Sepios robot
Credit: ETH Zurich

A new marine robot, called Sepios, has recently joined the ever-growing robotic animal kingdom. Built by a group of students from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, this biomimetic robot was inspired by yet another marine creature, namely a cuttlefish. The interesting thing is that Sepios can actually do better than the creature that inspired it.

Cuttlefish have two elongated fins that produce a beautiful undulating motion and allow these animals to move forward and backward, turn on the spot, or hover. Sepios has four such fins. The extra pair makes it possible for the robot to propel itself in any direction, including straight up and down, and rotate on any axis. Simply put, Sepios is omnidirectional, which cannot be said about the cuttlefish.

The fins are driven by the total of 36 servo motors and can reach the maximum speed of 1.8 km/h.

Perhaps the robot’s biggest advantage is that its fins cause very little turbulence and allow for a greater control as opposed to many other underwater vehicles. Sepios, for example, can easily navigate through patches of sea grass without leaving a mess behind.

Such properties suggest that Sepios will come in handy for marine life observation. The video below certainly proves the point, as Sepios seems to get on quite well with real fish.

Sepios is not the first biomimetic robot to use undulating propulsion. Its predecessors include this knifefish robot developed by researchers at Northwestern University and another cuttlefish robot from NextGen Aeronautics. Still, Sepios is the first to feature four undulating fins, making it the only truly omnidirectional vehicle that uses this kind of propulsion.

The amount of robots inspired by various marine critters has increased tremendously in the past years. Various types of fish, mollusks and even jellyfish consistently provide scientists with new ideas.

You may also be interested in this recent announcement from the National University of Singapore, which is developing a whole range of bio-inspired marine robots, including a smart robotic sea turtle.

C-Enduro vehicle sets off
Credit: National Oceanography Centre

Several decades ago, Earth observation satellites transformed how we keep track of changes on our planet. Now we are rapidly crossing a new technological threshold that will allow us to pick up even the most subtle variations in the environment.

Imagine swarms of autonomous robots roaming the globe by land, sea and air, together producing the ultimate picture of what is going on on our planet. This great vision is already becoming a reality – or at least with respect to the sea.

Recently UK scientists have unleashed an entire fleet of autonomous marine robots to travel about 500 km across an area of southwestern UK. The fleet comprises 4 types of vehicles, including both underwater and surface ones. The great thing is that all the vehicles rely on renewable sources of energy, thanks to which they can spend months offshore without any human intervention.

Instruments on board the vehicles record key parameters of the ocean, ranging from the temperature of the water to the density of plankton populations. Equipped with GoPro cameras, the robots are also expected to take some spectacular shots of marine life.

The Exploring Ocean Fronts project is led by the National Oceanography Centre and is already referred to as the most ambitious of its kind in Europe. The project is now in phase two, in which several vehicles are attempting to track acoustically tagged fish. The goal is to get an insight into the daily habits of marine life, which, believe it or not, we know very little about. The obtained information will inform future decisions regarding ocean management, including those directed at achieving sustainable fisheries.

Potential benefits of such massive robot observation missions, of course, go way beyond that. For instance, a better understanding of how the ocean varies over time and space can immensely benefit climate and weather research.

Xenex’s germ-zapping robot
Credit: Xenex

With the official Ebola death toll approaching 5,000, scientists are increasingly concerned with exploiting all possible ways of fighting this deadly disease. While the biggest labs around the world are working on a vaccine that will hopefully exterminate Ebola once and for all, roboticists are developing more unconventional ways of preventing the spread of the disease.

Recently, a lot of media attention has been focused on Xenex, a San Antonio-based company, which has developed a robotic assistant that helps medical professionals remove traces of infectious diseases, such as ebola, left in hospital premises. Even better, the robot can fence infections out 24/7 with 99,9 % efficiency, thus preventing any potential delays in the operation of a hospital.

The robot does that by firing powerful ultraviolet pulses that wipe out all nasty viruses and bacterias sneaking in the corners of hospital rooms. And while the technology of scrambling viral DNA with ultraviolet light is not particularly new, the idea of a roboticized Ebola killer is certainly to everybody’s liking.

But here is the catch: it does not take a genius to realize that Xenex’s machine has no more right to be called a robot than any other piece of medical equipment. What Xenox has developed is not an autonomous Roomba-like Ebola hunter. Essentially, it is a wheeled cart with a programmable ultraviolet lamp, and, although there is no doubt about its effectiveness in killing Ebola and other germs, we should choose words properly.

Does this mean, however, that robotics has nothing to offer in the biggest recorded outbreak of the virus?  Fortunatelly, the answer is no. Even existing medical robots have a huge potential for fighting diseases like Ebola, but deciding how to effectively use them in harsh conditions, such as those in West Africa, is a complicated issue.

