This year’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2013) was held in Tokyo, Japan— a globally recognized hotspot for some of the most fascinating robots on earth. Under the name of New Horizon, this conference aimed to get participants looking forward towards a new era of intelligent systems capable of meeting the needs of the fast-changing times we live in.

The event which was held over six days this November, drew top-notch experts from various areas of robotic expertise. Most of us robot lovers are well acquainted with rough-terrain rovers like AlphaDog, BigDog, and Cheetah. Responsible for developing the machines mentioned above, CTO and founder of Boston Dynamics, Mark Raibert, gave a plenary talk at this year’s IROS. The theme of his discourse centred on the theme of what makes machines capable of leaving the lab and entering the real world? And, how do we enable them with the kind of athleticism and agility normally only found in humans and animals?

But what about the robots we’d like to keep in labs? Masayuki Yamato, of Tokyo Women’s Medical University has been investigating the use of robots in regenerative medicine. In fact, Yamato is currently looking at how robots may be able to help fabricate transplantable layers of cells.

You may be familiar with the use of medical robots but now researchers like Tim C. Lüth from Technische Universität München in Germany are looking at ways to manufacture robots quickly for one-time use with individual patients. The solution is straight out of Sc-Fi: disposable robots made from 3D printers.

A large robot exhibit was also part of this year’s event- held every 2 years the International Robot Exhibition (IREX) marked it’s 20th anniversary. Many of the humanoid robots on display may have seemed to take on an almost eerily-human appearance. To explain the rhyme and reason for our feelings about creepily life-like bots, the event also held a special session:The Uncanny Valley Revisited, A Tribute to Masahiro Mori

From November 6–8, nearly 5000 of Europe’s top researchers, engineers, industry representatives, politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs, and students gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania to share insight and future visions for the future of ICT in Europe. The global event also provided  an inspiring setting for the discussion of European ICT policy as well as networking opportunities for business, research, and innovation groups.

The event —the largest in Vilnius during Lithuanian’s presidency of the EU Council— folds into a greater European initiative: the EU Horizon 2020 programme. This visionary plan, combines EU funding for both scientific research, and innovation. This year’s event included: an international conference, an exhibition, a networking session, an investor forum and events for students and junior researchers.

The exhibition involved over 180 participants from the ICT community. CSN (the Convergent Science Network) was well received with an exhibit co-organized by the project efAA (Experimental Functional Android Assitant, – EU Robotics Unit of DG Connect- ). The interactive installation titled “The Machine and I“ displayed graphics and drawings that provided futuristic visions of robots and their roles in human society. The project efAA, represented at ICT 2013 by the research group SPECS - UPF – Barcelona and by IIT, the Italian Institute of Technology, gave the iCub a chance to express it’s musical side as it entertained exhibit visitors through musical games as the DJ droid.

Over 40 international presenters covered various topics: from broadband Internet to cybersecurity and nanomaterials to artificial modeling of the human brain. Students and junior researchers had the opportunity to meet many of the conference speakers and other ICT-savvy representatives, later sharing their experience through social media.

The investor forum provided a perfect place for small and medium-sized ICT business owners and entrepreneurs to present their projects to investors, participate in special training programmes, and discuss key issues with business experts and corporate investors.

Events like this get just about everyone thinking: how will future technologies change the lives of those in generations to come?

While creepy, crawly, or just plain gross, insects are in fact the object of many scientists’ affections.Those involved in the field of biomimicry are attempting to figure out exactly how some of these fascinating critters have honed in on some pretty amazing skills.

Take the honey bee, for example. It’s an animal robotocists just can’t seem to get enough of these days. We featured a previous post on Harvard’s Robobee — a tiny little robot actually inspired by both bees and flies. Whats so great about these bugs? They’re speedy, energy efficient little creatures that can get wherever they need to go with nothing more than paper-thin wings — It doesn’t get much better than that when it comes to sophisticated locomotion!

A recent study carried out by out by researchers from The Vision Centre and The University of Queensland Brain Research Institute in Australia, describes how bees manage to land so gracefully. Because insects’ eyes aren’t wide-set like ours, they can’t gauge distances the same way we do. From a bee’s perspective, if the view of an object is expanding too quickly as it’s approaching, the insect knows it’s got to start hitting the breaks. If the view of the object is still expanding slowly, the bee knows it can speed up because it’s got a ways to. So the name of the game when it comes to bee landing is to keep the expansion of that image constant — that’s the only way they can guarantee a seamless touch-down.

Based on the bee strategy, researchers came up with a mathematical model for guiding landings.This finding could prove to be very useful in the development of robotic air crafts that currently rely on costly and cumbersome radars and sonars. An effort to copy how bees land may only require a simple vision-based system relying mainly on simple video cameras.

