchers to know that when mixed with geminoids people generate feelings of anxiety, nervousness and even fear, specified Silvera-Tawil.

For the first part of the study a female geminoid (Actroid F) and a person were seated, both wearing the same outfit, then the participant had five seconds to identify which one of the two was a real human.

The next part of the experiment was performed with only two humans sitting side by side, and about 50 percent of the participants said they could not confirm who the robot was and who the human was.

We linked to separate uncanny valley-related research in a recent post. I’m starting to wonder whether androids are doomed as a general style of robot design.

Or are there specific niche applications –perhaps during the Halloween period– for which android forms are perfectly suited?

North American Robotics Market Sets New Records for First Nine Months of 2015 (Robotics Tomorrow)

Robot orders and shipments in North America set new records in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Robotic Industries Association, the industry’s trade group:

A total of 22,427 robots valued at $1.3 billion were ordered from North American companies in the first nine months of 2015, an increase of six percent in units and nine percent in dollars over the same period in 2014, which held the previous record. Robot shipments to North American customers through September totaled 21,436 robots valued at $1.2 billion, breaking the previous record set in 2014 by 16% in units and 10% in dollars.

Chinese Robot Makes Guinness World Record for Walking 134 km (NDTV)

While we’re on the topic of robot-related records being smashed, here’s a list of 15 Official World Records Set By Robots.

The Autopilot Is Learning Fast (Electrek)

A few weeks ago, we covered a story about some teething problems with Tesla’s Autopilot feature.

The good news is that with the help of some human-robot collaboration in which the system learns from human drivers, Model S owners are already reporting that Tesla’s Autopilot is self-improving, Elektrek reports:

A Model S owner by the username Khatsalano kept a count of how many times he had to “rescue” (meaning taking control after an alert) his Model S while using the Autopilot on his daily commute. He counted 6 “rescues” on his first day, by the fourth day of using the system on his 23.5 miles commute, he only had to take control over once.

Musk said that Model S owners could add ~1 million miles of new data every day, which is helping the company create “high precision maps.”

We’re building superhuman robots. Will they be heroes, or villains? (Washington Post)

So asks Patrick Lin, an expert in technology ethics, an associate philosophy professor at California Polytechnic State University, and affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Artificial intelligence is replacing human roles, and it’s assumed that those systems should mimic human behavior — or at least an idealized version of it. This may make sense for limited tasks such as product assembly, but for more autonomous systems — robots and AI systems that can “make decisions” for themselves — that goal gets complicated.

There are two problems with the assumption that AI should act like we do. First, it’s not always clear how we humans ought to behave, and programming robots becomes a soul-searching exercise on ethics, asking questions that we don’t yet have the answers to. Second, if artificial intelligence does end up being more capable than we are, that could mean that it has different moral duties, ones which require it to act differently than we would.

 

Black Hawk Empty: Unmanned Helicopter Passes Key Test Defense One)

An autonomous U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter completed quite a feat this week by autonomously delivering an amphibious all-terrain vehicle (AATV) along a hazard-filled ten kilometer journey:

The helicopter, flying autonomously — it also can be piloted remotely — “came in, picked up [the AATV], flew five to seven kilometers in an air route, delivered it to a ground location and released it. The unmanned ground vehicle moved through a ten-kilometer scenario where it faced different chemical, biological hazards and then fed that data back via satellite,” said Paul Rogers, who directs Army’s Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center, or TARDEC.

The test took place at Sikorsky’s Aircraft Development Flight Center near West Palm Beach, Florida, Rogers said at the Unmanned Systems Defense conference in Pentagon City today.

Elsewhere, drones are having a massive impact on the entertainment business, opening up new capabilities and opportunities for film makers and creating a unique sub-genre in the process.

Sample some of the best drone film work via this List Of Drone Film Festivals from SkyTango.

https://vimeo.com/121669160

We’ve added a new section this week called Robopocalypse Now! From robots taking your job and eating your pets to advanced AIs plotting the downfall of civilisation, we’ll have you covered with all the robot doom you can handle.

ROBOT REVOLUTION: RISE OF ‘THINKING’ MACHINES COULD EXACERBATE INEQUALITY (GUARDIAN)

The Guardian got received exclusive access to a report from Merrill Lynch analysts this week and it seems the editors wasted no time in taking a negative spin down Robot Doom Boulevard:

In a 300-page report, revealed exclusively to the Guardian, analysts from investment bank Bank of America Merrill Lynch draw on the latest research to outline the impact of what they regard as a fourth industrial revolution, after steam, mass production and electronics.

