Upcoming Robot Competitions Include Handshakes, Law Breaking
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 18 of June , 2010 at 12:25 am
Robots could go a long way towards gaining the trust of humans if they were capable of a decent handshake. Ben Gurion University in Israel is hosting a competition for handshaking robots, hoping to spur some innovation into a human-like handshake from an artificial hand. Handshakes are tricky in the same way that facial expressions are tricky: lots of information can be transmitted based on slightly different (and somewhat nebulous) movement characteristics. I mean, can you quantify the differences between a friendly handshake and an evil handshake? Or, a please-hire-me-handshake versus an I-promise-to-have-her-back-by-9-sir handshake? This is what the winning robot will have to be able to do… Good luck. The competition takes place next year.
If you’re in the mood for something a bit more, uh, wantonly destructive, SparkFun (who also host an autonomous vehicle competition) is sponsoring an ‘Antimov’ competition, in the spirit of not being in the spirit of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The objective will be to create a robot that completes a trivial task in an excessively inefficient manner and then destroys itself. While large explosives, untethered rocket engines, and high powered lasers aren’t permitted, the scoring encourages creativity:
-Inefficiency (0-25 points) – the inefficiency of the initial task. The more complicated and inefficient, the higher the score.
-Pointlessness (0-25 points) – the pointlessness of the performed task. The more trivial the task, the higher the score.
-Drama (0-25) points) – the dramatic element to the robot’s self-destruction. The more poetic, creative, and dramatic the death, the higher the score.
-Destruction (0-25 points) – the completeness the robot’s self-destruction. The more in-operable and devastated the robot is at the end of its performance, the higher the score.
If you ask me, this competition is virtually certain to end in tears. Maybe tears of joy, maybe tears of sadness, or maybe explodey robot tears… Or maybe, hopefully, all three. Watch for it on October 16.
[ Jerusalem Post ] VIA [ PopSci ]
[ SparkFun ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]
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Category: Competitive
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