While the US Defense Budget shrank a little bit (by 4 percent overall), the fraction allocated to robotics apparently grew.
From CNET.com we have: "The budget includes a myriad of cuts, but there are also some interesting additions that show the military's increased interest in robotics and communications, particularly in unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)."
From the NY Times: "“F.C.S. is Army modernization,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said of the Future Combat Systems, a program that links soldiers with weapons, robotic sensors, a communications network and combat vehicles. "
They are also planning to shift emphasis from their own satellites to commercial providers. I guess it's only a matter to time until tanks come with a Google Earth console and a Blogger.com interface.
2009
2009
Yesterday Oussama Khatib from Stanford visited and give an great talk on human-friendly robotics, which is a theme he has been working on for a while. The talk had several different sub-topics, but the two key issues that resonated the most with me were that of how to assure robots can interact safely in a human environment, and how to uses robotics-based analysis to build better models of human beings.
In the context of safety, the idea is that robitic systems in human environments should not just include software that makes the behave in a safe way, but should have a hardware design that precludes dangerous behavior even if the saftware goes berserk. A trivial example of this concept might be to make a robot out of Jell-O, so that it could not possibly hurt you. On the other hand, making the robot out of very safe "stuff" is generally at odds with high performance, whre you might want hight speeds and good load carrying capacity. The challenge he addressed was to get both performance and assured safety, at least for some parts of the system, and he did this by (essentially) using a subtle analysis of the relationship between performance as a function of response time. Basically, strong robot muscles rarely need to move quickly.
We also had a great lunch and discussed the parallels between economic cycles driven by psychology, and similar cycles in the research community (related to how robotics was oversold back in the 1980's and didn't recover credibility until the late 1990's).
2009
Generally, I try not to reguritate, but... a robot attacked a man at a Swedish factory and almost killed him.
"A Swedish company in Bålsta was been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."
A disabled robot " ... suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself ..." but apparently suffered four broken ribs and was close to death.
[ from http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html ] It was, apparently, used for lifting heavy stones. According to prosecutor Leif Johansson it was "a first" and the blame rested with the company, but also partly with the injured man as well. [ fuller link in Swedish
Of course, as a robotics researcher I have been (slightly) injured by our robots several times. I'll bet the same is true of some of my colleagues or students.
How about the case in 2007 of a 45-year old Danish municipal worker who was killed by a Dvorak Spider 01 robot lawnmower (that fell on him). There's also the story of Shia LaBeouf (actor?) that was hit in the face by a fake robot during the making of the movie Transformers.
Once, back in 1997, an important government minister was visiting or lab and jumped in front of a wheeled robot to see it stop suddenly. Surprise! The robot was not running any collision avoidance software, and it was made of aluminum, and it has a think disk that jutted out around it's body. The minister tried to look stoic but he was limping when he left the lab!