In an attempt to clarify how robots can contribute to the ongoing battle, the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M University is organizing a policy workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers. The workshop will help identify what robots can do in order to minimize human contact with the virus, detect the virus and provide expert consulting to those who contracted the virus. You can learn more about the upcoming workshop HERE.

Octopuses, squids, cuttlefish and other cephalopods are often called the chameleons of the sea for their dazzling ability to instantly change textures and colour patterns of their skin in response to the complex marine environment. For a long time, this property of cephalopods has inspired awe and wonder. Now researchers are getting closer than ever to creating camouflage materials that mimic these astonishing creatures.

Scientists from the US and China created a flexible camouflage sheet that can change colour to match its surroundings. To achieve that, the researchers copied the remarkable three-layered structure of the cephalopod skin. The results of the study are published in the PNAS journal.

The camouflage sheet consists of a grid made of 1 mm cells. The top layer is filled with temperature-controlled dye, which can instantly switch from black to white when a certain temperature is reached. The middle layer contains special actuators that produce an electric current, which raises the temperature and triggers the change. Finally, the bottom layer comprises an array of photosensors, responsible for detecting changes in light and transmitting them to the actuators. You can watch a demo of how the sheet works below.

Despite the overall similarity in the layered design, the working mechanism of the sheet is, of course, completely different from the working mechanism of the cephalopod skin.

In cephalopods, colour pigments are contained in small sacs called chromatophores. The sacs are driven by muscle contraction. When relaxed, these sacs shrink and become practically invisible. However, when contracted, their surface significantly expands, thus making them visible. Interestingly, the muscles can also change the texture of the skin, for instance, from flat to bumpy.

This peculiarity of cephalopod design was explored in another recent study, published in Nature Communications. The researchers developed a paper-thin, elastic film that can simultaneously change texture and colour on demand.

Cephalopods change their colourful skin patterns by contracting colour-filled cells. A team of scientists attempted to achieve the same using a specially designed elastomer.                           Qiming Wang et al./Nature Communications

The film is made of elastomer, a flexible and stretchable polymer. An important property of elastomers is that they can dynamically change texture under voltage. Stephen Craig, Duke University Professor of Chemistry and one of the leaders of the study, explains how the film works:

“The texturing and deformation of the elastomer further activates special mechanically responsive molecules embedded in the elastomer, which causes it to fluoresce or change color in response to voltage changes. Once you release the voltage, both the elastomer and the molecules return to their relaxed state – like the cephalopod skin with muscles relaxed.”

Depending on the intensity of electrical pulse, the surface of the elastomer becomes bumpy, at the same time creating different fluorescent patterns.                                                                             Qiming Wang et al./Nature Communications

Although both studies are nowhere near the complexity and colour range of cephalopods’ skin, they represent a huge step in the development of dynamic camouflaging materials and make us wonder where this technology will eventually end up.

Technological Singularity is based on the prediction that the development of AI powerful enough to surpass human intelligence will change the world as we know it, leading either to a catastrophic end of the human kind or to its miraculous ascent.

In a recent article in the Guardian, Alan Winfield, professor of electronic engineering at the University of the West of England, Bristol, discusses the pitfalls of being overly pessimistic or optimistic about the Technological Singularity.

In his judgment, the best way to approach the issue is to be both a little cautious and at the same time a little optimistic. The key, of course, is remaining within reasonable limits. For instance, believe it or not, the risk of an Apocalyptic event induced by an almighty AI is unreasonable, because it requires a very improbable sequence of events to occur, one of them being the very invention of such AI, which, according to Winfield, may be as far in the future as the invention of faster than light travel.

So for those on the other side of the spectrum who think that the arrival of ultra-sophisticated AI is inevitable in our life-time and will solve all our problems, you should probably let it go. Yes, AI systems are all around us today: they can drive cars, recognize speech and do dozens of other useful things, often making humans look silly. However, human intelligence is not about reaching perfection in one task. It is about learning, generalizing what has been learned, creating new knowledge, understanding meaning and context, and of course, being self-aware. These goals are far beyond our current understanding of AI.

The singularity talk, as Alan Winfield notes, is not completely innocent. Being too pessimistic or optimistic about the Technological Singularity is to indulge in the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis. Focusing on some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario may not be the best of ideas, when we should be focused on combating more pressing and equally apocalyptic scenarios such as climate change.

You can read the full story by Alan Winfield in the Guardian HERE.

Read our previous post on singularity to learn about another take on the issue.

Credit: Daewoo

Everybody has been in a situation when we wish we had stronger arms or, even better, an extra pair of them. Whether it is attaching something large overhead or manipulating something heavy, we all know we are bound to run into the limitations of our own anatomical design. In some professions, such as construction work, these difficulties can surface practically every day. To make physical drudgery less stressful and traumatic, researchers around the globe are now developing a new kind of robots that will be worn on the body just like your regular backpack.

