Robotics

A car that drives itself has long been the stuff of science fiction.

But at Stanford University, you can find one going as fast as 40 mph on a dirt road in a sleepy part of the campus, and it goes by the name "Stanley."

"In the future, cars will drive themselves, no question," said Sebastian Thrun, a German-born computer scientist who is director of Stanford's artificial-intelligence laboratory and the man responsible for Stanley. As Thrun, 38, talked about the car last week, he was like a giddy schoolkid, particularly when he was hitching a ride with his robot car.
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What's new:
Like engineers at universities all over the country, a Stanford University team is still perfecting its driverless car in hopes of winning the Defense Advanced Research Projects' upcoming Grand Challenge, an unmanned race through the desert.

Bottom line:
"Stanley" can go as fast as 40 miles per hour, and in desert tests, it's managed to navigate for 25 miles before running into trouble. But this year's Grand Challenge involves a 175-mile course, so clearly the vehicle has a ways to go.

By the light of flashlights and a crescent moon, the three-member crew catapults a 300-pound pilotless airplane into the sky.

Minutes later, other U.S. soldiers behind a computer screen inside a shed monitor video images from the plane, known as a Shadow, as it loiters over a traffic circle frequently attacked by insurgent bombs.

"We fill some of the gaps in the intelligence field. We put one of these in harm's way instead of a soldier. It's all about saving lives," says Sgt. Francisco Huereque, who is in charge of the night's launch.

Unmanned aerial vehicles and other so-called "stand-off" weapons, whether currently used or in secret testing, belong to a developing high-tech arsenal that the U.S. military says will help minimize casualties as it battles insurgents.

A control system based on chaos has made a simulated, multi-legged robot walk successfully. The researchers behind the feat say it may have brought us closer to understanding how people and animals learn to move.

Standard robots control their leg motion either through complex computer programs or by using so-called genetic algorithms to “evolve” a successful walking strategy. Both these options are time-consuming and require a lot of computer power.

Roboticists Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Shinsuke Suzuki wondered whether chaotic systems might also generate efficient walking behaviour. Chaotic systems behave in a way that means that small effects are amplified so rapidly that the systems’ behaviour becomes impossible to predict more than a short time ahead. Such chaotic systems are behind a number of phenomena, including the weather and the performance of financial markets.

The pesky cockroach may be earning more respect soon. As this ScienCentral News video reports, the creepy critters are inspiring some new robots that could end up helping to save lives.

Cockroaches, perhaps the most unpopular of all unwelcome insect houseguests, have probably been around for 280 million years, and they'll probably still be around after we're gone. These speedy, hearty critters are almost indestructible—they can even live for a whole week without their heads.

Roaches are a source of disgust for most of us. But Mark Cutkosky, mechanical engineer and co-director of the Center for Design Research at Stanford University is proving that one man's frustration is another man's inspiration.

Cutkosky and his research group, along with Robert Full, biomechanics professor and director of the Poly-PEDAL lab, and his team at the University of California at Berkeley, designed the Sprawl family of legged robots based on the way roaches move (AKA "bio-inspired").

Sure, they're only machines. But the more they interact with us humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes.

Is your Roomba a boy or a girl?

The Roomba, of course, is that clever little house-cleaning robot. I reviewed Roomba in October 2002, then bought my own a few months later. Since then it’s been happily sweeping my living room and dining room every week or so. It also terrifies my cats and my three-year-old twin boys. All well and good—but what’s the Roomba’s gender?

“It’s a girl,” says my wife. “It’s round. It’s close to the floor. It ends with an ‘a’. I always think of it as a ‘wom-ba.’”

But if the Roomba is a girl, then Asimo is definitely a boy. Developed by Honda Motor, Asimo is a humanoid robot that walks around like a short astronaut in a white space suit. Four-foot tall Asimo is the latest in a long line of the company’s bipedal robots. These days Asimo spends his time as Honda’s goodwill ambassador to the world’s science museums, auto shows, and other venues. Last month he was spotted in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Asimo doesn’t look especially boy-like—there’s no slingshot in his back pocket, there’s no telltale bulge under his belt, and there’s no hint of facial hair. In fact, you can’t even see his face: the robot’s head is covered with a visor that has just two big holes for its video-camera eyes. But Honda repeatedly refers to the robot with the pronoun “he” on the Asimo website.

Indeed, Honda has taken great pains to make its walking robots more lifelike, and part of that realism appears to include giving the robot a friendly sounding name (the previous generation was called simply “P3”). The company’s earliest attempts at walkers were really nothing more than a pair of legs and feet with a big box on top of them. But over the years the robot forms have become decidedly more human—and more male.

Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that’s gendered than one that’s asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots’ designers to express their own playfulness and creativity.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters.