Robots March Forward Triumphantly

Robots are fascinating things to talk about, make movies about and generally be scared about nowadays. Of course we’ve all seen the new terminator movie but that is science-fiction isn’t it?

Let’s try and start at the beginning with the first robot, that sounds

Leonardo Robot

logical to me. Leonardo da Vinci had a good go at building a robot and I would class this as the first. For more info try here.

In 1961 the first industrial robot, Unimate, joined the assembly line at a General Motors plant to work with heated die-casting machines in welding jobs. An industry was created and a variety of other tasks were also performed by robots, such as loading and unloading machine tools.

The next step was Shakey which was the first mobile robot to reason about its actions. Developed by Stanford Research Institutes Artificial Intelligence Center from 1966 through 1972 Shakey has had a substantial legacy and influence on present-day artificial intelligence and robotics.

Robots produced nowadays are used in many applications and places. Manufacturing is a little boring so lets have a look at a space robot to be launched in spring 2011.

In terms of more advanced autonomy, Mars Science Laboratory will  take over from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. The Mars science labatory will analyze dozens of samples scooped from the soil and drilled from rocks. It has software that represents a leap forward for the rovers.

Before, rovers could only plan one or two moves on their own. Now, current and future rovers can look ahead and plan a path to a spot 50 meters (164 feet) away, evading surface features like large rocks that they determine to be obstacles along the way. This will mean that more surface area will be able to be covered in a shorter time, meaning that a lot more of Mars will be covered before the power source runs out or stops.

Perhaps you would like to go to Mars? Well that may not be possible but you can send your name with the Mars labatory. Sending your name to Mars

Have you seen the terminator films ? Those sort of robots are science fiction aren’t they? well, today we are almost at that point believe it or not. Military robots are very very sophisticated and they just improve all the time, just like computers.

When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had no robotic systems on the ground. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots on the ground in Iraq, a year later there were 2,400, by the end of 2008, there were about 12,000 robots of nearly two dozen varieties operating on the ground in Iraq.

Army Robot

It isn’t just on the ground, military robots have been taking to the skies—and the seas and space, too and the field is rapidly advancing. The robotic systems now rolling out in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than ones already in service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even they are just the start, gulp. the military always is one step ahead in secret so what they actually have is unknown, to be totally paranoid.

Most military robots nowadays are controlled by a human but there are plans to introduce completely autonomous robots in the future. Let’s face it, if it’s a choice between your loved one and sending a thinking robot then the robot wins every time.

But there are always civilians getting in the way in a war so these robots will need some sort of ethics and rules and be 100% reliable which is impossible. No War is without its innocent casualties and we mustn’t forget friendly fire which has taken untold injuries. Perhaps robots will even reduce casualties in this area as well Here is a bit more on teaching robots rules for war. there is a lot more needed than the basic robot rules created by Issac Asimov in his book I, Robot.

Medical Robot

An exercise actually went wrong and killed some people. A laptop is a laptop and Windows is still Windows and you know how many crashes you get with that. Here is the reason why when an exercise went wrong.

Robotic surgery may be coming to your town. Robots that perform surgery can be driven by surgeons who no longer need to stand by the patient, but direct the operation from a computer console.

In most cases the surgeon is seated at a console within the theatre, only a few metres away from the patient. Now a team of surgeons and scientists have shown that the surgeon and robot can be linked via a 4,000 mile Internet connection, or by satellite. I can see that this would be a good target for a hacker, you may get some unwanted tattoos.

One of the most advanced robots around today is said to be bigdog as in the video below. It totally amazed me at what it could do especially staying upright which must be a great achievement in the robotic world. I just can’t help but feel a shiver down up my spine when I see it and think of what it could be used for. The only thing that I haven’t seen it do is to run very fast.

So what will the future bring? I am sure that we will see robots that are carrying out jobs in all fields such as surgery, around the house, in factories and of course in war.

There are a few problems at the moment. It is not the mechanical “body” that is unattainable, articulated arms and other moving mechanisms adequate for manual work already exist, as industrial robots show. Rather it is the computer-based arti
cial brain that is still well below the level of sophistication needed to build a humanlike robot.

At AI they are trying to create an artificial intelligence by treating the software that they have written as a child and allowing it to grow from there. Every so often the child gets an update very similar to the way real children grow up and have bursts of improvement. The whole process is explained here. This website also has chatbots that you can check the intelligence of by trying them yourself.

Fully autonomous robot are just around the corner as is shown by this very useful battlefield surgical robot.

The future will almost indefinitely bring armies of robots doing our dirty deeds, as always though we must keep a rather large eye on controlling them even though they may be autonomous. A nice big red switch labelled off might come in very useful in the future.

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