“We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work,” the authors say. “The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives.”

However, this revolution could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years, according to Oxford University research cited in the report, with job losses likely to be concentrated at the bottom of the income scale.

According to The Guardian, The Merrill Lynch report does note a “worrisome” trend of low-skilled jobs –the source of much new employment in the United States– being replaced by robots, but much further down in the article, a quote from Beijia Ma, the Merrill Lynch report’s lead author reveals a very different perspective on the conclusions reached:

[..] over the past 200 years and more, societies have eventually found ways of turning technological developments to their advantage.

[She said] the best advice for people fearing the rise of the robots is to polish up their skills. “It’s not meant to be a doom and gloom report: one of the ways we think people could help themselves here is through education.”

People helping themselves? Turning challenges into opportunities? Maintaining their composure in the face of change? Emphasizing the positive over doom and gloom? These tendencies have no place in Robopocalypse Now! We hope you enjoy the journey. (If you need something to read while the bots take over, Daniel H. WIlson’s Robopocalypse might be a good place to start.)

You can read the Merrill Lynch report here, including this snippet from the overview:

This new work paints a positive picture: while technology has potentially contributed to the loss of approximately 800,000 lower-skilled jobs, there is equally strong evidence to suggest that it has helped to create nearly 3.5 million new higher-skilled ones in their place.

Each one of these new jobs pays, on average, £10,000 more per annum than the one lost. Crucially, every nation and region of the UK has benefitted, and we estimate that this technology-driven change has added £140 billion to the UK’s economy in new wages.

And finally…

Robots, Bioprinting, And The Future of Food (SingularityHub)

Social Shot: A Mobile Robot Bartender

Yamaha’s Alternative for Driverless Cars: Robot-Driven Cars, Starting with Motobot (Core77): https://youtu.be/wRweuMjbESs

Earthworm-inspired 3D printed biomimetic worm-bot could be used in pipe inspection, burrowing (via 3ders)

Watch This Soccer Ball Take Down A Drone (Popular Science); A Robot Orchestra Grows In Brooklyn (NPR); The government may soon commandeer drones near airports (Washington Post); Measuring empathy for human and robot hand pain using electroencephalography (Nature); Drone Company Misled Military into Buying UAVs that Were Basically Toys: Lawsuit (Motherboard); This Robot Is All Eyes To Inspect Satellites In Orbit (io9).  

Robots can now teach each other new tricks

MIT Technology Review — Researchers at Brown University and Cornell have successfully transferred robot learning from a PR2 research robot to the industrial co-worker robot, Baxter.

The research — which builds on the Robobrain project — could enable different types of robots to learn from each other and adapt quickly to new situations.

Ashutosh Saxena, who led the development of TellMeDave and RoboBrain, said that robots will increasingly share information in the future. “We are trying to make robots to learn and share knowledge,” he said. “Different robots can push and pull knowledge from the [RoboBrain] database.”

The key challenge in transferring learning between the robots at Cornell and Brown was that they are physically completely different, which means that low-level commands, such as those specifying the position each joint needs to assume in order to reach for a mug, will not match.

Collaborative robotics brings the best of existing human and robot capabilities together. However, if robots could collaborate among themselves and also with humans, we could be looking at rapid increases in robot capabilities in a very short time frame.
 
 

Robot builder designed for construction sites

Reuters — Meet the In-situ Fabricator: an autonomous brick-laying and construction robot that can adapt to “unplanned circumstances” such as dropped tools and sudden design changes.

As Reuters reports:

Matthias Kohler, of ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), is one of the supervising professors on the research team. According to Kohler, who is also an architect, it is “the first machine that can actually go on construction sites and build non-standard designs, meaning designs which can vary and adapt to the local conditions directly in the building site”.

Leeds could become the first ‘self-repairing city’ with a fleet of robotic civil servants 

Digital Trends — Leeds could become a “self-repairing” city serviced by a fleet of robotic infrastructure inspectors and utility workers. The £4.2 M ($6.5 M) government-funded project is expected to incorporate drones and eventually terrestrial repair bots to take care of the English city’s needs:

Leeds’ robot fleet will focus on robotic fixes for citywide issues like burst or damaged utility pipes, broken or nonfunctional street lights, and road fractures that disturb drivers on their way to anywhere.

Three main branches of the project cover the functions of the Leeds robots: Perch and Repair; Perceive and Patch; and Fire and Forget. The Perch and Repair segment covers research into robotic drones that can land, or “perch” like birds atop tall structures like street lamps or building-mounted civil structures.

The Perceive and Patch team leads research into drones that can survey popular roads or even particularly dangerous ones in order to identify and repair potholes where they exist, and in the future, even prevent them before they occur.

Finally, […] Research into Fire and Forget would handle inspection and metering jobs for utility lines, theoretically including all gas, water, and electricity networks throughout the city of Leeds. These robots would also be able to perform repairs, although much of their function would most likely be focused on reporting, with the goal of avoiding repairs.

L.A. Authorities seek owner of drone that took out power lines in West Hollywood 

Hollywood Reporter — Yet another example of why we need drone regulation:

Los Angeles authorities are determining how to move forward after someone flew a drone into power lines in West Hollywood on Monday, knocking out electricity for roughly 200 customers.

“This is a first, but it will probably start happening every day,” said Sgt. Dave Valentine of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

While we’re on the topic of drones, check out Routledge’s Global Affairs journal online, which has made some excellent articles about armed drones available for free viewing and download, including: Why and how the EU should act on armed drones and Drone warfare and morality in riskless war.

This Is A Tipping Point: Robots “Cheaper Than Any Human Worker” Means The End Of Jobs

Activist Post — It’s easy to be dismissive of some of the more dystopian visions of our robotic future, especially when some people have vested interests in painting the worst picture imaginable.

At the same time, it would be imprudent to pay no attention whatsoever to how the debate around robotics is playing out in different social groups, no matter how eccentric it appears. Fail to prepare for the forthcoming debate, as the saying goes… and prepare to fail.

Take prepper website “Activist Post”, for example, which ran a no-holds-barred robopocalyptic piece recently on human labor replacement as a result of robotics:

Before future-history brings us a dark and grim reality pitted against a killer Terminator
robot army, humanity will have to face job killing robots.

And that may be the bloodiest period of human history, after unemployment leads to riots,
unrest and bitter aftermath scenarios play out as a consequence.

Robotic labor is now literally cheaper than human labor, and it is poised to undercut work
forces and drive layoffs in even in the most exploitative, slave-wage factories in the world.

Sheesh. So, what’s the bad news?

It’s important for the robotics community to counter these dystopian visions by highlighting not just the business efficiencies robotics can provide, but also the great benefits, enhanced capabilities and opportunities robots can bring to existing workers.

Stuart Russell on Why moral philosophy will be big business in tech

KQED — As robots and AIs proliferate, the discussion about how these devices can make ethical decisions becomes more and more important.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that at least one AI expert believes that moral philosophy is about to become a key topic of interest for robot and AI developers:

“In the future, moral philosophy will be a key industry sector,” says Russell.

Translation? In the future, the nature of human values and the process by which we make moral decisions will be big business in tech.

And he says, not to be flippant, but nobody’s going to buy a robot that cooks a cat. So it’s just a matter of time before tech companies, universities and the government starts pouring resources into programming robots with morals.

“In some sense [the robots’] only purpose in existing is to help us realize our values, and perhaps it’ll make people better,” says Russell.

Listen to the full interview with Russell here: https://soundcloud.com/thecaliforniareport/big-think-moral-philosophy-as-big-business

And finally…

Toshiba unveils trilingual robot in Odaiba — Japan Times

‘Whalecopter’ drone swoops in for a shot and a shower — Science News 

What Dancing Lizards Can Teach Us About Human-Robot Interaction — MIT Technology Review

A giant robot sentry guards the territory of Zaqistan — Sky News 

Scientists Connect Brain to a Basic Tablet—Paralyzed Patient Googles With Ease (SingularityHub); ‘Spring-mass’ technology heralds the future of walking robots (ScienceDaily); Interactive Performance Art/ificial Intelligence — Robotic Ape Comes to BAM (Huffington Post); Drones vs. driverless cars: A tale of two robotics policies (MarketWatch); PANERA CEO: Robots will replace our labor ‘like the sun comes up in the morning’ (Business Insider); Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cheers (Georgia Tech).

Avoiding the Uncanny Valley

Slate — The “uncanny valley” is one of the best known — but far from settled — topics in humanoid robot design. Proponents of the view — which holds that robots that look almost like humans prove to be the most unsettling to us — had their position reinforced with a recent study, Slate reports:

A recent study in the journal Cognition provides compelling evidence to support the uncanny valley claim. What makes it different than earlier work is that researchers Maya Mathur and David Reichling may have avoided some pitfalls that could have obscured results in prior studies. In order to test whether the uncanny valley effect occurs with real-life robots, the researchers used 80 pictures of social robots that have actually been built, rather than using computer-generated morphed blends of human and robot faces, which often have unnatural distortions that cause strange features.

