Robotics

About a year and a half ago, I heard a roboticist say the only thing stopping robots from physically doing nearly everything humans can do is an adequate, lightweight, long-lasting power supply. In other words, basically the same thing holding back electric cars, only more so.

Asimov's robot

ChunkyC said:

They certainly seem to have worked out the balance issues for bipedal robots. Wowzers.

Will we see machines like Isaac Asimov's humaniform robots anytime soon? I'm thinking yes. Very soon.

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It wouldn't surprise me a bit, but we still need that power supply. Then again, if some of the current research proves accurate, we seem to be getting very close to fusion power supplies that may well be safe enough, small enough, and more than powerful enough, to use in cars and robots. If this happens, all bets are off.

Development always lags behind research, and implementation always lags behind development, but I'd be willing to bet that in twenty years we'll have robots very close to Asimov's. Possibly even equal to his, though I wouldn't stake much money on this.

Jamesaritchie said:

It wouldn't surprise me a bit, but we still need that power supply. Then again, if some of the current research proves accurate, we seem to be getting very close to fusion power supplies that may well be safe enough, small enough, and more than powerful enough, to use in cars and robots.

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WHOA! Where did you hear that? I want references! Fusion has been the great boondoggle since the 50's or '60's - commercial fusion power generation has been "only ten years away" for the past 50 years. I've seen the video of Bussard's speech at Google, but even if that works it'll be for a traditional steam-driven power plant, not for something as small as a car.

Here's a couple of much more likely near-future power tecnologies, these for smaller devices, laptops and cell phones. First, fuel cells running a laptop available now (or rather, was announced over two years ago, dunno if it was actually available):
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=a5sZn3vGo1js&refer=asia
Then there are the mirco turbines running off butane (as in cigarette lighters) - these give more power for longer time than the best batteries of the same weight and volume. I expect personal robots would be run on something like this (or maybe a little larger):
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/13865/
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/08/tiny_jet_engine.html

Jamesaritchie said:

If this happens, all bets are off.

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I'll be as surprised as anyone. You know what temperature it takes to do fusion? It's hot, I tell you, it's really hot!

I heard something about solar paint somewhere, wonder if that's some sort of possibility; maybe a solar fabric?

Check out Honda's website and go to the Asimo button. 'He' went on sale (really a rental program) to the general public in 05 or 06 in Japan. 'He' will be the first public model available, I would guess. I've already seen Honda's ads that they put in GoodHouskeeping to present Asimo as "one of the family". I think the ads were a bit before their time and haven't seen anymore.

I also think that the Rumba and derivatives are the first wave. Also, there are some dolls on the toy market that are precursors to a family robot.

The public has to be primed to really embrace the concept. I'm curious why I Robot was such a dud as a movie.

Which current research estimate is that? They're having containment issues with industrial size fusion plants as is, shrinking it down isn't going to make the issue much easier. The closest, barring any Eureka! sized discoveries, is ITER and IF that goes according to schedule it will only be finished in 2016:

http://www.iter.org/

You sure you're not thinking of micro-fuel cells?

merper said:

Which current research estimate is that? They're having containment issues with industrial size fusion plants as is, shrinking it down isn't going to make the issue much easier. The closest, barring any Eureka! sized discoveries, is ITER and IF that goes according to schedule it will only be finished in 2016:

http://www.iter.org/

You sure you're not thinking of micro-fuel cells?

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No, I'm thinking about the latest alternative fusion research by Dr. Robert Bussard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard A video of his talk about the research can be found here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

I've talked to a couple of physicists who say Bussard is going to be publicly blasted for this, largely because it may well take a lot of dollars away from many other scientists, but that he definitely seems to be onto to something very serious.

He believes he's solved most of the problems, and his test results are certainly impressive. If he's right, or as some are saying, merely on the right road, neither containment nor size is going to be a problem. Neither is radiation.

