Terminators getting closer everyday to launch...

Yard Dart · Jul 24, 2014

The National Science Foundation has committed $10 million to build robots that will act as “personal trainers” for children, in an effort to influence their behavior and eating habits.

The government has spent $2.15 million so far for the five-year project, which is being led by Yale University. The project, “Robots Helping Kids,” will ultimately “deploy” robots into homes and schools to teach English as a second language, and encourage kids to exercise.

The project will develop a “new breed of sophisticated ‘socially assistive’ robots,” designed to help children “learn to read, appreciate physical fitness, overcome cognitive disabilities, and perform physical exercises,” according to a news release by Yale University when the grant was first announced in 2012.

“Just like a good personal trainer, we want the robots to be able to guide the child toward a behavior that we desire,” said Brian Scassellati, a computer science professor at Yale and principal investigator for the study.

“What we want to do is move these robots out of the laboratory and into schools and homes and clinics, places where we can directly help children on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

The NSF grant said the project is necessary due to “critical societal problems.”
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Feds spending $10 million to build robot companions for children | Fox News

“critical societal problems.”?!

DarkLight · Jul 24, 2014

Yeah, critical societal problems like their parents being absent or too f*&$ing lazy to interact with them.

This is disgusting.

Yard Dart · Aug 13, 2014

Here's an idea for an awesome dogfighting aircraft. Make it small, light, and fast. Build it out of materials that are hard to detect on radar. Even give it a laser cannon.

Oh, and don't put a human in the cockpit. In fact, don't even closely tie the drone to human ground control. Because in an aerial knife fight, a computer-controlled machine will beat a human pilot.

That's the idea behind a controversial proposal by U.S. Air Force captain Michael Byrnes, an experienced Predator and Reaper drone pilot. Byrnes is calling for the development of a robotic dogfighter, which he calls the FQ-X, that could blow manned fighters out of the sky.

"A tactically autonomous, machine-piloted aircraft … will bring new and unmatched lethality to air-to-air combat," Byrnes writes in Air and Space Power Journal.

In Byrnes' conception, machines have the edge in making the lightning-fast decisions necessary to win a close-quarters aerial battle. "Humans average 200 to 300 milliseconds to react to simple stimuli, but machines can select or synthesize and execute maneuvers, making millions of corrections in that same quarter of a second," he writes.

Byrnes focuses on famed fighter pilot John Boyd's classic observe-orient-decide-act decision cycle — the "OODA loop" — which predicts that victory in combat belongs to the warrior who can assess and respond to conditions fastest.

Like a fighter pilot trying to out-turn his opponent in a dogfight, the trick to OODA is quickly making the right decisions while your enemy is still trying to figure out what's going on.

It's a battle of wits in which computers are superior, according to Byrnes. "Every step in OODA that we can do, they will do better."

Byrnes envisions a drone designed from the start to utilize the full potential of an unmanned dogfighter. The FQ-X would be constructed of advanced, difficult-to-detect "metamaterials." It would have extremely powerful computers that could determine an enemy aircraft's position from even the scantest of sensor data.

"The principle of 'first look, first kill' belongs to the aircraft with the most processing power and the best software to leverage it," Byrnes writes.

The FQ-X would also have multispectral optics and computer vision software that would enable it to distinguish friendly from enemy aircraft. The drone would pack a laser or a cannon firing armor-piercing incendiary rounds.

To sweeten the robot's victory, on-board machine-learning systems would analyze the encounter and transmit tips to other combat drones.

It should be pretty obvious we're not talking about some plodding, prop-driven Predator drone being steered by humans sitting in a trailer in Nevada, but rather a fast- and high-flying robot jet that functions without much need for human guidance.

"With FQ-X, autonomy for the conduct of the engagement would return to the air vehicle to take advantage of its superior processing speed and reaction times," Byrnes proposes.

But there's a tension in robotic warfare between the machines' incredible speed and lethality and we human beings' natural desire for direct control. Inserting a man into the loop inevitably limits a drone's potential.

Without human control, we effectively grant robots licenses to kill.

Byrnes suggests breaking a dogfighting drone's actions into different phases, including searching, stalking, closure, capture, and kill. Operator control would vary with the phase. And in the heat of direct combat, when milliseconds matter, the robot calls most of the shots.

It's a bold proposal — one the Air Force as a whole has showed little interest in pursuing. Only the Navy has openly discussed adding air-to-air missiles to jet-powered drones. Considering the bureaucratic resistance, Byrnes worries that the flying branch could eventually have no choice but to borrow dogfighting robot technology from the sea service.

