Jeremy Eades @ 16-04-2008
Is this a great idea for engineering, or a way to make our toasters self-aware and kill us all?
Researchers want to build in to bridges, airplanes, and other large structures a type of nervous system that, among other things, would detect any defects such as cracks or rust, and relay that to a central computer that could tell engineers and repair workers what needed to be fixed. This Structural Health Monitoring (SMH) system would use ultrasound waves travelling through really teeny, tiny fibers embedded into the material to detect any potential dangers. After the recent airline maintenance scandal in the US, this could really be useful.
(Note: I also came across this book from a conference in Tokyo in 2003 on the same topic for you eggheads who really want to get into this. Forgive me if I don’t read all 1300 pages of engineering articles)
(via Scitechdaily) (image from massdistraction)
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Tomas Martin @ 28-03-2008
With people starting to talk about the rights of robots, I thought it’d be a good time to link to the fun site ‘Let’s Make Robots’, which has a pretty comprehensive set of blog entries and guides to building your own cybertronic friend. Start at the post advising you the best way to build your own robot and work your way through some of the variety of constructions made by the team.
Of course, if you’re not in the mood for a bit of android DIY, there’s plenty of other places you can watch other people’s creations. Try the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, or the hovering Drone soon to be working for Miami Police . Alternatively, if you don’t care about robot rights and just want to watch them take each other apart, try some of the Robot Wars sites like Roaming Robots or the homesite of Tornado, the winner of the 6th UK wars. There’s even recent highlights from Japan’s ROBO-ONE, which pits bipedal robots against each other in the ring. After all, one of the Robot Wars judges thinks that we’ll be watching real battles of robots ‘within ten years’. A British group is already campaigning against autonomous robots capable of killing humans.
[picture via Let's Make Robots of a robot by Fredrik Andersson]
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Jeremy Eades @ 20-11-2007
Back in college, my computer science professor told us that AI was still not very good, only about the level of a fungus. Well, it seems that we’ve come a long way, all the way to cockroach level. Researchers in Brussels have developed a robot cockroach that can mimic the behavior of their real life brethren, though they look like little, white boxes. Evidently, behaving like a cockroach doesn’t make you a cockroach, so the robots were covered with cockroach pheremones. After this, the robots were able to influence the roach clan, convincing them to come out of the darkness and nest in bright areas. It’s really quite cool. Next up, they’re jumping straight to robot chickens, I guess.
(via DailyTech) (image from Neil_T)
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Is this a great idea for engineering, or a way to make our toasters self-aware and kill us all?