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In what probably isn’t a tribute to Spirit (which drove backwards from March of 2006 on due to a broken wheel) Curiosity took its first drive test on Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it’s undergoing assembly. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the SUV-sized rover will be carrying a much larger science payload than the current Mars rovers are able to. Scheduled to arrive on Mars in August of 2012, Spirit is now officially one meter closer to its destination.
One meter down, only 188,500,000,000 meters to go.
[ MSL ] VIA [ Discover ]
A week or so ago, we posted about a 2008 study suggesting that humanish robots are a bad, bad idea. However, it’s definitely true that human facial features are great at communicating emotional information to humans, so there’s certainly something to be said for incorporating things like eyes and eyebrows into a robot. Flobi, a robot from Bielefeld University, is a good example of a conscious decision to make a humanoid robot head that is capable of recognizable human expressions while avoiding the Uncanny Valley.
Flobi relies on expressive elements that are almost cartoonish in their simplicity: 18 actuators move the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and mouth, and there are LEDs in Flobi’s cheeks to let it blush… I say ‘it’ because Flobi’s hair (all of the facial elements, in fact) can be easily changed to let it appear to be male or female. For me, though,that process brings back quite a bit of the uncanny:
I find it pretty amazing how much of a difference subtle little things like blinking can make when it comes to how I (personally) relate to humanoid robots. And that’s part of the tricky thing about the Uncanny Valley: there’s a very fine line between seeming human, and seeming too human.
As IEEE Spectrum points out, Flobi looks a lot like iCat. Like, a lot. This makes iCat angry:
And you don’t want to make iCat angry…
[ CIT ] VIA [ IEEE Spectrum ]
Earlier this year we posted about how people are starting to specifically request robot-assisted surgeries as opposed to having ‘just’ a human operate on them. Now, researchers at Duke are working on an entirely autonomous robot arm that can take biopsies on humans based on ultrasound data. It works pretty well, too, at least on the dead turkeys that they tried it out on:
“In the latest series of experiments, the robot guided the plunger to eight different locations on the simulated prostate tissue in 93 percent of its attempts.”
I’m not entirely sure what happened in that other 7 percent… Most likely a slight miss with minimal consequences for the ex-turkey, as opposed to the robot going berserk and wildly stabbing everything within reach. More importantly, I’m curious as to what what the average “miss” rate is for a human taking a biopsy based on an ultrasound.
In any case, the idea here is that robots will eventually (soon, perhaps?) be able to at the very least take care of simple, routine medical procedures which will save patients both time and money.
“We’re now testing the robot on a human mannequin seated at the examining table whose breast is constrained in a stiff bra cup,” Smith said. “The breast is composed of turkey breast tissue with an embedded grape to simulate a lesion.”
This is making me hungry. Vid, after the jump.
Incidentally, turkeys are used because they have similar flesh to humans, and they show up about the same on an ultrasound. Also, they’re tasty.
[ Duke ] VIA [ Daily Mail ]
Note: the robot in the picture, a DaVinci system, was not the robot being used for this study. And as far as I know, the turkey in the picture wasn’t involved either.
A pair of robotic vehicles from Vislab (artificial vision and intelligent systems lab at the University of Parma) departed Parma, Italy on Tuesday for Shanghai, China. The 100% electric vans will travel 8,000 miles over three months, enduring (hopefully) all kinds of extremes ranging from the downtown Moscow to the Gobi desert, which I’m pretty sure is full of dinosaurs or something.
Now, I’m calling these vans semi-autonomous because they’re autonomously following a vehicle that’s being driven by a human. Not that this is an easy task, of course… The vans have been kitted out with the same sort of obstacle detection and avoidance tech as the DARPA Grand and Urban challenge vehicles.
At this point, this technology is targeted mostly at goods transport as opposed to letting you take a nap while your car drives you somewhere. Some people, though, don’t really get why this sort of thing is useful or important:
“It begs the question why. In Australia, you have big trucks with three or four trailers attached in the desert. Why do you need an autonomous vehicle if you can connect them with a piece of steel?” said Andrew Close, an analyst at IHS Automotive.
Well, there’s a reason why that type of thing works in Australia and nowhere else: in Australia, you have a bajillion miles of long, flat, empty road. Most states in the US, on the other hand, limit connected trailers to two. Giving autonomy (or optional semi-autonomy) to vehicles means that you can have as many trailers as is reasonable or convenient. And really, it’s the optional semi-autonomy that’s the most realistically valuable in the short term, as we’ve discussed before. Think about it: on the highway, you spend a LOT of time doing nothing except following the guy in front of you, slowing down when he does and not going outside the lines. It’s pretty robotic, right? Right? Yeah. And pretty soon, your car will be better than you are at avoiding the unexpected. Autonomous driving: it saves time, it saves money, and it will most likely save lives.
[ VisLab ] VIA [ PopSci ]
Whenever we boot up our time machines, cruise back to 1200 B.C., and try to pick up chicks at our favorite wine bar in Western Syria, our rudimentary knowledge of Ugaritic is usually more embarrassing than helpful. The good folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have us stoked on some new software we hope to have in pocket form soon. It analyzes an unknown language by comparing letter and word patterns to another known language (in Ugaritic's case, its close cousin is Hebrew) and spits out a translation quickly, using precious little computing power. To give some perspective, it took archaeologists four years to do the same thing back in 1928. It's not quite Berlitz yet, but this proof of concept is kind of like the Michael Jordan of computational linguists -- it's probably the first time that machine translations of dead scripts has been proven effective. If we plug some hopeful numbers into our TI-83, we calculate that we'll be inserting our own genes into the ancient Syrian pool in a matter of months. Thanks, MIT!
[Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons] New MIT software learns an entire dead language in just a few hours originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink  Mother Nature News |  National Geographic | Email this | Comments
The Artic Circle:
 
