NASA Funds Advanced Robotics Projects

NASA Funds 8 Advanced Robotics Projects - Government - Information Management - Informationweek: NASA is investing $2.7 million to kick off eight advanced robotics projects aimed at improving robot technology as part of its long-term goal of putting a human on Mars. The projects, part of the White House's National Robotics Initiative, are tied to NASA's plans for an asteroid mission in 2025 and human exploration of Mars around 2035. The National Science Foundation managed the solicitation for the project proposals, each of which will receive between $150,000 and $1 million in funding.

Mapping the uncanny valley

Robots and psychology: Mapping the uncanny valley | The Economist: Dr Gray and Dr Wegner speculated that experience in particular was playing a crucial role in generating the uncanny-valley effect. They theorised that adding human-like eyes and facial expressions to robots conveys emotion where viewers do not expect emotion to be present. The resulting clash of expectations, they thought, might be where the unease was coming from.

Robots Threaten Jobs

Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.

From self-service checkout lines at the supermarket to industrial robots armed with saws and taught to carve up animal carcasses in slaughter-houses, these ever-more-intelligent machines are now not just assisting workers but actually kicking them out of their jobs.

Automation isn’t just affecting factory workers, either. Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers.

Source: The Daily Beast

Robot talk

Robots are creating their own language as part of a project involving the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. Researchers have taught two robots how to speak, but have not given them a specific language. Instead, the robots are making up words for each new place they visit and thing they see.

Source: Physorg.com via ACM Tech News

Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse

Erico Guizzo, in "IEEE Spectrum", July 2008
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul08/6380

This article presents Kiva Systems' innovative warehouse operation technology. The following picture (from the company's web site) gives you a notion of how their automatic warehouse works: multiple robots fetching racks of products and navigating using barcodes.

You can also see the following videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdmtya8emMw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsMdN7HMuA

I have one suggestion to Kiva: why not create a miniature toy set for their technology? It would make any robot fan go wild with it... myself included :-)