Milkbots

Milking robots on dairy farms help the cows milk themselves when they want to be milked. [Link]

Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past.

With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation.

The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day, which can indicate when she is in heat.

“The animals just walk through,” said Jay Skellie, a dairyman from Salem, N.Y., after watching a demonstration. “I think we’ve got to look real hard at robots.”

Many of those running small farms said the choice of a computerized milker came down to a bigger question: whether to upgrade or just give up.

“Either we were going to get out, we were going to get bigger, or we were going to try something different,” said the elder Mr. Borden, 59, whose family has been working a patch of ground about 30 miles northeast of Albany since 1837. “And this was something a little different.”

The Bordens and other farmers say a major force is cutting labor costs — health insurance, room and board, overtime, and workers’ compensation insurance — particularly when immigration reform is stalled in Washington and dependable help is hard to procure.

The machines also never complain about getting up early, working late or being kicked.

“It’s tough to find people to do it well and show up on time,” said Tim Kurtz, who installed four robotic milkers last year at his farm in Berks County, Pa. “And you don’t have to worry about that with a robot.”

The Bordens say the machines allow them to do more of what they love: caring for animals.

“I’d rather be a cow manager,” Tom Borden said, “than a people manager.”

The machines are not inexpensive, costing up to $250,000 (not including barn improvements) for a unit that includes a mechanical arm, teat-cleaning equipment, computerized displays, a milking apparatus and sensors to detect the position of the teats. Pioneered in Europe in the 1990s, they have only recently taken hold in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, which is a leader in the production of Greek yogurt and the third-largest milk producer in the country.

Kathy Barrett, a senior extension associate at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, credited a recent surge in milk prices with motivating dairy owners to seek new ways to improve their farms — and farm life.

The 'Killer Robot' Olympics

DARPA Robotics Challenge. [Link]

Valkyrie and her fellow competitors—Chimp, RoboSimian, Hubo, Schaft and Thor—are at the center of a debate beset by distortions and spin on every side. Their developers want to portray them as benign; their detractors want to ban “killer robots.” But what’s certainly true is that we’re at “the beginning of a historic transformation in robotics,” as DARPA puts it. And the inescapable reality is that some machines will save lives and some will take lives, and they’ll be programmed to make the relatively simple but critical decisions on their own that determine who survives and who dies.

Many of these “robots” will take the form of airborne drones, big and small; some will be weapons systems on ships; and some, like Valkyrie and the other competitors scrambling over the obstacle course at Homestead-Miami Speedway, will be moving more or less like animals and humans.

The implications are enormous as all this comes amid widespread and growing excitement about robotics in daily life. Jeff Bezos just floated the imaginative notion that Amazon.com will be using drones to deliver packages in the not-too-distant future. The Google empire, always the spotter and setter of trends, is busy meanwhile buying up some of the best robotic labs in the business. But there’s no doubt the sinister Schwarzeneggan shadow of The Terminator haunts much of the discussion of military automatons.

A year ago, Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard published a report with the arresting title “Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots,” that I found perfectly convincing when I first read it. “Fully autonomous weapons,” it concluded, would be unable to meet international legal standards under the Geneva Conventions and, in action, they would have no compassion to temper their lethal judgments.

Robots stealing jobs

How to deal with the coming economic collapse. [Link]

That would appear to be a two-pronged challenge:

1. Survive the economic collapse.

2. Be happy about it.

We spoke to Pistono about these ideas a while back when he was still working on his book. Around that time, he was on the record with statements like this:

Without a backup plan to adjust to a new paradigm, we can expect the worst. Civil unrest, riots, police brutality, and general distress of the population will continue to rise until critical levels are reached, at which point the whole socioeconomic system will crumble upon itself. This has negative repercussions across the whole spectrum of the population, and it is against the interest of everyone on this planet, even of the richest and wealthiest people.

Presumably this “backup plan” is fleshed out in the new book, and it will be the means by which we can avoid all-out robopocalypse. Of course, while most agree that machines are rapidly taking on more and more tasks that at one time could only be performed by humans, not everyone is convinced that automation represents a real threat to the long-term employability of human beings — as long we’re willing to keep moving up the value chain and do things machines (still) can’t.

Teletubbies as Wells' Eloi

Teletubbies as utopia. [Link]

It seems clear from the world of the Teletubbies that, whether alien or posthuman, they come from a technologically advanced culture. Like the Borg they have assimilated technological devices into their own bodies, but unlike the wholly technological/artificial worlds of the Borg they have chosen to inhabit an environment shaped largely by the aesthetics of the natural world. We have, then, a disparity between (on the one hand) the high degree of intelligence and technological know-how needed to build the ’tubbies home, their automated toasters and vacuum-cleaners, the periscopes, the broadcasting tower and all that; and (on the other) the evident puerility and immaturity of the Teletubbies themselves. Rather that reading this in terms of parental abandonment, I suggest a reading more in keeping with the traditions of SF.

The Teletubbies, I’d suggest, are contemporary versions of Wells’s Eloi, those indolent foppish creatures from The Time Machine. Indeed, they are a more thoroughly-worked through rendering of the Eloi mode of life. Where Wells saw his Eloi as adults, still capable despite their degeneracy of adult pastimes (so that Wells’s time traveller is for instance able to have sex with the Eloi Weena), the Teletubbies inhabit a more self-consistent vision of complete degeneracy.

Let’s put it this way: imagine a culture that develops such sophisticated technical prostheses that its inhabitants no longer need to work, to worry, to strive in any way. Imagine those inhabitants, through choice or through evolutionary pressure, losing all stress-related functions of adult consciousness: work-ethic, conscience, guilt, lust, anger, avarice. Imagine them, in other words, regressing back wholly to a toddler’s existence, finding in that simplicity a maximum fit between existence and stress-free-satisfaction, like those German 40-something businessmen who like dressing in nappies and rolling around on the carpets of speciality brothels. Or, in fact, not like those men, because (unlike the Eloi) the Teletubbies have discarded the sex impulse as well, abandoning with it the dangerously fretful anxiety-gratification ratio of adult sexual life.

The machines in Teletubbyland, in other words, are the devices necessary to free mankind from its attachment to the adult world of necessity, provision and work. And once freed from those constraints, the show suggests, evolution or choice leads life back into the calm, bright satisfactions of toddlerdom. The Teletubbies are purer Eloi than the Eloi, a more complete rendering of the old SF convention about degeneration. Wells characterised his Eloi as child-like in some respect, but adult-like in others (physical appearance, sexual appetite). Huxley’s Brave New World also posited human global happiness upon an infantilisation of the human animal, although his future humans are also adult in appearance and physical appetite.

Computer learns language by playing Civilization

No, really. [Link]

The extraordinary thing about Barzilay and Branavan’s system is that it begins with virtually no prior knowledge about the task it’s intended to perform or the language in which the instructions are written. It has a list of actions it can take, like right-clicks or left-clicks, or moving the cursor; it has access to the information displayed on-screen; and it has some way of gauging its success, like whether the software has been installed or whether it wins the game. But it doesn’t know what actions correspond to what words in the instruction set, and it doesn’t know what the objects in the game world represent.

So initially, its behavior is almost totally random. But as it takes various actions, different words appear on screen, and it can look for instances of those words in the instruction set. It can also search the surrounding text for associated words, and develop hypotheses about what actions those words correspond to. Hypotheses that consistently lead to good results are given greater credence, while those that consistently lead to bad results are discarded.

Proof of concept 

In the case of software installation, the system was able to reproduce 80 percent of the steps that a human reading the same instructions would execute. In the case of the computer game, it won 79 percent of the games it played, while a version that didn't rely on the written instructions won only 46 percent. The researchers also tested a more-sophisticated machine-learning algorithm that eschewed textual input but used additional techniques to improve its performance. Even that algorithm won only 62 percent of its games.