Random Cities in Mainland China:
 
 
Hong Kong International Airport:
There is no excuse for buying McDonald’s in Hong Kong. But I did, and I will try to explain.
- My first night in Hong Kong led me, quite randomly, to the best Chinese food I’ve ever eaten, hands down. So good, in fact, that I have gone back to the same place twice since, and tried to make nice with the wait staff there.
- The fact that this place is right around the corner from a row of strip clubs has nothing to do with my frequenting this establishment. Honestly.
- I’ve also tried other places, with mixed results. I am currently convinced that I don’t really like the taste of Chinese barbecue; it is sweet and gummy in a way that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve also decided that I don’t really like rice noodles either; again, its mostly a texture thing. I’ve been on the look out for some fresh sea food, but no luck so far. This is high on my list of priorities for the weekend. I’ve run into a lot of sushi places, but since I’ll be in Tokyo in a few weeks I want to save my appetite for the real deal.
- The point is that its not from a lack of trying new things. I’ve become quite bold at stepping inside small, steamy restaurants, pointing randomly at the menu, and hoping for the best. Although the city is designed to be bilingual, I’ve found myself in a number of situations interacting with people can’t speak more than a few words of English, and so it is a crap shoot every time.
- I’ve also started working a lot, and running into the city to try new food isn’t always an option. I’ve gone hungry a few nights from just working past the time when it is reasonable to go out.
- I’ve also been drinking tap water, really without thinking about it. I learned today that this is probably the worst possible thing to do, when my bathroom tap water suddenly began to smell like stagnant, moldy water that had been sitting in a homeless woman’s vagina. My bowels have been quite angry at me as a result of drinking this water, and I’ve woken up a few times with a horrible stabbing pain in my guts.
- There is a cafeteria on campus; several of them, actually, but I have been incredibly confused at the process of ordering food, then paying for it, then obtaining it, which often involves moving through several different lines scattered across the cafeteria in no discernible order. This has confused and frustrated me several times, occasionally to the point that I just give up and skip lunch.
- I’ve easily lost 10 pounds since I got here.
- The closest place to get food is a Mcdonald’s in the basement of the main Academic building on campus, which is unfortunately on my way to class every morning and open very late at night. And it is always PACKED full of people. The temptation was too much. So I gave in.
The rituals surrounding meals is strange, and there are things I take for granted about the process that are completely different here.
- Multiple lines, for ordering, purchasing, and obtaining food, are
 common in all HK restaurants, including McDonalds. I thought it would be a good lesson to go through these foreign rituals in a place that was otherwise so familiar.
- The habits of customers is also different. For instance, people will just leave their food on the table, expecting a service person to come clean it up after they leave. Obviously this is common in sit down restaurants in America, but at fast food places you usually take the tray to the garbage and clean up after yourself. In Hong Kong, you ALWAYS leave your food on the table, and they look at you weird if you bring it to them, as if somehow you are making it more difficult for them by cleaning up after yourself. I still feel guilty just getting up from a table to leave.
- There are also a variety of exotic menu items that are only available in Hong Kong. Most intriguing were Shake Shake fries, which are normal french fries that come with a special bag and packet of shakey powder in a variety of flavors. Walking around the city, you see tons of people with bags of Shake Shake fries, and the seaweed flavoring seems to be most popular. Also, it is just assumed that you want to eat an order of chicken nuggets with the Spicy Garlic sauce that is also incredibly popular here.
   
- Trip report: Seaweed fries are the shit. Would definitely eat again. But I’m swearing off McDonalds for the remainder of the trip, at least until I get to Tokyo and maybe I’ll try a teriyaki burger.
- This stuff is worse than crack. This is a nonsmoking campus, so in addition to pure sobriety I’ve had to limit myself to sneaking a cig in random corners in the early morning hours. I can handle all that fine. But wave a fry in my face and I’m like a quivering bowl of jelly.
- As an aside, I’ve had to dive under a children’s play set to avoid campus security while outside smoking a cigarette. It was not my proudest moment.
- Garlic Chili sauce, which has the texture of cocktail sauce but makes everything taste vaguely like Chinese food, but like authentic Chinese food and not American “Chinese food”. I didn’t really care for it.
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