"Aviators may dislike it, the public will question it, science fiction imagines harbingers of the Cylon apocalyps,e and we are uncertain about how to best utilize it within the context of a larger Air Force," he writes. "Nevertheless, the FQ-X concept is too dangerous to our current thinking to ignore forever."
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This laser-armed drone could blow fighter jets out of the sky - The Week

ghrit · Aug 13, 2014

DARPA working on this for years. There are some ethical and moral questions to be answered before fielding robots of any flavor that can act independently.

Yard Dart · Sep 5, 2014

The Pentagon is giving more time and money to companies that have shown promise in fielding a humanoid robot.

Eleven of 16 firms that put their robot prototypes through their paces in June at have now been given an additional six months and $1.5 million each by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to continue their work, the Pentagon said on July 15.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, was originally scheduled to end with a winning robot in December, but has now been pushed back to June.

The 11 teams receiving DARPA funds will also be competing against privately funded teams, both domestic and international.

The Pentagon characterizes the humanoid robot it is looking to develop as an asset that could be deployed worldwide to assist first responders in rescue operations.

If there is also a weaponized version a la The Terminator anywhere in the plan the Pentagon has not said so.

The winning team of the DARPA Robotics Challenge will be awarded $2 million.

The extended time and increased budget was not because of missed timetables or disappointment with technologies, but actually because the trials held in Florida last December were so successful, according to a report in the National Defense, the news magazine of the National Defense Industry Association.

Gill Pratt, DRC program manager, told the magazine this month that “things went better than we expected at the DRC trials,” resulting in DARPA deciding to “raise the bar even more than what we had planned from the beginning.”

And since that means a greater challenge, additional time and money was appropriated to the DARPA teams, he said.

DARPA is expected to spend about $95 million on the program through 2015. The DRC began in 2012.
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DARPA putting more time, money into humanoid robot | Fox News

Yard Dart · Sep 17, 2014

When the ‘cheetah-bot’ runs, it bounds with a grace and speed that resembles its animal namesake. The four-legged MIT-designed robot weighs almost as much as its feline counterpart and now researchers have developed an algorithm that lets it jump and run untethered with the potential to reach speeds around 30 mph. Supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, this project was about three years in the making, from getting the hardware ready and taking the design from its conceptual phase to actually racing across MIT’s Killian Court, Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the research university, told FoxNews.com.

While a robot that moves with the agility of one of Africa’s ‘big cats’ sounds like it was borrowed from a Michael Bay “Transformers” film, Kim asserts that there are tangible real world applications for this type of robotics technology down the line.

“Our goal is to use this kind of robot to save lives in a disaster situation. It could be used to help fire fighters or police in a dangerous situation,” Kim said. “One situation that comes to mind is a wildfire. Robots like this could carry water, hose down a fire, move into areas that would be dangerous for a human.”

Getting to that stage would involve more modifications to the robot’s design, and Kim said that “artificial intelligence is far behind the human capability” to assist with complex tasks. Still very much a prototype, Kim said the robotic cheetah’s potential as “an indispensable tool” has generated much excitement among members of his research team.

In order to replicate a cheetah’s agility and speed, each of the electrically powered robot’s four legs are programmed to expend a specific amount of force at the moment when it hits the ground. For the robot to reach faster speeds, more force needs to be exerted to each leg. The researchers tested the robot under various conditions – they had it run on a treadmill, and during experiments on an indoor track, the faux cheetah sprinted up to 10 mph.

Kim said that the algorithm that programs the robot needs to be adjusted for different settings. The space of a treadmill is not big enough for the robot to run very fast, versus a field outdoors. The associate professor said that “this hardware can go up to 33 mph,” and will continue to alter the algorithm in future studies to enable the machine to get closer to hitting its potential speeds.

The robot is also full of surprises.

“During one test, there was a program bug, and as soon as my research scientist pushed the power on, the cheetah actually somersaulted and landed on its feet. It did a flip,” he said.

Not sluggish like many similar robots, the mechanical cheetah possesses a custom-designed, high-torque-density electric motor powered by special amplifiers, both designed at MIT.

In order to realize the ultimate goal of an emergency response robot, Kim said the next phase of the design would be to develop hands that could grasp and open doors. Kim envisions this being developed within the next year.

“Our robot can run and walk and drag things, but it can’t manipulate anything,” Kim said. “A new version might be a little slower, but could perform more complex movements. In the future, I expect to see these robots be useful. I expect to see them in fire stations.”
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MIT ‘cheetah-bot’ could hit speeds up to 33 mph | Fox News

NotSoSneaky · Sep 17, 2014

Thread drift alert !

Here's an idea for an awesome dogfighting aircraft. Make it small, light, and fast. Build it out of materials that are hard to detect on radar. Even give it a laser cannon.

Oh, and don't put a human in the cockpit. In fact, don't even closely tie the drone to human ground control. Because in an aerial knife fight, a computer-controlled machine will beat a human pilot.
Click to expand...

