For the 4th of July back in 2009, we saw some PoV video from a robot plane outfitted with remotely launched roman candles. It was pretty sweet, but it’s definitely been put to shame by the above vid, which shows a tricopter UAV doing fireworks battles with hydrogen filled balloons and air defense systems.

While I hate to turn such a cool project into a rant, this video showed up at the end of a TechCrunch article that’s essentially just another flavor of the obligatory “robots are going to kill us all” piece that media who know nothing about robots like to write because it scares people. Since I haven’t in a little while, I’m going to address a couple of these points right after the break.

From the article:

“I immediately start thinking of kit-built UAVs packed with Semtex and targeted via GPS. Voila, poor man’s cruise missiles, available to any hardware hacker with a grudge.”

I won’t deny that this kind of situation is hypothetically possible, but it’s possible in the same way that anybody “with a grudge” can get a car or a gun and be more dangerous than a UAV would be. Singling out robots as being particularly dangerous weapons is intentionality deceptive and unfair.

“Then there’s the smuggling problem.”

While I’m no expert on drug smuggling, my guess is that transporting drugs using unmanned aircraft, boats, or submarines will basically never be cost effective considering the cost to develop the craft, the risks associated with running the craft, the payload that the craft would be able to carry, and the myriad of other lower-tech ways that exist to smuggle drugs in bulk. Again, yes, it’s technically possible that robots could be used in this way, but it’s not realistic.

What makes drones dangerous is that, unlike most technologies, they can and will decouple criminals from their crimes.

After all the hyperbole, this seems to be the relevant point that the author of this article is trying to make. Potentially, an unmanned GPS-guided aircraft could be programmed to autonomously crash into a set of GPS coordinates, and it’s true that this is a capability that’s unique to robots. And potentially, that robot would be very difficult to trace back to its source. Okay, so now what? What are we supposed to do? Stop developing the technology? Make GPS devices illegal? Stop teaching people how to program robots?

Essentially, my point here is that with any new technology, you can come up with worst-case examples of how it can be used that are guaranteed to scare people. Pick anything you want: cars, airplanes, electricity, medicine, the Internet… In each case, it’s possible to take some aspect of that technology and focus on how dangerous it is.

I won’t beat this to death, but let’s use cars as an easy example. Imagine for a sec that it’s 1900 or thereabouts, you’re used to walking around and riding horses, and people are starting to talk about these big metal things that move around super fast by using controlled explosions. I bet it would be pretty easy to convince people that they’re just going to run them over and blow up, especially since to some extent, it’s true, that happens. But imagine what it would be like now if people had believed that stuff and stifled the development of the car. It would have set back society as a whole, not just that technology.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to minimize the importance of issues like this, and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be discussed. The thing that gets my goat is when robots and robotics are presented with an intentional bias designed to scare people. It’s bad reporting designed to take cheap shots to illicit a reaction from a generally uninformed audience, but the worst part is that it’s bad for the industry as a whole, an industry that’s focused on convincing the public that robots are a good and important technology with the potential for making all of our lives better.

[ RCExplorer ] VIA [ TechCrunch ]

This is InBirdie. InBirdie plays golf, and it’s apparently the world’s most sophisticated golf robot (besides Putter Bot, of course). It can accurately judge distances and slopes and is supposedly able to reliably nail hole-in-ones, at least on the putting green. When it comes to driving, it looks like InBirdie might need a bit of a motor upgrade. Or an air cannon of some sort… Those are legal in golf, right?

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I have a beef with golf as a sport, it’s simply because it seems ludicrous to have a tiny little ball that’s supposed to go in a tiny little hole when you have such a gigantic course. The proportions are all wrong, that’s all.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

Robot ethics is always a pretty hairy subject to tackle, largely because human ethics is something that’s hard to reduce to logical rules, and robots really, really like logical rules. There are ways to try and make it work, though, and researchers at the University of Connecticut have been trying to combine machine learning with traditional ethical philosophy to teach robots to behave ethically.

The approach they’re taking is based on a technique pioneered by a philosopher named David Ross, who’s automatically awesome because he’s Scottish. Ross suggested that when people make ethical decisions, they’re actually balancing a bunch of different variables against each other, including things like ‘do good,’ ‘don’t do harm,’ ‘keep your promises,’ ‘don’t be annoying,’ and other things in that vein. Variables, you say? You know what are good with variables? Robots, that’s what.

