Robots To The Rescue

Robotic development has come a long way since the days when mechanical robots could execute just a small number of repetitive tasks. But as the world was reminded following the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima, Japan, following the tsunami of 2011, there is a pressing need for more agile and autonomous robots to aid first responders, especially in risky situations.Unfortunately, robots are not yet sophisticated or adaptable enough to handle many of the tasks that arise during disasters. Despite advances in programming and micro mechanics, robots have limited mobility, dexterity and ability to recognize and make decisions autonomously.

That's what's behind the focus of the latest DARPA Robotics Challenge, the fourth in a series of robotics development contests sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.In the first round of the competition, DARPA asked competing developers to tackle something different than the usual robotics challenge: create software to control a virtual robot.For robots to succeed in disaster environments, they require not only complex hardware to handle a variety of tasks but also software that operators can use to direct them remotely through many jobs and across difficult terrain. Spanish Museum Relies On Robot To Catch Cracks In Artwork, in a disaster, operators are more likely to be first responders than trained robotics specialists, so the virtual robots have to be relatively intuitive to direct.

That requires testing virtualized environments and exercises to develop and perfect the software for first responders.More than two dozen teams from eight countries qualified to compete in DARPA's Virtual Robotics Challenge held in June. Using a simulator developed for the DARPA Robotics Challenge by the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the teams created software to direct a virtual robot through three different tasks -- drive a vehicle, walk across rugged terrain, and attach a hose and turn a valve -- in a simulated environment.

Spanish Museum Relies On Robot To Catch Cracks In Artwork

I spy with my little eye, a crack in a Renaissance masterpiece! Well, that particular "job" has fallen onto the shoulders of a robot now, at least at Madrid's Reina Sofia museum in Spain. A huge robot will scan a painting of a masterpiece, where it will do so in an extremely slow process since it has to snap hundreds of microscopic shots via the use of infrared and ultraviolet photography. This particular robot will allow restorers to check out cracks, scratches and creases which are difficult to see at times with the naked eye, in addition to underlying preparatory sketches and other touch-ups. This unique robot has been given the nickname "Pablito", and that is because its first work involved Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" canvas that showcased the resulting carnage of the Spanish Civil War.

Pablito is no graceful robot, as it measures a whopping 9 meters long and 3.5 meters high, tipping the scales at approximately 1,200kg when fully assembled. In fact, its work on Guernica involved snapping 22,000 or so photos, so good luck trying to pore through all of that! You might expect a book with the title Sad Robot Stories to make you laugh. Sure, a robot with human emotions is nothing new. But wouldn't it be kind of funny if C3PO sang the blues? You know, if his verses were written by, say, Mason Johnson, one of the Chicago writers most likely to make me ROTFLMAO? This was my thinking, and if you're anything like me, you're already hunting-and-pecking your way through this review to find a release date and some purchasing information.

Turns out, though, in Mason Johnson's Sad Robot Stories, a fictional novella rather than a blues song, we see that there's a great deal more than laughter to be found in the woes of a machine.The title character of this book is Robot with a capital R, and he's sad because there are no more people on Earth. Some unnamed cataclysmic event wiped us all out. "Even the minute sound of blood rushing through veins and arteries, speeding through the heart and up to the brain--which sounded to Robot's technologically advanced thingymajigs like a warehouse filled with porcelain toilets constantly being flushed--was gone. Robot missed the toilet sound that was the human race." He means this in the nicest way possible.

Inquisitive robots can help make us better teachers

To be more effective, robots need a more robust model of the world that includes the simple variations in terminology or knowledge that we take for granted. Consider the fact that something called a "red dish" or a "burgundy bowl" may in fact be the same object, or that "clean up this room" means different things to different people.To help train robots to pick up on those nuances, Chernova turned to the model of microtask management, which uses the Internet to enable short-term business tasks—transcribing audio files or categorizing a.pany's inventory, for example—Robot Frogs Trick Females in 'Bizarre' Example of Evolution to be done by workers around the world."If it's not being used, we want to have the robot say, 'I'm free right now. I want to post a job on CrowdFlower,'" said Chernova, referring to a.pany that employs a million microtask workers in 90 nations.

"'I need someone to teach me what these objects in my world are.' Hopefully a Crowdflower worker will take the job and spend five minutes labeling things in the environment for the robot, or teaching it in some other way."Recruiting people can be a challenging and inefficient project," she added. "So we like having the robot be in charge of it.""Teaching Robots to Anticipate Human Actions."To truly jumpstart their learning, robots need to ask more.plex questions, such as, "Am I doing this correctly?"Maya Cakmak, a post-doctoral student who is spending time at Willow Garage, said it's important for robots to ask questions because people aren't all that good at training them via demonstration.Humans generally don't like repeating tasks, can't perform those tasks the exact same way every time, and are disinclined to demonstrate different methods a robot might use to.plete the same task.

