Designing robots to help in a disaster View the video Dennis Hong first spied Japan’s ruined nuclear power plant from a bus wrapped in plastic. A hefty layer of protection guarded the seats, floors and handles from radioactive dust. More than three years earlier, after an earthquake and tsunamis battered Japan’s eastern coast, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station blew, blasting radiation into the sea and sky. “It’s like a disaster site frozen in time,” Hong says. Workers toiled day and night to save the plant, but they had to get out as radiation levels rose. Ideally, robots could take over for human crews. Hong, a UCLA roboticist, is one of several engineers racing to make robots that can come to the rescue in disasters. Engineers have built impressive-looking humanlike bots that can play trumpet and even compete against each other in slow-moving soccer games. So DARPA kicked off a contest to create robots that someday could do the job. National Robotics Engineering Center/Carnegie Mellon University On the scene D.
Romeo La carrera contra la máquina | de Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee Contenido (pdf) ¿Por qué nuestra sociedad es cada vez más desigual? ¿Por qué la proporción de gente con trabajo está cayendo tan rápidamente? ¿Por qué las rentas medias han dejado de crecer? Según una explicación frecuente, la causa fundamental de estos hechos es el menor número de ideas nuevas y de inventos. En La carrera contra la máquina, los investigadores del MIT Erik Brynjolfsson y Andrew McAfee ofrecen una explicación muy diferente. Algunas de estas consecuencias son positivas, como el aumento de productividad, la reducción de precios y el crecimiento de la riqueza en general. El argumento del libro es que las perspectivas de empleo son negras para mucha gente, no porque el progreso tecnológico se haya estancado sino porque los hombres, y las instituciones, no corren lo bastante. «En la investigación en ciencias sociales, necesitamos desesperadamente que se hagan, y se respondan, las preguntas más importantes.
Scientific Blogging: programmable sheet self-folds into a boat- and into a plane-shape. Sign In | Support | Create Your Own Channel programmable sheet self-folds into a boat- and into a plane-shape. About this Video Submitted By: Editor on June 28, 2010 About the Video: courtesy of Robert Wood, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Daniela Rus, MIT.Movie: A programmable sheet self-folds into a boat- and into a plane-shape. Hosted At Magnify | 426 views Rate this Video Magnify it! This video hasn't been rated yet. Who should see this video? Comments (0) Add your comment Tags Popular: None [Sign In To Tag] Your tags: Report a Problem What type of problem are you reporting? Please enter your email address: (required) Enter a description of the problem: (required) Embed Email Share this Video Link
Loom.ai La gran paradoja de nuestra era: la tecnología destruye empleo y fomenta la desigualdad elEconomista.es El lado oscuro de la innovación: elimina la necesidad de humanosEl crecimiento económico ya no genera un incremento de empleoLa tecnología va a cambiar cada profesión de formas apenas vistas Erik Brynjolfsson y su compañero Andrew McAfee llevan el último año y medio argumentando que los grandes avances tecnológicos son los responsables del bajo crecimiento de empleo de los últimos 10-15 años. De corroborarse su hipótesis, tanto la teoría económica como las políticas gubernamentales deberán ser repensadas. Así destruye empleo la tecnología, según el MIT Technology Review. El futuro, de acuerdo con estos académicos, se presenta negro para muchos trabajadores de cuello blanco. En algunos sectores, la entrada de robots, nuevo software o máquinas que sustituyen a personas es más que evidente desde hace muchos años. La clave de este fenómeno está en la productividad, uno de los indicadores favoritos de los economistas a la hora de medir el crecimiento y la creación de riqueza.
Innovator Under 35: Pieter Abbeel, 33 Instead of programming robots to handle each step of a new job, Pieter Abbeel, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, has created robots that can observe humans demonstrating a task and then mimic them, or learn from pictures how to handle a piece of flexible material they've never seen before. His robots have learned to perform flying acrobatics, tie surgical sutures, and neatly sort socks. Abbeel's key innovation was to program the robots so that they can reliably infer the underlying intent of their instructors, filtering out the "noise"—irrelevant variations, or even slight mistakes, in the instructors' demonstrations. Each robot is usually shown around 10 demonstrations before it can extract general rules of behavior.
Conversations on AI Morgan Quigley | Innovators Under 35 Three decades ago, the availability of many versions of DOS helped spark the boom in personal computers. Today, Robot Operating System, or ROS, is poised to do the same for robots. Morgan Quigley programmed the first iteration of what grew into ROS as a graduate student in 2006, and today his open-source code is redefining the practical limits of robotics. Since version 1.0 was released in 2010, ROS has become the de facto standard in robotics software. 159,000 Number of industrial robots sold in 2012 To visit Quigley’s office at the Open Source Robotics Foundation in Mountain View, California, the organization he cofounded last summer to steward ROS, is to step into a future of robotics where hardware is cheap, and it’s quick and easy to snap together preëxisting pieces to create new machines. Unlike more conventional robotic technology, Quigley’s four-fingered hand is not controlled by a central processor. Despite its name, ROS isn’t really an operating system. —Ted Greenwald
JPL Robotics superfast rock-paper-scissors robot wins every game it plays nov 05, 2013 superfast rock-paper-scissors robot wins every game it plays superfast rock-paper-scissors robot wins every game it playsall images courtesy of ishikawa oku laboratory take a look at the video below to see the mechanical hand win every game of rock-paper-scissors it plays against its human opponent: janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate: 2nd version video courtesy of ishikawa oku laboratory diagram showing how the high-speed vision recognizes the shape of the human hand the evolution of the janken rock-paper-scissors robot h/t nina azzarello I designboom