“If you’d asked me beforehand if I thought we could do this yet, I’d have said no,” says Eugene Charniak, University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. “You are building something where you have very little information about the domain, but you get clues from the domain itself.” 

UAV Carrier Ops

F/A-18 lands on carrier automatically. [Link]

On July 2, the F/A-18 performed dozens of arrested landings without any input from the pilot in the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia Capes. What’s really interesting about this is that the jet wasn’t controlled by someone in the carrier the way current drones are controlled from ground stations. No, this jet simply received a command from the carrier’s air traffic control to enter the landing pattern and execute the landing all on its own; the same way a piloted jet would.

“Once he’s on his approach, we actually take control of the aircraft via the systems we have installed as part of the demo and actually the aircraft is controlled by flight [rules] we put in place, all the way down to trap,” said Don Blottenberger, Navy UCAS-D Dep. Principal Program Manager during a phone call with reporters this morning. “There is no remote control of the aircraft, there is no pilot control of the aircraft; we’ve given it instructions and it executes those instructions.”

Just to make it clear, Blottenberger added:

“There is no remote control, meaning there is no joystick, there’s no one that’s flying this aircraft from the carrier, we give it commands via the network we have in place … tying in with existing carrier systems and then the aircraft executes those commands.”

The system, which uses precision-GPS navigation data transmitted over Rockwell Collins’ Tactical Targeting Network Technology (which I thought was defunct), allows the air traffic controllers, air boss and landing signals officer to tell the plane to enter the approach and perform all the necessary adjustments in heading, altitude and speed necessary to perform a trap. In the final phase of the approach, the LSO can even order the jet to wave off using his terminal that has been modified to communicate with an unmanned jet, according to NAVAIR officials.

According to the Hornet’s pilot, Lt. Jeremy DeBons, the landing felt no different from when an F/A-18 lands using the Automated Carrier Landing System, although. Still, he kept his “hands very close” to the controls during the ‘hands-off’ landings.

The new, GPS-based system developed for the UCAS-D has 360-degree coverage around the ship; the ability to control multiple aircraft and allows the actual airplane to determine how it will fly according to the commands from air traffic control. The older radar-based auto-land system has limited coverage off the stern of the carrier, determines what type of stick and throttle inputs should be performed for the plane and can only control a limited number of aircraft, according to NAVAIR officials.

Driverless cars coming to Nevada

Or at least laws regarding driverless cars. [Link]

This week, the state passed a new law that will require its Department of Transportation to "adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada." More specifically, the DOT will have to cook up a set of safety standards for self-driving vehicles, and designate specific areas in which they can be tested.

3d maps generated by drones

Neat. [Link]

Users upload images taken with their flying machines, at which point Pix4D kicks into action, defining high contrast points in the phots and pasting them together based on those points. It then renders a 3D model, overlays the graphics, and spits out a Google Earth-style map.

Redesigning Doctor Who monsters

Neat designs. More at the link. [Link]

3D Mapping with quad copter

Neat. [Link]

In the future, our flying robot overlords won't just navigate terrain autonomously, they'll also report back to base with detailed 3D maps of everything they've seen -- or at least that's what this homebuilt UAV does in a video released this week. 

RoboCop coming to Detroit

The people have spoken. Emphasis added. [Link]

The statue has set off debates about the artistic value of a RoboCop statue. Some complain that the movie, about a dystopian, crime-ridden Detroit, would hurt the city's image.

Others said it's a fun way to bring more attention to the struggling, but resilient city.

Fund-raising began last week after Detroit Mayor Dave Bing politely rejected a suggestion on Twitter that RoboCop would improve the city's image. Although the Tweet was a joke from a New England computer technician, fans of RoboCop swarmed cyberspace to call for a statue.

Once the price tag is determined, a team of skilled sculptures, including a team that worked with Bjork's husband, Matthew Barney, will build the sculpture from any number of materials. The group is working with the Mayor's Office to consider public spots, such as areas near Comerica Park or a downtown park.

If that doesn't work out, the statue may end up at Imagination Station, an outdoor art project cofounded by Paffendorf near the abandoned Michigan Central Station just off Michigan Avenue.

Paffendorf and other local artists hope RoboCop is just the beginning of a series of public art installations.

"With all of this publicity, we have a big opportunity to extend this to other projects in Detroit," Paffendorf said.

Supporters of the statue got a big boost Tuesday when San Francisco businessman, Pete Hottelet, donated $25,000.


"Despite everything, we live in a great country, and every day, there's an opportunity out there to do something awesome," Hottelet, owner of Omni Consumer Products, told the Free Press. "You just have to find it."

Cube Stormer

Neat.

Landing drones on carriers

They can, as long as the weather is calm and clear. [Link]

The Navy’s top admiral told a think-tank audience yesterday he wants more unmanned aircraft in the sea service, and he wants ‘em in a hurry. In particular, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead said he’d like a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier. As it happens, I saw a full-scale mock-up of just such a plane a few weeks ago.

The X-47B is expected to make its first flight by the end of the year and could be making autonomous carrier landings as soon as 2011. In the meantime, drone-maker Northrop Grumman decided the show the thing off to the press at Edwards Air Force Base.

It’s no secret that unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming the preferred eyes in the sky and weapons platform for the military when it comes to combat zones. But so far the drones have been limited to operating from established air bases and flying relatively slow and easy, high above the action. The X-47B has the potential to change all that.

Northrup Grumman’s Tighe Parmenter says the X-47B is a test vehicle designed to demonstrate that a tailess, stealthy, unmanned aircraft can operate in the carrier environment. If the unmanned aircraft performs as planned, “it’s likely the Navy will pick a design like this to replace the F/A-18 Hornet.” The X-47B has a wingspan of just over 62 feet, has a range of more than 2,000 miles and can carry 4,500 pounds of internally stored bombs.

The bad news is the tailess, flying wing planform of the X-47B comes with some inherent stability and low speed flying issues that make the take off and landing from an aircraft carrier a real engineering challenge. The good news is Northrup Grumman has a lot of experience with the flying wing design, most recently with the B-2 bomber.

Landing an airplane on an aircraft carrier is considered one of the most difficult things to do in aviation. The Navy wants this experimental craft to do it autonomously — no humans involved. The X-47B will have to be able to take off and land from an aircraft carrier deck without a pilot sitting at a remote control station; that’ll set it apart from today’s drones, like the Predator.  Taking off isn’t too much of an issue. Landing is where the engineers will earn their paycheck.

More Giant Robots in Japan

How can we compete against the Giant Robot Gap? [Link]

Bouncing robot spy

Bounces up to 25 feet per jump. [Link]

During normal travel, an electric motor powers the wheels. But when needed, the robot can engage a hopping mechanism and leap over 25 feet in the air to clear an obstacle (as the video posted by Sharon demonstrated earlier this week) . It may look strange, but its unique capability might give the Hopper an important role in urban warfare.
Ground robots have always had problems with curbs, stairs and other obstacles that humans cross with ease. One solution is to build a bipedal robot the size of a human, but it’s much harder for small robots. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have been working on hopping robots which, much like grasshoppers or fleas, can leap over obstacles several times taller than themselves. Work started as far back as 1997. But recent advances have finally made it a practical proposition.
According to Mark Peterson of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, the three important developments have been the hybrid rolling/hopping design, miniaturization, and high-precision valves. “With these improved valving technologies, researchers are now able to precisely meter fluid fuels and oxidizers into the piston systems, and accurately provide the needed energy to hop the vehicle to an exact spot,” he told Danger Room.
The hopping mechanism works like an explosive pogo stick. It uses methyl acetylene-propadiene gas as fuel and nitrous oxide as an oxidizer, igniting the combination with a glow plug. Accuracy is the key here: The Hopper is capable of negotiating cluttered environments and can go up stairwells. It can even pop through (open) windows.