Inquisitive robots can help make us better teachers. Cakmak has performed studies that have helped to prove that—especially when robot programmers are non-experts.In 2012, Cakmak led a team that had volunteers guide robots through assembly tasks to construct a toy house by.bining a square block foundation with a triangular top. With passive learning, only one person in four showed the robot enough examples that it could understand how to.plete the task on its own.But when the robot asked questions about how to assemble the house, volunteers answered them—and the robot success rate soared to 100 percent. The robots processed the feedback into new actions and into mathematical functions that they could replicate later.

Robot Frogs Trick Females in 'Bizarre' Example of Evolution

Ryan.pared the phenomenon to what's called a "continuity illusion" in humans. If loud enough white noise is played in between a pair of beeps, humans will begin to perceive the beeps as a continuous tone. It's not fully understood why this happens, but it's probably a byproduct of our brains' useful ability to filter out background noise.Túngara frogs are challenged by an auditory world similar to what confronts humans in noisy environments what's called the "cocktail party problem" by cognitive scientists. At breeding choruses there is a lot of noise and cross talk, with sounds and images of several males reaching the female at different times. The females need to extract meaningful information from all of that. Ryan said it's plausible the neural mechanisms that enable them to correctly parse these stimuli in nature are being hijacked by this artificial scenario.

"We need to be able to hook things together perceptually in unexpected ways to extract meaningful stimuli from a lot of noise," said Ryan. "So what we think is happening here is that the vocal sac, the visual cue, is working kind of like the white noise, giving perceptual continuity between these two sounds, binding the temporally displaced whine and chuck together."Ryan said that although the frogs' aggressive search for meaning leaves them open to being tricked by clever researchers, it could also enable more flexibility in.plex situations. He believes it may have a much longer-term evolutionary advantage as well.

"It's an example of how.plex traits could emerge from simpler ones," he said. "In this case there's no obvious advantage to these two behaviors being hooked together in this way, but think of how you can take a muscle and move its insertion on the bone and have a great influence on speed. You didn't get the evolution for these bones and muscles all at the same time, but just by making a change or adding a muscle, now you change the functional coupling. You end up with something really.plex, but it evolved in a really simple way. I think in this case we may be seeing an example of how that could happen."

Meet e-David, the Painting Robot That is More Artistic Than You Are

Anything you can do, a robot can do better. OK, that's probably not quite true yet, as Honda's Asimo robot demonstrated recently, but it's really getting there. Take e-David, for example. This robotic painter developed by the University of Konstanz in Germany takes photographs, then uses its software to develop a unique set of brush strokes to make a one-of-a-kind painting of its subject. For everyone who got a fine arts degree thinking that they'd be impervious to replacement by robots, this could not be worse news.e-David, which even goes so far as to sign its work — and with a creepy reverse-written signature, no less —We wonder who invented summer anyhow. creates its mechanical masterpieces using five different brushes and a palette of 24 paint colors.

Like many human painters, e-David also keeps one eye always on its canvas. That makes it able to change its painting style on the fly, making adjustments to future brush strokes by observing the results of those it has already made. The results — a series of gorgeous paintings in monochrome and watercolors — speak for themselves.Though it may seem counter-intuitive, the University of Konstanz team didn't develop e-David to make a better robotic painter. Instead, they built the robot painter to learn more about the techniques human artists use, hoping to boil painting techniques down to their basics by crafting algorithms that can mimic them. According to the project profile:Our hypothesis is that painting – at least the technical part of painting – can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content – regardless if it is a representational painting or not.

What do you all think? Is a robot painter always going to be just going through the motions? Or are we posing the wrong question when we look at a painting and ask "Yeah, but where's the heart?"The 3rd annual Robot Film Festival is.ing to San Francisco this weekend and Boing Boing is proud to be a media sponsor! This Saturday and Sunday (July 20-21),.e explore the relationship between humans and robots through a series of film showings, live performances, and a day-long film workshop.

We wonder who invented summer anyhow.

The group represents a who's-who of the refining industry, including oil majors ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Valero, Tesoro and Phillips 66.In case their legal challenge fails, Drevna said, the oil companies are actively pursuing "legislative" solutions to the issue in Congress.The ethanol lobby said oil companies are bluffing. "What it comes down to is we're [cutting] into their market share," said Michael Frohlich, spokesperson for Growth Energy, the ethanol group that made E15 possible by petitioning the EPA to approve its sale.Profits, more than vehicle safety or performance, are the main reason why refiners are "fighting tooth and nail" to get rid of E15, Frohlich claimed. If they wanted to, they could easily blend more ethanol into the gasoline supply, he said.

The included dust hose adapter accepts standard 2-1/4" outside diameter hose on both ends and is secured to the main stem at the desired height with a threaded knob. The top of the stem is curled into a specially designed pigtail-shaped loop which holds power cords up while still allowing free travel in either direction through the loop.Celebrating its 59th year as a family-run business, Rockler Woodworking and Hardware is the nation's premier supplier of specialty hardware, tools, lumber and other high quality woodworking products. Rockler has 29 retail locations in AZ, CA, CO, GA, IL, IN, MA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NH, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, WA, and WI – plus 60 independent reseller locations nationwide, as well as extensive catalog and internet operations.