They were also very picky about a lot of other factors—for instance, they only chose robots that were meant to interact with users (that is, not missing hair, facial parts, skin, or clothing), not marketed as toys (which are often made to look “adorable”), and capable of physical movement.

[…]

Specifically, as robot faces appeared increasingly more human, their likability ratings increased up until they looked almost human, at which point the ratings dropped significantly, dipping down into the valley. Similarly, the amount of money wagered by participants first increased before drastically dropping, only to increase again when robots began to look identical to humans.

Why a robot that gets ‘tired and hormonal’ is a good thing

Aberystwyth University’s Blodwen robot has “digital hormones”

BBC — In the last weekly roundup, we featured a study that indicated humans in care situations have more positive interactions with companion robots when the robots exhibit human-like behavioral idiosyncrasies and imperfections.

This week, the BBC reports on a researcher exploring the idea of using digital “hormone cascades” with the aim of making robots “appear less stilted and more easy for people to be around.”

In Mr Finnis’ system, a hormone is released when Blodwen’s electric current and temperature rise above a certain level. If it builds up too much, that triggers the release of a second hormone.

“That second hormone, in what we call a hormone cascade, does change the behaviour of the rover,” he said.
“If it goes above a certain level the rover will start to lurch because it decides it is ‘tired’ or ‘fatigued’.”

It prevents the robot – a miniature concept version of that to be used in the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Mission 2018 – from switching abruptly between functions as it drives up the banks of the university’s Mars surface mock-up – a landscape covered with a super-fine soil simulant.

An endocrine system can also allow, for instance, machines to save power and shut off non-essential functions when energy levels are running low.

At the rate these developments in robot imperfections are going, we will soon be told that the best kind of robot is one that doesn’t work reliably at all.

In the meantime, all of these new insights into human-robot interaction reinforce a growing sense that the vast majority of behavioral idiosyncrasies (and all the unpredictability) lie on the human side of the human-robot equation.

Has it reached the stage where robot designers need to be — or to hire — psychologists too? Or is talk of “digital hormones” more metaphorical than real, however biologically inspired the software design?

Speaking of robot imperfections, what to do when a real problem — such as a robot falling over accidentally — arises is the focus of some fascinating research at Georgia Tech…

An algorithm helps robots fall safely

MIT Technology Review — Researchers at Georgia Tech took inspiration from the way people break a fall by sticking out an arm or a leg on the way down. “When you fall down, you try to dissipate energy,” says Karen Liu, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech who carried out the work with her then graduate student Sehoon Ha, who now works at Disney Research Pittsburgh. “And every time you make contact with the ground, some of that energy is dissipated.”

Liu and Ha devised an algorithm that lets an unbalanced robot figure out how to contort its body so that it hits the ground with less force. The algorithm calculates how to create a number of contact points with the ground in order to disperse the momentum of the fall.

Samsung’s Korean robot factories aim to cut dependency on China

The Stack —

The Samsung investment scheme will see 17.75 bn won (£9.5+ bn | $14.8 bn) of taxpayer revenue funneled into ‘key components’ that will permit further robot production over the next three years […] The anticipated industrial robot infrastructure will be placed at the service of smaller and mid-sized robotics companies, with initial focus on technology production covering sectors such as cars, computer chips, displays and semiconductors.

Regulators Propose a Drone Registration System

New York Times — A US task force composed of more than two dozen representatives from the drone and manned aviation industries, federal government and other groups has been given until Nov. 20 to develop a drone registration system for unmanned aircraft.

Some drone makers were concerned, though, by the lack of detail about how the system will work and the speed with which the task force has been ordered to work out those particulars. Many questions about the regulation are unsettled, including exactly which drones are considered so harmless that they should be exempt from the new rules. The department said the regulations would not apply to toys and other small drones that posed low safety risks.

It will be fascinating to see how this plays out as drones are the first group of robots to become regulated ‘en masse’.

(Related coverage from Robohub and DIY Drones.)

