OK, this isn’t actually new technology–it’s been around for years, just not in this part of the world –but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and it struck me as an interesting example of how advanced technology seeps into everything while you’re not looking. (Via CBC News.)
A Saskatchewan dairy farm is using high-tech robotics and a computer program to milk the cows while the farmers sleep…
Each cow in the herd wears a chip that communicates with a central computer.
The system begins with a cow, feeling the urge to be milked or fed, moving through a series of gates to a stall where the animal knows it will be tended to. The computer system knows if Bessie is due for a milking or ready for more feed based on the history it has stored for each animal.
Sensors pick up the cow’s chip to provide location information, allowing the computer to open the appropriate gates to guide the animal along to either a feeding station or the milking system.
Inside the milking stall, a robot arm takes over. It uses laser beams to check udders and direct a fine spray to wash and disinfect teats. Then it attaches hoses and starts milking…
Next thing you know the cows will be blogging. (By the way, CBC’s headline is pretty funny: “The farmer in the DELL® uses a computer to milk the herd.”)
Yohanan and others believe that haptics are a faster route to creating an emotional response … I wonder if the guys at Ai Robotics have included haptics in their soon-to-be-launched “Perfect Woman” robots?
No, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.
He’s interested in swarm robots (which we’ve mentionedhere on Futurismicbefore, sometimes in a military context), and believes that the future of robotic development is modular, because it allows researchers to design and develop complex robots quickly and cheaply.
Chris Kiick of Hack-a-Day went to see a demonstration of McLurkin’s swarm robots, of which I am quite jealous. Apparently McLurkin has over a hundred of these things, though he only takes about a dozen out for shows to do tricks like “circle-the-wagons” and physical bubble-sorts. Even so, my inner geek suspects it’d still whip the hell out of a night at the comedy club.
The robot has a certain ‘AT-AT’ quality, doesn’t it? It’s amazing how creepily lifelike its movements are. If you had to trek across the desert or Antarctic, would you like a ‘Big Dog’ around carrying your gear?
“I’ve got no problems with enslaving machines — even intelligent machines, even intelligent, conscious machines — because as Jeremy Bentham said, the ethical question is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”* You can’t suffer if you can’t feel pain or anxiety; you can’t be tortured if your own existence is irrelevant to you.
You cannot be thwarted if you have no dreams — and it takes more than a big synapse count to give you any of those things. It takes some process, like natural selection, to wire those synapses into a particular configuration that says not I think therefore I am, but I am and I want to stay that way. We’re the ones building the damn things, after all. Just make sure that we don’t wire them up that way, and we should be able to use and abuse with a clear conscience.”
How about you - are you looking forward to running your Roomba ragged, or planning to kennel your Aibo when you go on holiday? [Image by Plutor]
Usually, when we hear about some new technological prototype that’s seemingly stepped off of the page of a science fiction story, it’s the military that always seems to get first dibs on the new toys.
The RoboSwift is a remote controlled micro airplane with wings that can reconfigure in flight, mimicking the flight characteristics of swifts. There are four “feathers” on each wing that can fold over one another to increase or decrease lift and speed, and a propellor that can turn off and fold against the fuselage for better gliding performance. Cameras in the nose allow the operator to know what the plane’s doing and where it’s going.
A Japanese man who has been paralysed from the neck down for two decades has fulfilled his dream of ascending the Breithorn mountain in Switzerland - by being carried on the back of his buddy, who was kitted out with a HAL ‘robot-suit’ exoskeleton that increases the strength of its wearer by up to 80%. The HAL’s inventor plans to develop the system further, with the goal of enabling more disabled persons to fulfill ambitions otherwise inaccessible to them. Now this proof-of-concept is loose outside the military domain, we can expect to see a lot more devices like it in the coming years.
NEW FICTION: THE RIGHT PEOPLE by Adam Rakunas: So, it’s Wednesday after school, delivery time, and we’re doing the usual: I’m checking invoices on my cell, and G.R.’s violating the safety parameters of our merchandise.
“Gene,” he says, gripping the pickup’s wheel with one sweaty hand and his cell in the other, “check this out.” G.R. thumbs the keypad until his torso makes
OK, this isn’t actually new technology–it’s been around for years, just not in this part of the world –but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and it struck me as an interesting example of how advanced technology seeps into everything while you’re not looking. (Via CBC News.) 
In an effort to deepen the experience of humans interacting with robots, Steve Yohanan has been concentrating on the largely-neglected fifth sense of touch. 
No, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.
The 