Wearable robotics flourishes on the collaboration between the human and the machine and has a huge potential in all kinds of physically challenging work. This idea has already been put to test by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world. Korean shipyards have long been known for their high degree of automatisation. Now it appears the Korean company has decided to go one step further.

The company has developed a wearable exoskeleton that allows workers to carry huge pieces of metal and other heavy components with no or little effort. The exoskeleton weighs around 30 kg, none of which, however, is felt by the wearer since the suit is designed to support itself and follow the wearer’s movements.

Credit: Daewoo

The prototype can lift and precisely manipulate objects with a mass of up to 30 kg. The test has demonstrated that this technology can indeed help workers with their daily tasks, although those who had a chance to take part in the test run say they would like to be able to move faster and lift even heavier weights – a goal the research team is already working towards: the current research target is an exoskeleton that can lift up to 100 kg and be used on a daily basis at shipyard facilities.

Another example of how wearable robots can literally give a hand to future workers comes from the MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology. The lab is working on a pair of lightweight robotic arms attached to a backpack that are envisioned to assist people with those tasks where our two arms are just not enough.

The project called SRL (Supernumerary Robot Limbs) is supported by Boeing and was recently used in a demo that involved installing ceiling panels in an airplane, a highly repetitive task that is difficult to perform on your own. By pushing the panels against the ceiling, the device can alleviate the worker from the necessity of simultaneously holding the panel, inserting the screws and using the screwdriver to attach it.

Watch the video below to see the prototype in action.

Information can be scary, and even more so when we find ourselves humbled by its immensity. In a press release issued earlier this week, the European Commission has once again demonstrated that it is not afraid of big data. Quite the opposite, Europe is more than ever ready to embrace it – a gesture, which is reflected in Europe’s strong bet on research projects like CEEDs, which uses big data to enhance human cognition and improve problem solving.

In a previous post, we already discussed CEEDs and the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), the heart of the project, located in the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The press release singles out CEEDs as an example of successful and highly promising big data research initiative.

Although XIM has so far mainly been applied to visualising brain (BrainX3) and historical (Bergen-Belsen reconstruction) data and will certainly bring about a huge qualitative change in how scientists work with tremendous amounts of information, the integration of this technology into more down-to-earth application fields seems imminent.

The press release reports that early interest in the XIM technology is already coming from several museums in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States, where it could potentially help with gathering and reacting to feedback from visitors. This naturally applies to many other public spaces such as shops, libraries and concerts. The CEEDs team is also conducting negotiations with several public, charity and commercial organisations to further extend the scope of application of the platform.

The CEEDs project coordinator Jonathan Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London pointed out that “anywhere where there’s a wealth of data that either requires a lot of time or an incredible effort, there is potential.” In science, whole disciplines, from satellite imagery inspection to oil prospecting and astronomy, could benefit immensely from this novel approach to processing information.

With projects like CEEDs, Europe is working its way towards a new data-driven economy, a long-time goal, which the European Commission is now actively promoting across national governments. The European approach towards big data is perhaps best expressed in the words of the vice-president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes: “Big data doesn’t have to be scary. Projects like this enable us to take control of data and deal with it so we can get to solving problems. Leaders need to embrace big data.”

You can also read this article to learn about some other exciting big data projects backed by the European Commission.

Credit: Real Humans

Although we may be decades away from building truly life-like humanoid robots, it is never too early to start questioning the legal and ethical implications of creating machines that are hard to tell apart from ourselves. In a brave leap of imagination, Real Humans, a popular Swedish TV show, written by Lars Lundstroem, deliberately blurs the line between humans and robots to explore what it means to be human.

The show, which could have been inspired by Hiroshi Ishiguro’s weirdest dream, is set in an alternative present-day Sweden, where extremely life-like androids with perfect looks called “hubots” are commercialised` to take care of all domestic and workplace drudgery.

With time, some hubots are programmed to acquire free will and become capable of entering into social and even intimate relations with humans. The story follows the emotional effects on two families in possession of hubots as well as the trials and tribulations of a group of hubots that decide to fight for their rights.

Real Humans has received a positive critical acclaim, even though it has been repeatedly characterised as creepy and disturbing, which in fact seems to be part of the writers’ intention. The premise of the show allows the creators to explore diverse philosophical questions as well as contemporary social issues.

Although the creators of the show claim that there was no science to rely on in the making of Real Humans, it is remarkable how the show’s vision resonates with some of the statements made recently by the mentioned Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro during the presentation of his latest creations, two eerily human-looking robot newscasters Kodomoroid and Otonaroid. “Making androids is about exploring what it means to be human,” Ishiguro explained to reporters, “examining the question of what emotion is, what awareness is, what thinking is.”