A few days ago as I walked through my neighborhood I noticed a smell — kind of like a dead skunk having fallen into a heavily-used toilet kind of aroma.Next on my walk came the mosquito bites. Not biblical plague kind of stuff, but itchy nonetheless.When my walk ended, a friend asked me if I had been swimming. Guess my shirt was a tad wet with sweat.Summer means a lot of things to adults — baseball and, yes, the Cubs are still awful, thanks for reminding me, barbecues I can burn anything mother nature can throw at me, and yard mowing source of much of my summer sweat.But for kids summer means but one thing — no school.Getting up late. Wearing shorts all of the time. Being barefoot.They are all part of the great children award for having persevered through another year of school.Sometimes summer leaves us parent types at our wit's end.We wonder who invented summer anyhow.

Visa Inks Deal with mPOS Providers

The deal will allow iZettle, SumUp and Swiff to access Visa's best practices, APIs (Application Program Interfaces) and SDKs (Software Design Kits). These would include tools, direct connection to Visa, value-added services and Visa Ready symbol.As per the agreement the mPOS providers can access reference applications and tools to facilitate the ongoing development of magnetic stripe, EMV-chip (contact and contactless), and mobile acceptance solutions. To simplify the processing of the EMV-chip transactions, they will be connected to Visa in some countries with the help of Visa POS Solutions platform or payment gateways like CyberSource and Authorize.Net.

In addition, the companies might also be exposed to Visa's value-added services, like instant redemption of special offers at the point-of sale. Additionally, on approval by Visa, iZettle, SumUp and Swiff will be permitted to use the Visa Ready symbol to endorse their devices. Anywhere Commerce and Miura Systems are already permitted to use the symbol to market their Visa approved devices.Mobile acceptance technology is judged best for the electronic mode of payment to all types of merchants, consumers and financial institutions. Through the use of mPOS technology, merchants who were out of the purview of accepting card payments will now be exposed to the electronic payment market. It will also benefit consumers through the convenience of mobile checkout.

Micro and small merchants have responded to this mPOS acceptance solution vastly in recent years, which has helped the transition of payments to electronic mode. This is evident from the burgeoning usage of the number of mPOS terminals from 2011 to 2012. mPOS terminals increased 111% year over year to 9.5 million in 2012 and is anticipated to reach as high as 38 million by 2017.Despite growing acceptance of mPOS payment mode, nearly 19 million or 70% of the total number of merchants in the United States are yet to accept the electronic payment methods. When transactions at these merchants are summed up it would translate to a potential yearly migration of more than $1.1 trillion from paper to electronic mode. So, this provides a huge scope for Visa to tap the prospective clients to enhance its business.In the fiscal second quarter 2013, Visa's revenues increased 14.7% year over year to approximately $3 billion. We expect the deal to help the company attain its goal of strengthening the customer base and thereby bolster revenues further.

Cleaning up Earth's outer space

There is a lot of stuff floating around in space that we put there and simply forgot about.There are old satellites that stopped working, bits of the rockets that put them there and even the odd astronaut's leave-behind.That's potentially catastrophic news for our continued presence in space. It's bad enough that today's satellites risk running into something up there, but if we aren't careful, the problem will spiral out of control and leave orbit too hazardous for even the hardiest spacecraft.In space even the tiniest particles can cause a lot of damage. The laws of physics are the same, but the speeds involved are far outside our everyday experience.This means things we would brush off on Earth can become terrible threats in orbit – a speck of space dust can damage a spacecraft and put astronauts' lives at risk.

A piece of debris no bigger than a centimetre can destroy a spacecraft. That's because of the high relative speeds that objects in orbit can attain.It takes energy to deform and shatter metal and plastic, so the damage caused when two objects collide is in proportion to their energy of motion.A moving car is dangerous because it is heavy. A speeding bullet is dangerous because it is fast. In space, if you hit another object, it is likely to be travelling much faster than a bullet from a gun, and many of those objects are much heavier than bullets.Space debris occurs naturally thanks to fragments of asteroids, comets and other heavenly bodies. But by adding our own debris to the mix, we don't just increase the odds of hitting something, but risk a much greater problem known as the Kessler syndrome.

At some point, the debris becomes so dense that a chain reaction of collisions begins. Big objects are broken into lots of smaller ones, which in turn go on to pulverise other big objects and so on. Now, instead of a few thousand large bits of debris that can be easily tracked, you have a vast, unpredictable cloud of little bits surrounding the planet.Some experts worry that the Kessler syndrome is just around the corner. Others think it may have already started.The fear of orbit becoming so debris-ridden it becomes too dangerous, has led to proposals to clean things up, including sending up specially designed robots to grab on to them and drag them back into the atmosphere to burn up. It's easier to get the big ones now, while they are intact, rather than trying to mop up all the pieces later if the Kessler syndrome gets to them.