The Giant Robot Gap

First the Gundam in Japan and the coming Tetsujin 28 (Gigantor). Now South Korea is planning to build one that will dwarf the Gundam and be twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. [Link]

In what at first appears to be a serious case of keeping up with the Jones’, Korea is planning to build a 111 meter (364′) tall statue of Robot Taekwon V that will dwarf the Gundam statue and the upcoming 18 meter monument to Tetsujin 28.  Robot Land, the robot-themed amusement park being built by Incheon Metropolitan City has actually been in the works for years, predating the Japanese projects.  Ironically, Robot Taekwon V (known as Voltar the Invincible in the U.S.) starred in a string of patriotic animated films that some would say brazenly copied Japan’s own Mazinger Z, which was also popular in Korea at the time.

Once completed, the ginormous statue will be more than twice the height of New York’s Statue of Liberty

Where is our giant robot? How can we compete? America needs Giant Robots Now!

Giant Robot in Japan presides over wedding

You can't make this stuff up. [Link]

A special wedding event was held at the base of the 1/1 Gundam RX78 at Odaiba on August 25, 2009. The couple was chosen out of over 500 entries by T&G wedding planners. They have a new born daughter they have named Seira from the Gundam series.

And I'll Form the Head!

LEGO Voltron. In minifig scale. (The figures are at its feet!) [Link]

Years have passed since Zarkon's invasion of Arus. A team of Space Explorers approaches the planet. Young but determined, these explorers have been sent by the Galaxy Alliance on a special mission: to search for the secret of Voltron. The team of explorers consists of five brave young (brick)men: Keith, Pidge, Hunk, Lance, and Sven. Together, with 71 hours of building, they form Lego Voltron. From work in progress to cockpit details and shoulder pin mechanisms, the photographed details are there to enjoy. The builder includes credits to the Teknomeka plans for the frame of the structure (history of the plans, models, and another model) (via).

Why are they making Robots that eat food?

This is just asking for trouble when the robots start going on a human eating rampage. [Link]

The idea of EATR is ostensibly that military reconnaissance droids far behind enemy lines would be able to forage for fuel. Robotic Technology Inc, lead contractor on the EATR, puts it thus:

EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, propane and solar) when suitable.

The machine runs on a "biomass furnace" which powers a steam generator driving a "waste heat engine" from Cyclone Power Technologies. These pieces of kit will now be mated together within 90 days, according to RTI.
The robot steamers are envisaged as being equipped with powerful articulated arms in order to rip trees or bushes out of the earth and stuff them into their glowing maws. By way of a treat, it seems that the machines will also be able to loot or forage more conventional fuel supplies from the petrol tanks of cars, domestic gas cylinders and so on. Cyclone says that their engine can also run happily on old apple cores, banana peel and other kitchen garbage gleaned from bins.
Hapless drivers or householders will be in no position to object to such robotic plundering: military reconnaissance vehicles are typically heavily armed, and doubtless the EATR will be no exception. It might also be fitted with DARPA's SELF tech, enabling it to construct copies of itself and modify its own design.

UPDATE: EATR is a vegetarian and follows the Geneva Conventions. [Link]

RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.
“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO. “We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.” (emphasis in the original)

Mars rovers just don't quit

Even when they're stuck. [Link]

When your rover has abundant energy but can't go anywhere, what's a scientist to do? How about making observations of the evening and night skies on Mars? With the benefit of a boost in electrical power from a wind gust cleaning off her solar panels, the Spirit rover has more energy available than she's had for a couple of years. But unfortunately, Spirit is stuck in a patch of loose soil in the Home Plate region on Mars. While the engineers at JPL work hard at figuring out how to "Free Spirit" (see the new website dedicated to their efforts) scientists are making observations of her surroundings to aid in the effort to get her out. But there's also enough power to do additional observations, and astronomy was a logical choice. "Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers," said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters." Besides, Lemmon added, using all the energy in the daytime might lead to overheating.