In this demo, for example, Nao is trying to give medication to someone who doesn’t want it. The robot is considering several variables here, including the importance of taking the medication at all, the importance of taking the medication at a specific time, and the implications of the patient’s refusal. Essentially, Nao does some math to balance the values of these variables, and decides that the patient gets to refuse their meds once, but after that Nao appeals to a higher authority (the doctor, who we can probably assume is a human).

So where do the values for all of these variables come from in the first place? That’s the tricky bit, but for things like medications, you can see how it would be possible to come up with figures. Other values (like the importance of respecting the wishes of a human) are much harder to quantify, but part of the hope is that robots will be able to observe the results of their ethical decisions, and use that information to help them make better choices in the future.

[ UConn ]

Murata had a booth at CES, which was super cool, because they brought their Murata Boy and Murata girl robots to impress people with, and to illustrate the fact that Murata makes stuff that you care about. And they really do make a lot of stuff that you care about, but since it’s all itty bitty electronic components, regular consumers like you and me have no idea how integral Murata is to our lives. Hence, the robots.

For example, did you know that Murata makes capacitors?

There are 100,000 (!) monolithic ceramic capacitors in this jar, and your mobile phone uses about 300 of them. Sweet!

After the jump, check out a few more pics of Murata Boy and Murata Girl.

[ Murata ]

Adam wrote in to keep the balls rolling with Sarcoman, who can juggle three balls at once. While I’m not sure on the details, I believe that this robot is actually using a vision system to make dynamic adjustments to its movements based on the paths of the balls, as opposed to simply repeating a movement pattern.

This is a four year old video, which is basically forever ago in the robot world. Anyone got anything that tops this?

[ Sarcos ]

Man, you just can’t make this stuff up:

A robot met its end near Coors Field tonight when the Denver Police Department Bomb Squad detonated the “suspicious object,” bringing to an end the hours-long standoff between police and the approximately eight-inch tall figurine.

A bomb squad robot was sent it to examine the troublesome robot before a bomb squad officer, dressed in heavy protective gear, took a turn.

Robot vs. robot! That must have been pretty epic.

Everything ended badly (for the toy robot) when it was “rendered safe” as police decided to blow it into chunks, just in case it decided to attack them. After the remains of the robot were cleaned up, the citizens of Denver went about their lives, slightly more confused than they were the day before.

Congrats to the Denver PD, though, as they struck a preemptive blow against the inevitable robot takeover.

[ Denver Post ]

We know that President Obama likes robots. We also know that President Obama is (at least little) scared of robots. On his recent trip to Japan, Barack came face to face with both Paro and HRP-4C, and it goes just about how you’d expect:

I’m with ya, buddy… Just back away slowly or she’ll snap your neck.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]

-What robots might think about the balloon coffee ground grabber hand thing (thanks Sean!)

-Hizook has more details on Cody, the sponge bath robot from yesterday

-RobotShop now serving Europe

-Send your name to Mars on MSL (thanks Oliver!)

-Intelligent wheelchair project from MIT CSAIL

-Gallery of crazy Roomba knockoffs from TIROS2010

-Gearlog’s take on the scariest robots of all time

-Cute little crawlspace robot

-Video: Luke arm goes shopping

-iFixit’s total Pleo teardown

-Plug and play solar panels for LEGO NXT

Well, what do you think? Is it worth your time to have this random robot stuff to look through occasionally, or would you rather I just put things on the Twitter feed?

Thanks!

Note: this video might not display unless you click through to the post page

Everyone’s favorite TV show, NewsHour on PBS, had a segment on robots last week, and it’s now online. There’s nothing super new and exciting, at least not for loyal BotJunkie readers, but there’s bits of new footage of PR2′s towel folding and some other stuff. They couldn’t avoid a breathless “How close are we to being replaced by robots?” tagline, but we’ll forgive them, because Jim Lehrer is badass.

[ PBS NewsHour ]

Thanks Mom!

Well, I totally forgot about Murata Girl’s birthday on September 23rd. Sorry about that, I know you’re all disappointed. But now that she’s a year older, she’s learned how to negotiate a curvy balance beam, which is a good 100% curvier than the straight balance beam she was wheeling on last year.

So, we’ve got Murata Boy riding a bike, Murata Girl riding a unicycle… Next? Murata Dog on a pogo stick. It’s just logical progression, right?

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]