Intriguing about Bussard. I don't know if he's right, but he's certainly no scam artist. Where's he been looking for funding? I'm surprised Richard Branson hasn't picked up on it. After all it's only $200 million in funding.

I hope he's set up a good system to protect his work, as he is getting on in years, and I'm sure there are certain people out there who might feel inclined to help him along.

merper said:

Intriguing about Bussard. I don't know if he's right, but he's certainly no scam artist. Where's he been looking for funding?

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Did you see the whole video? He was speaking at Google because Google has lots of money. As the slashdot article on this was titled, "Should Google go nuclear?"

I mean other than google.

merper said:

Intriguing about Bussard. I don't know if he's right, but he's certainly no scam artist. Where's he been looking for funding? I'm surprised Richard Branson hasn't picked up on it. After all it's only $200 million in funding.

I hope he's set up a good system to protect his work, as he is getting on in years, and I'm sure there are certain people out there who might feel inclined to help him along.

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The military was funding him, and there's now some private money, but I'm told he owns some patents, and they're taking things slow.

I've also been told he's going to have trouble getting money from traditional sources, primarily because of flak and threats from the "fusion the old way" crowd.

But he certainly isn't a scam artist, and neither are those who have been working with him. Every last one of his colleagues have impeccable credentials. His results have been very impressive, and I suspect things will heat up in the next couple of years.

Even if he's made some mistakes, it still looks like he's onto something real.

He says he can show proof-of-concept with just $1-2 Million. I don't know why he doesn't just ask for that first. It's the other $198 Mill that's scaring away investors.

kdnxdr said:

*snipped for brevity*I also think that the Rumba and derivatives are the first wave.

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The Roomba (and Scooba and Dirt Dog) are the consumer products of iRobot Corp. who are doing a great deal of development for the military as well.

These guys are ones to watch - they've got all that military R&D $$, marketing oomph, as well as a large nerd fan base (count me in, I even wrote a poem and blog about my Roomba).

What I wonder is how far the robot industry is going to go. There's plenty of money to be made but will we see porn-bots before janitor-bots?
My bet goes to the porn-bots There would be such a huge demand for them IMO. Seriously.

Love Bicentenial Man btw.

I think that unless they start selling afordable robots very soon there could be some trouble in the future. We're all pretty open minded and intelligent people here but the masses have mostly thought of robots as metal creatures that kill their creators for quite a while now. I predict that an android will be a scary thing unless they slowly get us used to the idea of something looking a bit like a human but without a soul.

IMO though... I want one that looks like Data "fully functional and anatomically correct" *rowr*

by the time the the sun's light hits the earth, its putting out something like one horsepower per square yard.

Or something.

Cant remember the exact number.

It's a fairly diffuse power source, better suited for long term accumulation, not surges of unlimited power that might be used by, say, a super-jumping morphing robot. with fricken laser beams.

Jamesaritchie said:

His results have been very impressive, and I suspect things will heat up in the next couple of years.

Even if he's made some mistakes, it still looks like he's onto something real.

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Sure, but to keep things in perspective he talks about an effective design being about 10 metres in diameter - not including the control system, etc. (The 1 metre diameter design won't be able to produce power - just demonstrate that the technique can generate a decent energy well) Fascinating subject, though. Hope his design does work.

Mind you, we make enough robots now. We just manufacture them biologically instead of mechanically.

Mac

In the Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2010, or so, that robotics will be so commonly used as body part replacements that we will have bionic droids, and that the legal system will be fighting out who is human and who is not human.

kdnxdr said:

In the Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2010, or so, that robotics will be so commonly used as body part replacements that we will have bionic droids, and that the legal system will be fighting out who is human and who is not human.

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I've got that book, it's in my to-read-queue. I forget when it was published, but it's 2007 right now, and I don't see this happening in another three years or so. I'm optimistic about science and technology (at least as far as how much more we'll have, not neccesarily about who will benefit from its use), but that seems a little too optimistic to me.

