Cody Taylor

holy_calamity writes “New Scientist reports on the different flavors of Turing Test being used by AI researchers to judge the human-ness of their creations. While some strive only to meet the ‘appearance Turing Test’ and build or animate characters that look human, others are investigating how robots can be made to elicit the same brain activity in a person as interacting with a human would.”

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Released in 1985, the Dustbot is claimed to be the first robot to feature a built-in vacuum cleaner (that broom was just for show) and featured edge detection to turn away from obstacles.

Australian research has brought tiny medical robots, small enough to swim in the human bloodstream, one step closer to reality.

You are being watched…

Evan Reynolds, 19, got his hand and part of his arm ripped off in a car accident and has since been fitted with an i-LIMB, a robotic hand developed by an Apple/Star Wars fanboy.

Smivs writes “The BBC are reporting on the development of tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots. Some surgical procedures are hindered by the size or inflexibility of current instruments. For example, the labyrinthine network of blood vessels in the brain prevents the use of catheters threaded through larger blood vessels. Researchers have long envisioned that trends of miniaturisation would lead to tiny robots that could get around easily in the body. The problem until now has been powering them. Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size. As they approach millimetre dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings. Now, research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has demonstrated a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs.”

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coondoggie writes “Researchers say technology they have developed would let boats or small aquatic robots glide through the water without the need for an engine, sails or paddles. A University of Pittsburgh research team has designed a propulsion system that uses the natural surface tension that is present on the water’s surface and an electric pulse to move the boat or robot, researchers said. The Pitt system has no moving parts and the low-energy electrode that emits the pulse could be powered by batteries, radio waves, or solar power, researchers said in a statement.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday and today.

With the recent detection of seasonal Martian methane emissions, NASA’s next robotic mission to the planet could become the most exciting unmanned mission in the history of the agency.

This question is starting to get debated by robot designers and toymakers. With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn’t how we learn to accept robots—but whether we should care when they’re mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?