An author I like by the name of Dale Brown writes military fiction on air superiority mostly with a variant of the B-52 called a "MegaFortress" and in several of the novels he wrote a number of autonomous fighter craft were deployed from said "MegaFortress".

Interesting concept and ahead of its time (90's to early 00's). A good read. Moar at Megafortress.com
I'm not connected to the site in any manner, and his books are available on Amazon
( Clicky the "A shop" up on top and support the forum ! )

Carry on Monkeys.

Yard Dart · Sep 17, 2014

NotSoSneaky said: ↑

Thread drift alert !

An author I like by the name of Dale Brown writes military fiction on air superiority mostly with a variant of the B-52 called a "MegaFortress" and in several of the novels he wrote a number of autonomous fighter craft were deployed from said "MegaFortress".

Interesting concept and ahead of its time (90's to early 00's). A good read. Moar at Megafortress.com
I'm not connected to the site in any manner, and his books are available on Amazon
( Clicky the "A shop" up on top and support the forum ! )

Carry on Monkeys.
Click to expand...

Something like this.....
DARPA And Lockheed Are FINALLY Testing Laser Turrets On Planes - Yahoo News

Brokor · Sep 17, 2014

Yard Dart said: ↑

Something like this.....
DARPA And Lockheed Are FINALLY Testing Laser Turrets On Planes - Yahoo News
Click to expand...

Psst, so 1980. OLD NEWS!

Here we go, this is more like it

Yard Dart · Sep 18, 2014

Is it a wasp? Is it a spider? Is it a fly? It’s actually a tiny drone conducting a military surveillance mission.

Tiny intelligent flying and crawling robots, inspired by insects and animals, could soon help the armed forces.

The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program is the Army Research Laboratory’s collaboration with a number of teams drawn from industry and academia.

The 10-year initiative, which began in 2007, aims to create intelligent next generation micro robots. BAE Systems is the industrial lead for the project, which also involves the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The MAST-inspired micro robots could provide U.S. ground forces, small units and individual soldiers with the capability to conduct surveillance within complex urban environments and difficult terrain – significantly increasing their safety.

What do they look like?

One BAE Systems prototype looks like a fly and weighs less than an ounce. Its lightweight carbon joints help the robot imitate real flies. With a wingspan of just over an inch, its wings beat 110 times per second.

The University of Pennsylvania’s smallest robot weighs less than three quarters of an ounce and is very quick - travelling at about 53 body lengths per second.

Other tech resembles spiders and lizards.

How could these micro robots be used?

The robots could be sent on missions to collect lifesaving data for frontline troops.

MAST hopes to produces lots of different microbots that will give soldiers additional eyes and ears for different environments. In urban, rough or complex terrains, the microbots could be particularly useful for small units, giving them better situational awareness.

Microbots can capitalize on their size to move quietly and easily access small spaces.

If a unit approaches a building and needs to know what’s inside, for example, the soldiers could deploy a reconnaissance team of microbots. The robots could penetrate the building undetected, search the interior, map the layout, and provide data on the building’s occupants and their locations.

Soldiers may also need to enter areas where GPS technology won’t function, such as underground. This would be another scenario where the microbots could provide 3D mapping and navigation.

They could also be used to detect and track people or to locate threats such as explosives and bomb making materials.

The bots will know the relative positions of their robot counterparts and can detect obstacles in the path of the mini surveillance team. The flying mini-drones will also detect obstacles and threats located above, below, at either side and behind the microbots.

Ground-based versions of the technology will be able to adapt their method of movement to different terrain.

The University of Pennsylvania has been working on giving their robots the ability to automatically reconfigure and adapt to both human commands and their environment.

To ensure that these microbots can be monitored and managed as groups, the team is creating cutting-edge methods of sensing, communication, control and computation.

The robots will be able to operate on their own and may eventually be equipped with a range of sensors for location and orientation. They may also provide additional data from audio, thermal, magnetic, and chemical sensors.

Understanding insects

Insects and other animals have been key to developing the mini drones. Working out how insects sense their environment, move around and react to threats is leading to breakthroughs.

The Army Research Laboratory, for example, has studied scorpion biomechanics. The hairs on a scorpion’s arm can sense vibrations and identify threats in its environment. Researchers want to replicate this capability, allowing a robot to detect footsteps and, if necessary, hide.

The scorpion’s tail system helps it change its center of motion and gravity. Scientists have also been looking at building a robot version of a scorpion’s tail, which helps the arthropod change its center of motion and gravity.
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Insects inspire military mini drones | Fox News

3M-TA3 · Sep 20, 2014

Hoping that Microsoft wins the bid for the OS or that they buy the company that does. Imagine seeing a BSOD in Schwarzenegger's eyes every 10 seconds or so.

tulianr · Nov 11, 2014

The robo karate kid! Terrifying two legged giant robot being developed by Google learns to stand on one leg - and recreates scene from cult film
By Mark Prigg for MailOnline
11 November 2014

For fans of the cult film the Karate Kid, it is a familiar pose.

