Top Tech #1: AI and Robots

Posted February 11th, 2015 @ 5:45pm

Innovative, Interesting, or Important
There’s plenty of technology news every day — too much.
The mission here is to highlight only the developments that have long-termimplication, promise, or portent. Instead of fleeting news of updated software,slightly improved gadgets, or a start-up’s funding, I’ll spotlight innovations that should still be important a year from now.

This weeks Top Trend: Robots and AI

Sometimes the trends leap out and identify themselves, and in preparing this edition of the Top Tech digest, there were an overwhelming number of news items about robots and artificial intelligence.
Whether you think these two trends represent a boon or a boondoggle (or a potential big boom) there’s no question the pace of innovation here is accelerating rapidly.

Headlines in this edition:
1. AI: Threat or Menace?
2. Not the Terminator: the Extinguisher
3. Real-looking robot receptionists
4. IBM’s AI employed in android
5. Britain’s ’Bot behind the wheel
6. Old interplanetary robot found
7. DARPA robots go wireless for $3.5 million
8. Robot scientist develops drugs
9. Robot dogs form packs
10. Moving cameras talk to each other
11. Disney Beachbot draws pictures in the sand
12. Skydio’s smarter quadcopters see where they are going
13. AI Revolution: Road to Super intelligence
14. Shooting a laser-guided rifle made me feel like a robot

AI: Threat or Menace?

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are already known for their misgivings about the potential problems posed by artificial intelligence — but recently they were joined by hundreds of other leading scientists in an open letter warning about the impending rise of AI.

i09 reports the open letter was put together by the Future of Life Institute, a group mobilized by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, MIT’s Max Tegmark, Harvard’s Viktoriya Krakovna, Boston University’s Meia Chita-Tegmark, and UC Santa Cruz professor Anthony Aguirre. “The signatories of the open letter are not calling for a ban on AI research and development. Rather, they’re calling for responsible oversight to ensure that it works with humanity’s best interests in mind,” the news site adds.
The open letter notes “there is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.“
Tesla and Space X founder Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute for its research program.
The full letter is here.
[A no-prize to whoever gets the headline.]

Not the Terminator: the Extinguisher

This walking robot will fight fires aboard ships.
Sponsored by The Office of Naval Research, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot is now undergoing testing.
SAFFiR “is a bipedal humanoid robot being developed to assist sailors with damage control and inspection operations aboard naval vessels,” a Navy press release reports. It uses thermal imaging to identify overheated equipment, and a hose to extinguish a small fire in a series of experiments aboard a decommissioned Navy vessel.
The two-legged humanoid robot was developed by researchers at Virginia Tech. SAFFiR stands 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 143 pounds. “The unique mechanism design on the robot equips it with super-human range of motion to maneuver in complex spaces,” the Navy adds. Its sensors include infrared stereovision, and a rotating laser for light detection and ranging (LIDAR), which “enables the humanoid to see through dense smoke.”

Real-looking robot receptionists

Checking in? A robot may be waiting for you at reception.
The new Henn-na Hotel in Japan will be staffed with robots at the front desk. “The hotel will feature three "actroids” (robots with strong human likeness) that will act as receptionists,” CNN reports. “They’ll be able to engage in intelligent conversations with human guests.”
Here is the website for Henn-na, which opens in July with the motto of “A commitment for evolution.”

IBM’s AI employed in robot

IBM’s Watson is the most widely known AI out there — and now its smarts will be housed in the Pepper robot made by the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank.
Pepper already has algorithms that read emotions from people’s faces and voices, Popular Science reports. “Watson is designed to learn from example, to understand people’s questions and requests, and to read the Internet and other databases to find answers.” IBM is licensing the tech for Watson-driven apps for banking, insurance, health care, and automotive — and the Pepper “cute personal robot” SoftBank makes.
PopSci previously posted here on Pepper (and many other ’bots).

Britain’s ’Bot behind the wheel

While Google is testing it driverless cars in the U.S., the UK government is fast-tracking its own automated automobiles.
The British Department for Transportreports the UK “is uniquely positioned to develop driverless car technology… The industry has been given the green light for testing on public roads.” It cites the “tremendous potential for reducing accidents and making traffic flow more smoothly.”
A prototype driverless pod will soon be tested in public areas: the Lutz can seat two people and scoot around for 40 miles, or roughly six hours on a single charge, Engadget reports. It packs twin cameras and LIDAR sensors on the front, two cameras and a single LIDAR on the back, and two cameras on each side “which combine to give the vehicle a detailed 360-degree picture of its surroundings.” It’s made by Transport Systems Catapult and the RDM Group.

Old interplanetary robot found

Speaking of British bots: Let’s not forget that we’ve been sending robots out to space for years — and one lost little ’droid* have apparently been found.
The Beagle2 probe was sighted on Mars, NASA reports. The lander was built by the United Kingdom, and thought lost since its 2003 touchdown on Mars. It was found in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing “Beagle 2 partially deployed on the surface of the planet, ending the mystery of what happened to the mission more than a decade ago,” NASA says. “They show that the lander survived its Dec. 25, 2003 touchdown enough to at least partially deploy its solar arrays.”
The BBC has more on the story here.
(*Even if it wasn’t what we were looking for.)

