African Firm Sells Pepper-spray Bullet Firing Drones

Here it comes ...

Project Tango

Johnny Chung Lee reveals Project Tango.

And, of course, it's his level of genius. And it's awesome. But, hell, aren't we scared yet?

Given everything we now know about the end of privacy, the fact that the NSA have back-doors to all our mainstream social software that Google are legally prevented from telling us about? And that Google are putting always-on cameras onto everyone's face?

Is the thing that we are really missing the ability to have millimetre accurate models of all the geometry (and therefore, via recognition algorithms, inventories of all the objects), in every room we enter? Collected automatically? And potentially streamed to Google's servers? Do I want to have someone walk into my room and immediately start telling Google / the NSA everything I have in it?

Sure, it's going to make amazingly competent robots, though.

The Future is Telepresence

Interesting story of Willow Garage's transformation.

Self Folding Robots

Wow! Self-folding.

Robo-Oppression

Mashable :

iRobot recently announced that it will outfit Brazil with 30 PackBot robots, units similar to those that have been deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and inside Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. Each PackBot is camera-equipped and remotely controlled to allow operators to examine suspicious objects and explore threatening environments.

The robots will work in tandem with thousands of soldiers who will be patrolling the 12 host cities in Brazil. The $7.2 million in contracts include maintenance, spares and associated equipment.

Each PackBot 510 unit typically costs around $100,000 to $200,000.

Brazilian police will also be donning some high-tech gear. Officers will sport facial-recognition camera glasses that claim to capture 400 facial images per second, then archive each face in a database that stores up to 13 million faces.

In their attempt to make “one of the most protected sports events in history,” Brazil invested $900 million to boost its security forces for the 2014 World Cup. Besides purchasing surveillance equipment and helicopters, the country reportedly acquired four Israeli-made drones to provide additional security at the FIFA Confederation next month.

Yeah. I'm sure Brazil (with massive inequality and paranoid rich people) will lead the world in cyber-security. :-(

More Quadrotor Construction

Singularity

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2013-03-28/

Soft autonomous earthworm robot at MIT

Little Dog

These things just get nastier and nastier.

InMoov

I confess even I'm pretty shocked by InMoov. 

A few weeks ago someone asked me to answer a Quora question on the possibility of humanoid robots. (I'll quote the answer now Quora requires logins to see what I wrote)

Caring robots have to become cheaper than people before they'll take off.

There are projected to be between 7 and 10 billion people in the near future. And they're pretty cheap, all things considered. Also, most people like to be cared for by other people.

So I'd expect technology to *augment* rather than replace carers in the near future.

What will certainly happen first is intensive monitoring technologies : sensors which are worn by, or embedded in the rooms and furniture of, people who need support. It will be easy for one nurse to monitor dozens of patients in a hospital or at their own homes in a district and to talk to them whenever they request.

Robotics will continue to develop within medical instruments. Most medical operations will be conducted by tiny robots, largely under the direct control of a surgeon, but with areas of increasing autonomy. Expect to see robot anaesthetists, machines which can painlessly take blood samples from an exposed arm, machines which can sew-up wounds. 

Not to mention extensive 3D printing of organs and to repair wounds. All these machines will be fronted by a caring and responsible human being. 

Later, expect to see more machines that allow self-monitoring and even self-treatment turning up in the home. 

Humanoid nurse-substitutes are likely to be fairly late arriving, if at all.

That answer is, of course, predicated on humanoid robots being hard to do and expensive. However, what if the whole future manufacturing thing is making reasonable homebrew humanoids pretty cheap?

(Tiny) Reconfigurable Robots at MIT

Electronic Demon Costume

I'm impressed by this Electronic Demon Costume. Don't the lights make some pretty impressive facial expressions? I guess this would be pretty good for cheap affective robotics too.

The Case Against Obama

1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn't "precise" or "surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue. 
2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.  
3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.

More ...

Food Delivery Drones

Tacocopter, delivers ... er .. Tacos by quadcopter.

Why Drones Are Advancing So Quickly

John Robb on drone development. It's all about the control systems.

(Though the new ways of manufacturing don't hurt either)

Musical Quadcopters

Another demonstration of just how well co-ordinated (in time and space) quadcopters are these days.

Micro Drones

I'm, frankly, gob-smacked by this video :

Both by the implication of how cheap and simple it will be to manufacture micro-drones (or anything else) with cut laminates and folding techniques. And the widespread ubiquity of drones that it implies.

via Global Guerrillas. (WarpLink RoboFold)

DIY Drones also links a printed quad-copter : 

We have no idea what's about to hit us here ... 

A Swarm of Nano-Copters

This is probably the thing that will change the world more profoundly and shockingly than almost anything else over the next 5 years.

That's about the time it took smartphones to become ubiquitous in the developed world, and for business and culture to re-organize themselves around them. (If you're conservative, you can assume it took 10 years.)

Now imagine that nano-quadcopters (with video surveillance) hit hundreds of millions of cheap units in the next 5-10 years. What happens when everyone from concerned parents to nosy teenagers, criminals to police to political protestors have them. What happens when they routinely monitor traffic in the streets? Routinely carry out inspections of industrial infrastructure? Routinely patrol your house when you're out? When they're a standard tool of industrial espionage and gutter journalism? Where they guide automated cranes and architectural scale printers in docks and on construction sites? Where they monitor pollution and conduct ecological surveys in forests?

Nano-quadcopters and sousveillance are coming. And the world is going to be unimaginable.

Flight Assembled Architecture

Amazing!.

The thing about this is that there's no need for these to be Quadcopters. We could have automated cranes with this level of precision. Giant robot arms spitting bricks like enormous Pez machines, with in-built nozzles cementing them into place.

Painting Robot

This painting robot has THE MOST AWESOME SOUND EVER!

Go watch and listen to the first video. How beautifully amazing is that sound?