Robots have yet to best humans in solving a Rubik’s Cube, but they are making inroads concerning social media and are becoming more human-like everyday.  Disconcerting to say the least.

Standford researchers have announced the creation of wearing a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling skin-like covering for robots.

The indvidual we can thank? for the new robotic covering is Zhenan Bao.  His work has resulted in development of a stretchable solar cell system which can shrink and expand along two different axes, perfect for artificial robotic skin, prosthetic limbs and possibly clothing.

According to Fast Company:

“The latest advance has seen Bao adding a corrugated microstructure organic solar cell layer into the skin. The clever folding in this layer allows it to be stretched along two axes…by up to 30% beyond its original length. This lets her coat pretty much any human-like joint with the skin and still have it collect enough solar power to run its sensor array, even when the skin is stretched and distorted over complex joints like elbows. Cleverly, the flexible solar array is connected into a circuit via a liquid metal electrode, which conforms to the particular shape of the solar cell at any particular moment.”

Using the skin provides are possible, future, robotic leaders with the ability to power-up using the sun, have human-like touch sensitivity, and to have super-human chemical senses.

Scared?  Yours truly certainly is.

Certainly robots are neat, especially when they’re mowing our lawns, vacuuming our floors, or assembling machines in a factory.  That said, a robot with an unlimited power supply and senses described as “super-human” is disturbing.

What do you think?  Should the researchers implement use of the skin on robots or utilize the creation solely for better prosthetic limbs and clothing?

That is why work by people such as Ruth Schulz is so interesting. Schulz and her group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology have created robots which communicate using their own language. That in itself is nothing to wow at – after all, computers do have their means of communication. The amazing thing is that these robots – called Lingodroids – actually speak like humans do AND they create their own language as they go along. Not exactly sentient beings, but it’s a start, yes?

Evan Ackerman of the IEEE Spectrum provides a simplified explanation:

To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let’s say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who’s in the exact same situation as you. What do you do?

What might very well end up happening is that you invent some random word to describe where you are right now, and then point at the ground and tell the word to the other person, establishing a connection between this new word and a place.

I don’t know about you, but I find this research extremely exciting – both technologically and linguistically speaking! If this project progresses, we might have more languages to learn – aside from Klingon, Na’vi, and Dothraki, that is.

More than likely not, but robots are making great strides in many areas, including getting their own world wide web, RoboEarth.

What is RoboEarth?  The creation is an Internet development designed to make “life” easy for robots.  As if they didn’t have it easy already.

Similar to our world wide web, using RoboEarth, robots will have the capability to communicate with other robots on learned tasks, in addition to routine uploads of data about what it is doing (Twitter?) and where it is (Foursquare/Gowalla?).

With RoboEarth, robots could for example, learn to assemble something by data one robot has learned and uploaded to RoboEarth, sharing it with other robots, eliminating the need for human intervention.

The project, funded by the EU, has been in the works for a year, recently reaching a milestone when AMIGO, a robot downloaded instructions necessary to deliver a drink to a patient. Seriously.  Take a look:

Pretty incredible, but nothing to fear, at this point.  Thankfully for those that fear what robots may eventually do to the human race (hand raised) RoboEarth is, at present, only a knowledge base, lacking central intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

What do you think of RoboEarth?  Do you find it neat, or potentially frightening?

That’s because Watson isn’t quite there yet. What makes you shake your head in awe about Watson, however, is the fact that he is the first ever machine that can interact meaningfully with humans (that’s us!) through speech. When I first read about Watson, I couldn’t help but think about that robot in Tony Stark’s workshop (does it have a name?).

While Watson is not that smart (yet), his success rate at correctly answering questions asked by humans is impressive. And how does he do this?

Thanks to a hundred algorithms, Watson is able to analyze complex human speech. The words, the inflections, and the nuances – they are all taken into consideration! He then cross references the question with millions and millions of documents to come up with a list of probably answers.

Yup, that is quite a letdown, as he does not give one specific answer. Instead, he presents possibilities and ranks them. Still, that is quite a feat, isn’t it?

In fact, IBM tested the waters by putting Watson up against Jeopardy contestants. Guess what? The machine bested the humans most of the time.

Are we one day going to be ruled by descendants of Watson the Jeopardy expert? Check out this video and judge for yourself.

This four foot tall robot not only looks fantastic but seems to be highly functional, thanks to some nifty systems and programming by its creator, Dave Shinsel.

There’s a ton of video over at Dave’s YouTube page which really gives a flavour of what Loki can do.

Loki has remote control and logistics over Wi-Fi, vision processing, speech recognition, indoor pathfinding and basic artificial intelligence.

Lots of data on the web site if you’re inclined to have a go creating your own Loki. Otherwise, just sit back and enjoy the show.

Via

As you might imagine, it’s quite a complex procedure that involves scanning the digits already present and working out which squares are blank.

Processing the scanned image requires setting a threshold value to remove noise, segmenting to work out which marks are part of the digit, thinning to one pixel wide and then checking the features to find out what the digit is.

Solving the Sudoku puzzle is the relatively easy bit, though the Mindstorm processor is slow and doesn’t allow recursive functions, so took some time to optimize.

Then comes the time to write in all those digits, column by column. The whole process is very slow, for all sorts of reasons, and it won’t be beating a human Sudoku champion any time soon (even if it solved the puzzle more quickly), but that’s not the point. This is a trés cool application.

Read more at Tilted Twister