DARPA robots go wireless for $3.5 million

Developers seeking $3.5 million in prizes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are adding wireless communications to their robots.
DARPA says its Robotics Challenge spurs “development of human-supervised robot technology for disaster response.” Among the latest “additional hurdles teams will face: Robots will have to operate completely without wires — they may not be connected to power cords, fall arrestors, or wired communications tethers. Teams will have to communicate with their robots over a secure wireless network.”
What’s worse: “DARPA will intentionally degrade communications between the robots and human operators working at a distance. The idea is to replicate the conditions these robots would face going into a disaster zone. Spotty communication will force the robots to make some progress on their own during communications blackouts.”
Other upgrades to the base Atlas robot include the power supply with a variable-pressure pump, repositioned shoulders, electrically actuated lower arms, and three onboard computers for perception and task planning.
There’s more information here.
You can see a video here.

Robot scientist develops drugs

An artificially-intelligent ‘robot scientist’ could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. “The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as “Eve” discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria,” reports the University of Cambridge.
The A.I. “reduces the costs, uncertainty, and time involved in drug screening, and has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people worldwide,” the report adds. “Robot scientists …can automatically develop and test hypotheses to explain observations, run experiments using laboratory robotics, interpret the results to amend their hypotheses, and then repeat the cycle, automating high-throughput hypothesis-led research.”
In 2009, Adam, a robot scientist developed by researchers at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge, became the first machine to independently discover new scientific knowledge. The same team has now developed Eve, based at the University of Manchester, whose purpose is to speed up the drug discovery process and make it more economical.

Robot dogs form packs

I grew up with car salesman Cal Worthington’s TV pitches that always featured varying species as his “dog Spot.” He never featured a robot however, and now Boston Dynamics has named its four-legged 160-pound device “Spot” — and this robot even evidences pack-like behavior, Wired reports.
“A video shows Spot gallivanting with a weird equestrian hop through office corridors, up concrete stairs, and along rocky hills with little trouble. And when a pair of Spots begin trekking up a hill, Spot Number One starts repeatedly colliding into Spot Number Two—and neither loses balance. After a few seconds and a bit of subtle push-and-shove, they straighten out and walk in parallel again, and then turn together once they reach the top of the hill… This is getting creepy, guys,” Wired says. “It looks like these robots are exhibiting the same swarm-like behavior that we see in animals.”
Boston Dynamics is owned by Google.
The full story is here.

Moving cameras talk to each other

To track and identify pedestrians, a proposed new surveillance system will connect its cameras.
Technology developed at the University of Washington “distinguishes among people by giving each person a unique color and number, then tracks them as they walk,” the school reports. The algorithm “trains the networked cameras to learn one another’s differences. The cameras first identify a person in a video frame, then follow that same person across multiple camera views.”
The problem with tracking a human across cameras of non-overlapping fields of view is that a person’s appearance can vary dramatically in each video because of different perspectives, angles and color hues produced by different cameras, the report notes. “The researchers overcame this by building a link between the cameras. Cameras first record for a couple of minutes to gather training data, systematically calculating the differences in color, texture and angle between a pair of cameras for a number of people who walk into the frames in a fully unsupervised manner without human intervention. After this calibration period, an algorithm automatically applies those differences between cameras and can pick out the same people across multiple frames, effectively tracking them without needing to see their faces.”
Here is the full story.
There’s a demonstration video here.

Disney Beachbot draws pictures in the sand

Disney Research has built a robot that etches massive pictures onto a beach.
The Beachbot autonomously rakes the sand to recreate an image file it is provided with. It’s large, soft wheels let it move about without marring what it’s drawn.
The mobile robot “can turn an ordinary beach into an artist’s canvas,” Disney says.
There’s a video demonstration here.
TechCrunch has more on the story here.

Skydio’s smarter quadcopters see where they are going — funded $3 million

Start-up Skydio is making flying cameras that are almost impossible to crash — and the proof of concept has won them $3 million seed funding.
“Drones are poised to have a transformative impact on how we see our world,” the new firm says. “They’ll enable us to film the best moments of our lives with professional quality cinematography — and they’ll also change the way businesses think about monitoring their operations and infrastructure. This grand vision is starting to come into focus, but existing products are blind to the world around them. As a consequence, drones must fly high above the nearest structures or receive the constant attention of an expert operator. “Flyaways” and crashes abound. These problems must be solved for the industry to move forward.”
Skydio says it will offer “safe and intuitive” drones “for a much broader audience and a much broader set of applications.” Their flying camera will be “aware of its surroundings” and so be “far easier to control, safer to operate, and more capable.”
How will it work? By using it’s camera not just to record images, but to ‘see’ where it’s at. “Almost all the information a drone needs to be good at its job can be found in onboard video data; the challenge is extracting that information and making it useful for the task at hand. That challenge, and the incredible capabilities that are unlocked, are our focus.”
Here’s a cool video demonstration.
And TechCrunch has more on the company here.

AI Revolution: Road to Super intelligence

This has been so widely linked — even by Elon Musk — that you’ve probably already read it, but we must note here the “Wait But Why” overview of artificial intelligence’s evolution.
It makes two primary points:
1. Technology advances exponentially. What seemed impossible a few years back is now commonplace, and what seems impossible now might actually occur very soon.
2. Once one is created, an AI can evolve from ‘almost-as-intelligent-as-us’ to ‘super-intelligent’ almost overnight — and we can no more comprehend the capabilities of a super-intelligence than a monkey could design and build a skyscraper.
“AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future,” the author concludes.
Here is part one.

Shooting a laser-guided rifle made me feel like a robot

And the last item in our round-up of robots and AIs: a writer shooting a laser-guided rifle from Tracking Point reports it made him “feel like a robot… cold and emotionless.”
The piece is worth checking out not only as it highlights how we all might feel when we are “augmented” with electronics and algorithms — but also for how it shows the type of weaponry robotic war-machines will carry. Hint: robots won’t miss.
The full story is here.