The Future of Robotics and AI Is Open Source?

April 9, 2012

The premise of William Hertling’s piece is that, “Openness is disruptive, profitable, and will allow participation in robotics and AI to take off.”

As opposed to the slow process of incremental advancements, Hertling asserts that with an open source platform and with the significant contributions of users around the world, that this “crowd-sourced knowledge” will provide broader and more accurate results than the current traditional small circle of experts.

In addition, once basic computing power has increased to a level near that of IBM’s Watson, robotic hobbyists and others will be able to develop, test, and make their contributions to this field via open-source.

He uses the examples and success of  Wikipedia and the Linux operating system among others.

He makes a solid case and I hope he’s right.

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy

Warehouse robots come of age

March 29, 2012

Modern warehouse robotics

Background:

“After his experience at Webvan — which raised and then lost over $1 billion in investor capital — Kiva founder Mick Mountz realized that there had to be a breakthrough in cost reduction for large scale distribution businesses to get to the next level. He came up with the simple, but very clever, idea of having the shelves come to the packing stations at the warehouse, rather than having workers go and retrieve each product from the shelves.”

Now, modern warehouse bots trek around the warehouse via a combination of high-speed sensors and a bar code grid to fetch needed items and bring them to human workstations.

Very impressive stuff.

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy

DARPA’s world

March 28, 2012

The most famous name in American innovation today isn’t Apple or Google. It’s DARPA.

“That DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, runs with the big dogs of commercial innovation reflects the importance of science and technology to national security. War, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
”

Also, DARPA, the agency that brought us the internet, is pursuing the “Avatar Project” wherein a soldier can partner with a robot.

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy

21st Century warfare…from cyber attacks to robots

March 24, 2012

The Information Revolution, the Just War doctrine, cyber warfare, drones, robots, warfare without bloodshed…these and other issues are discussed in the Atlantic.

A sampling:

 How do you define information warfare?

Taddeo: The definition of “information warfare” is hotly debated.
One example would be cyber-attacks or hacker attacks, which we consider to be information warfare; another example would be the use of drones or semi-autonomous machines.
From those instances, to me, a good definition of information warfare is “the use of information communication technologies within a military strategy that is endorsed by a state.”

What’s also interesting is the reference to the existence of non-physical space such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., and that events that occur in these spaces, increasingly affect events in the physical world.

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy

Speaking of robots…

March 23, 2012

Why Our Service Robots Needn’t Look Like Humans

Our acceptance of robots increases as robots get more human-like but only up to a point because, “If it gets too human-like, people are very fearful”

“Robots should be smaller, it should be helpful, it should be subordinate, it should be making sure that you are the master and not the robot.”

Yes, but above all, it needs to do what I tell it to do (or at least what I program it to do).

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy

The robots are coming!

March 22, 2012

Better get used to it.

Although robots have been around for a while, primarily in the manufacturing realm, they are increasingly being used for warehouse work, in the medical field, and plans for robotic driven cars.

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Posted by UrbanTechGuy