Hiroshi Ishiguro’s latest androids Kodomoroid and Otenaroid during the demonstration last month

Just like the creators of Real Humans, robotics researchers, such as Ishiguro, warn of possible legal and ethical complications that may arise when humans and robots form stronger bonds, especially if the latter look and behave like us. Most of the present-day robots look deliberately artificial, but there is no reason why it has to remain so once the technology becomes available to make them look human.

Real Humans was released in 2012 and screened in at least 50 other countries with great success. Now the show is to be remade in English, with the premiere scheduled for 2015.

Credit: Human Brain Project

Last week, the eyes of the scientific community were fixed on the € 1.2 billion Human Brain Project (HBP) as more than 150 European neuroscientists raised concerns over the project’s management in an open letter to the European Commission.

One of the two Europe’s Flagship Initiatives, the HBP spans 112 research institutions across 24 countries and was launched last year with the grand vision of creating a long-needed ICT infrastructure for future brain research. Not without controversy, the project adopted a bottom-up approach to build a computer simulation of the brain based exclusively on the fundamental understanding of neurons and their interactions.

The public outcry is not surprising given that the project has been surrounded by heated discussions from the very beginning when a number of labs refused to be part of the project because of its narrow focus on ICT and an apparent lack of basic neuroscience. Now many researchers fear that the inevitable failure of the project will cause a wave of adverse reaction to neuroscience undermining the future of the field.

The letter was largely driven by the recent changes made in the project plans for the next stage, which limits the role of cognitive scientists who pursue the difficult task of understanding the brain on the level of thought and behaviour. Now the labs working in this direction are to be repositioned from the project’s core to what is known as partnering projects (PPs). The concern is that, while the resulting computer simulations may not be completely useless, without a more pronounced theoretical component they will fail to elucidate brain functions.

A detailed review of the second stage by the EU commission is scheduled for January 2015 and the letter’s authors hope to bring the attention of the reviewers to the flaws in both science and management of the project. The second stage is expected to receive € 100 million over the course of 2 to 3 years, with a 50/50 split between the CP and the PPs.

The official response, released by the HBP two days after the letter, shows signs of disposition and openness to dialogue. The response states that “the members of the HBP are saddened by the open letter” and invite the signatories to engage in direct discussion with the project leaders. Importantly, the response strongly suggests that cognitive neuroscience and other basic research will have an increasingly crucial role in the project as the required ICT platform comes into place.

Lots of researchers still firmly stand by the project arguing it’s a long-needed change in brain research. You may also be interested in reading this article defending the project by Richard Frackowiak, the co-executive director of the HBP.

What is clear is that the HBP has not managed to entirely unite neuroscientists, but when it comes to such grand projects this is not as surprising as it may seem. The management might need to become more consensual and we can only hope that HBP will continue its 10-year journey to unravel the universe inside our heads.

Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign

Robots can be very strong, fast and enduring. However, unlike in animals, none of this strength comes from muscle, instead robots mainly rely on electrical motors and other hard and generally inflexible parts. But with all the advantages that conventional robot hardware can deliver, it still does not match the ability of muscle-powered animals to provide an accurate response to different physical environments. To address this downside of robotics, a group of researchers, led by Professor Rashid Bashir, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign developed tiny walking bio-robots powered by engineered muscle tissue.

The robot consists of a 6 mm long flexible 3D-printed backbone with two strains of muscle attached to each of its ends. The backbone has two little feet and is used both for walking and sustaining the structure. The important thing about the robot is that the muscle tissue used in it is the skeletal muscle, the one humans use to move around, which means that it can be easily turned on by administering electric impulses. Furthermore, by adjusting the frequency of the impulses, the robots’ speed can be modified.

The use of skeletal muscle allows for a better control over the robots’ movements. This significantly differs from the previous study conducted by the same group, where the researchers used heart tissue, which contracts non-stop and with a constant rate.

This technology is an important step on the way to integrating biological tissue in machines, which in some cases can be priceless. For example, muscle-powered robots are perfect for medical applications inside the body: the tissue is a perfect biodegradable material and such robots could run in a nutrient rich fluid without any additional power source. In addition, the use of muscle-powered limbs in biomimetic machine design would open hundreds of new possibilities, especially in the field of soft robotics. Imagine how much more lifelike a robotic starfish or octopus could be if powered by muscle tissue!

With the concept of a muscle-powered robot tested, the researchers are now preparing for the next step: the group envisions equipping their robots with light or chemically sensitive neurons for controlling direction of robot’s movement as well as testing new designs of the backbone to enable a wider range of motions.

The results of the study can found in PNAS in the article called “Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle.”