However, in the latest video from the US military team developing a two legged fighting robot, the buildup to 'crane kick' is seen in a new way.

The researchers taught the robot to stand on one leg - recreating a key scene from the film in the process.

The Atlas robot has already shown it can walk, jump and even drive a car

THE ATLAS ROBOT
According to Boston Dynamics, Atlas is a 'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain.

'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment.

'In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.'

The Atlas robot created by Google-owned firm Boston Dynamics is a formidable figure at 6ft 2in tall and weighing in at 330lb.

The robot boasts 28 hydraulically actuated joints and stereo vision, and is one of the most advanced robots ever created.

However, it's not just karate - Ian has another trick up his sleeve - software written by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Interaction which allows him to drive a car.

'To achieve this level of maneuverability in robots, researchers at IHMC look toward nature,' the team say.

'Inspired by the speed of cheetahs, the endurance of horses, the maneuverability of monkeys, and the versatility of humans, IHMC researchers are on a quest to develop legged robots that are fast, efficient, and graceful, with the mobility required to access many of the same places that humans can.'

At the US Government's Robo-Olympics, Ian came second, despite competing as a virtual software simulation.

Despite his lack of limbs, the world's most innocuously named 'bot was able to walk, carry a fire hose and, most impressively, get in a car and drive it.

The 'crane' stance, being held by Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (played by Ralph Maccio left) in the 1984 film inspired the latest movements of the Atlas robot. It demonstrates strong balancing skills and composure and showcases the agility of the Google-owned machine, said the firm

Atlas robot performs impressive karate kid style balancing act

Atlas is a high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain, Boston Dynamics said.

'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment. In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.

The researchers taught the robot the trick to show off its balance.

The Atlas robot has an articulated sensor head includes stereo cameras and a laser range finder so it can 'see' where it is going.

'Articulated, sensate hands will enable Atlas to use tools designed for human use. Atlas includes 28 hydraulically-actuated degrees of freedom, two hands, arms, legs, feet and a torso.

'An articulated sensor head includes stereo cameras and a laser range finder.'

Atlas is powered from an off-board, electric power supply via a flexible tether - although a new version promises to remove this.

Read more: The robo karate kid! Terrifying two legged giant robot being developed by Google learns to stand on one leg - and recreates scene from cult film | Daily Mail Online

BTPost · Nov 11, 2014

See that 1 1/2" umbilical plugged in to His back... Until they get rid of that, he can do all that crap, he wants but he will not be engaging anyone, or anything, outside the Lab.... Very expensive Toy......

Let us see what happens if someone knocks the CinderBlock out from under him....
My Bet, He falls on his A$$, and breaks something.....

kellory · Nov 11, 2014

that is promised with the next model.

gunbunny · Nov 11, 2014

Having enough power will always be the downfall of mechanical devices. Until we find a much better way of storing energy, equipment like this will stay in the lab. Someday, they will figure out how to mimic our digestive system and make the robot have to eat something... Like human blood for example, to make energy. I'm sure that has a bunch of scientists pondering all the peaceful, innocent civilian uses for their mechanical monstrosities.

kellory · Nov 11, 2014

Tiny battery is made from lots of even tinier "nanopore" batteries

Bat-hook device taps into overhead power lines

kellory · Nov 11, 2014

New Nanoscale supercapacitor can store 100 times more energy

gunbunny · Nov 21, 2014

The hyper-real robots that will replace receptionists, pop stars... and sex dolls: Unnervingly human androids coming to a future very near you | Daily Mail Online

Here come the fembots!

BTPost · Nov 21, 2014

We have. Rumbah (the Robot Vacumn) that runs around our Front Room at 4:30Am every morning and keeps the floor, very nice. We had one, before, but it died, and we sent it to Robot Heaven. She had wanted to replace it for years, but never had the resources, until recently. I really like the machine, and it sAves me hauling out the Old Vacumn, and doing the job by hand.

Yard Dart · Nov 21, 2014

BTPost said: ↑

We have. Rumbah (the Robot Vacumn) that runs around our Front Room at 4:30Am every morning and keeps the floor, very nice. We had one, before, but it died, and we sent it to Robot Heaven. She had wanted to replace it for years, but never had the resources, until recently. I really like the machine, and it sAves me hauling out the Old Vacumn, and doing the job by hand.
Click to expand...

We have one as well.... I call him George, and he does a good job most days, unless the dogs hassle him!!!

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