One thing we should all do, regardless, is have a copy of this, just in case.

My own intro to how far "intelligent machines" have come in recent years seems very mundane on the surface. A music-supply catalogue showed up, wherein they offered a "squeal stopper" for sound systems. This thing could track four audio channels, determine when unwanted feedback was starting, & filter down that chunk of audio spectrum in a few microseconds.

On sale for $89.95.

Holy crud -- this hunk of hardware thinks faster than most of my relatives!

Weirdly, there are some areas where AI still hasn't come up to speed. Some 20 years ago I was working on precog algorithms -- pattern recognition -- & the problem remains as tricky as ever. There's big military bucks to be made, but green recruits (for all their problems) are still far better in "shoot/don't shoot" situations than today's microprocessors -- whence I should note that your cellphone probably has more raw computing power than the typical ten-ton computer of 1975.

FWIW, there's some hints (like the original "Ginger" that led to the Segway) that Sterling-type heat converters will be the way to go for self-operating robots in the near future. Such machines should be able to scavenge from whatever sources are available outlets, solar, thermal, wind, even chemical.

A very impressive example of how good we are getting at making 'intelligent' machines is the competition to make a robotic vehicle to drive itself.

The first competition in 2004 - not a single vehicle made it to the finish line!
The second competition in 2005 - five finished.

That's a huge leap in ability in only a year.

For the new one in 2007 - the robot cars will have to obey all traffic laws and cope with other vehicles on the road.

So I predict that by 2010 they'll have a vehicle that can drive itself fine. They won't be available to the public, but they will exist.

FWIW, there's some hints ... that Sterling-type heat converters will be the way to go for self-operating robots in the near future. Such machines should be able to scavenge from whatever sources are available outlets, solar, thermal, wind, even chemical.

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Remember, though that there is no such thing as a Sterling heat converter. Only a Sterling heat DIFFERENCE converter. Thus, you need one part of the machine in heat and the other in cold to extract energy from the difference.

Mac

Mac H. said:

Sure, but to keep things in perspective he talks about an effective design being about 10 metres in diameter - not including the control system, etc. (The 1 metre diameter design won't be able to produce power - just demonstrate that the technique can generate a decent energy well) Fascinating subject, though. Hope his design does work.

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I was going to comment on this but you were faster. This problem won't be solved soon either, since it's a geometric problem. The better the volume to surface ratio, the better the energy needed for containment / energy output ratio.
I think our recent advances in nanotechnology will make capacitors the energy storage devices of the future. If you can create particles that are only a couple of atoms in diameter, that'll give you a real boost in surface area compared to the old tinfoil&paper capacitors.

Anthony Ravenscroft said:

Weirdly, there are some areas where AI still hasn't come up to speed. Some 20 years ago I was working on precog algorithms -- pattern recognition -- & the problem remains as tricky as ever. There's big military bucks to be made, but green recruits (for all their problems) are still far better in "shoot/don't shoot" situations than today's microprocessors -- whence I should note that your cellphone probably has more raw computing power than the typical ten-ton computer of 1975.

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Well our brains evolved over several hundreds of thousands of years into optimized pattern-recognition CPUs (by now we're actually overshooting the mark. Everytime you see a face in a cloud that's your pattern-recognition programming producing false positives ), while the programmers only had a couple of decades to play with computers. Give'em time.

Thump said:

I predict that an android will be a scary thing unless they slowly get us used to the idea of something looking a bit like a human but without a soul.

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I don't think we'll see humanoid robots anytime soon. Not even after robots become more common. "Form follows function" is pretty important, even more so when it's a complicated and expensive machine. And a humanoid robot is pretty versatile but still besides the point.
Sure, he could mow lawn as well as vacuum the floor and wash the dishes, but he still needs tools for all that. It's far more efficient to just make a robotic lawnmower and a robotic vacuum and skip the android.