Meanwhile, some members of the animal kingdom appear to have made their minds up already:

And finally …

This Tesla Autopilot Close Call Shows We Need To Be Responsible With Autonomous Tech (Road and Track):

The Future of Mobility (Deloitte University Press); Professor Dr Robot QC (The Economist); Israeli engineer designs delivery robot concept (Jerusalem Post); The Army built a Wi-Fi “gun” that shoots drones from the sky (Fortune); 11 Startups Building Advanced Robots To Replace Humans (Futurism); Why Does The World Hate Sex Robots? (Maxim); Why No Manufacturer Wants To Sell You The First Fully Autonomous Car (Jalopnik); Robotic System Means No Fee Procedures (Mexico News Daily); Japan’s Pepper Robot Makes European Debut In France (NDTV) .

Research reveals robot flaws are key to interacting with humans

ERWIN, one of the robots used in the study.

PhysOrg – People are more likely to form successful “working relationships” with robots that display human-like imperfections in thinking and behaviour, according to research from the University of Lincoln’s School of Computer Science.

One of the researchers, Mriganka Biswas said:

Our research explores how we can make a robot’s interactive behaviour more familiar to humans, by introducing imperfections such as judgemental mistakes, wrong assumptions, expressing tiredness or boredom, or getting overexcited. By developing these cognitive biases in the robots – and in turn making them as imperfect as humans – we have shown that flaws in their ‘characters’ help humans to understand, relate to and interact with the robots more easily.

The researchers studied interactions between humans and the ERWIN (Emotional Robot with Intelligent Network) and Keepon robots.

During half of the interactions the robots were not affected by cognitive biases, but during the remainder, ERWIN made mistakes when remembering simple facts (using verbal abilities and expressions) and Keepon showed extreme happiness or sadness (using various movements and noises).

The participants were then asked to rate their experiences, and the results revealed that almost of all of those taking part enjoyed a more meaningful interaction with the robots when they made mistakes.

Fascinating research, which may have implications for future robot design.

However, the phrase “working relationship” is slightly misleading here (PhysOrg simply copied it from the press release).

These are not industrial robots. Nor are they robot coworkers. They are care/companion robots. The care relationship is not purely a “working relationship”; at least not from the perspective of the end user. Further the demands and requirements of the care environment are quite different from those of the workplace.

Nobody wants huge industrial robots making deliberate miscalculations and behaving erratically in order to endear itself to its human coworkers. The most likely outcome of such a strategy would be a series of expensive lawsuits.

But when it comes to smaller robot co-workers, could they be made more appealing by introducing some human-like quirks or flaws? For use in the workplace, such flaws would have to be fleeting and obviously designed merely to give the bot a bit of character.

We have to ask: What degree of erratic reasoning, misunderstanding, and illogical behavior is acceptable in the workplace?

(I’m asking this question about robot coworkers, and not your human colleagues. Ahem.)

China has had a telescope on the moon for the past two years

Chinas Chang’e 3 moon lander.

New Scientist – A paper published this week revealed that China has been using a remotely operated robot telescope on the moon since 2013.

As New Scientist reports:

The 15-centimeter telescope is mounted on the Chang’e 3 lander, which touched down on the lunar surface in December 2013. Chang’e 3 carried the Yutu rover, which repeatedly struggled to survive the lunar night and ceased working in March this year – but the lander is still going strong.

According to the research paper, the robot carried out 2,000 hours of observations in its first eighteen months on the moon.

Courage or capital: The final obstacles for sustainable asteroid mining

Accenture Consulting – Capital is the last major obstacle to sustainable asteroid mining, according to this optimistic report (full PDF) from Accenture Consulting and Planetary Resources.

Finally, the asteroid mining sector faces the need for capital infusion to get these projects off the ground. Not all capital sources have the courage required to be a part of a highly risky and long-term investment, but with the extremely high potential payout for successful resource acquisition, more and more prominent investors are starting to take note.

The timeline (see above) predicts “full deployment” of extraction, transportation and delivery technologies via the Arkyd spacecraft by 2019-2020.

QRoSS round robot rolls along, then sprouts legs to walk

NBC News – QRoSS has a quadrupedal walking system completely enclosed by a spherical metal cage, and it can be tossed or rolled along the floor as easily as any other ball. When it senses that it has come to a stop, four legs unfold and bring it upright, then allow it to walk along the ground.

And finally …

A robot monk with artificial intelligence makes debut (People’s Daily Online); Volvo will accept liability for self-driving car crashes (AutoBlog); Tesla’s cars can drive themselves starting tomorrow (The Verge); President Obama puts his finger on the real danger of robots (Washington Post); Researchers say they’ve recreated part of a rat brain digitally (New York Times); and Singapore introduces Robocoach to keep older citizens in shape (The Guardian).