If you want to learn more about bio-inspired flying machines, check out the TED talk above by Dr. David Lentink, a participant in the Convergent Science Network’s Living Machines Conference and the Barcelona Cognition, Brain and Technology Summer School (BCBT).

What’s the relationship between living and artificial systems? How can we combine the two to form sophisticated solutions to challenges in science and engineering? The annual conference Living Machines puts these questions under the microscope.

Conference chairs Paul Verschure (Director of the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems Group at Pompeu Fabra University) and Tony Prescott (Director of the Sheffield Centre for For Robotics, University of Sheffield ) hosted the 2013 events July, 29 – August, 2 at the Natural History Museum in London, a venue no less enchanting than last year’s edition which took place at Antonio Gaudi’s La Pedrera in Barcelona.

In addition to the workshops and the international roster of plenary speakers, this year’s conference featured a special exhibition on Living Machines at the London Science Museum.  Intelligent artifacts and biohybrid art made up the majority of installations displayed. Some of the stranger-than-fiction highlights included: a live musical performance featuring a humanoid robot; a robot model of ‘trace’ fossils from the dawn of life; music composed by a bio-inspired computer programme that mimics natural selection; plant-like robots that grow and change shape; wearable computing for finding your way in darkness and a robot that powers itself by digesting insects.

The fascinating exhibition complemented captivating talks on Natural and Artificial Selves by University of California Berkeley’s Tarrence Deacon; Biomimetics for medical devices by Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena from Imperial College London; the history of living machines by Andrew Pickering from the University of Exeter, and several others.

Stay tuned for the Convergent Science Network’s next edition of Living Machines, coming up in the summer of 2014! To read more about the 2013 event click HERE.

Boston Dynamic’s been keeping dog lovers happy throughout their steady development of BigDog, a robot with uncannily canine gait and maneuvers. Now, feline aficionados can finally rejoice as WildCat makes its way into the robot world.

However this is not the the first time that Boston Dynamics has taken a crack at cat-like bots — WildCat’s predecessor is the Cheetah bot which boasted a running speed of 45 km/hour. While this machine’s no slow poke, it can currently only run at about 26 km/hour but its truly biomimetic design should have it up to speed with real-world wild cats in the near future.

As part of US’ Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program, robots like WildCat are being developed to increase the efficacy of military operations across a great range of missions.

And even though cats and dogs don’t normally get along in the real-world, humans may choose to have their robot counterparts working together. Machines like BigDog could be charged with the task of carrying heavy loads over long periods time, while ones like the WildCat might be used when there’s a need to maneuver with speed and agility.

But let’s not forget androids! If you were fascinated by Boston Dynamic’s PETMAN, it’s high time you check out its upgraded version Atlas. It may look a little scary in the video below but researchers are confident that bots like these might be able to help humans out in life-threatening situations.

They may be found in swarms of marvelous colours, or floating solitary like transparent pieces of blown glass. From waters East to West, and North to South the jellyfish knows little boundary regarding where it can call home and today, their claiming their territory in numbers never-before-seen.

The very-jelly outbreak has been the source of much frustration for the fishing industry. High numbers of jellies means that fishery resources can’t be easily renewed since a jelly’s preferred feast includes large amounts of larval fish.

So what’s caused the jelly infestation that has people around the world up in arms? Well, ironically, we have. By over-fishing massive quantities of  small, open-ocean fish such as sardines and anchovies, we’ve unintentionally killed off the jelly’s main competitor for access to one of it’s major food sources — zooplankton. Furthermore, over-fishing has also caused the diminution of natural jelly predators like the tuna and sea turtle.

A recent study performed by the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement looked at two ecosystems belonging to the same ocean current off the coast of Namibia. One population resides in a tightly restricted fishing zone, where the number of jellies have remained stable for the past 60 years. In the other—heavily-exploited zone— Jellyfish have started proliferating to high extremes.

So what can we do to stop the vicious cycle we’ve started?(unfortunately holding the anchovies on your next pizza just won’t cut it). Call in the jelly-fighting robots! The JEROS robot has been developed by the Korea Institute of Advanced Technology (KAIST) to help manage jelly fish populations.

Donghoon Kim et al. Experimental Tests of Autonomous Jellyfish Removal Robot System JEROS. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Volume 208, 2013, pp 395-403

Robots piloting their skills in South Korea’s Gyeongnam Masan Bay carry out these simple steps: first they detect the jellies using a camera and a special algorithm. Once targets have been identified, the robots — operating as a team, much like real ocean predators — suck the jellyfish upwards into a grid of thin wires which can destruct about 900 kg of jellyfish per hour. While these bots have currently only been tested for their jelly-fighting capabilities, researchers are keen to explore how they might be able to help us out in trying to solve other human-induced problems like: oil spills and water pollution.

An ancient Arabic machine manuscript

What’s so great about machines?

It’s easy to see how some of today’s mechanical marvels like NASA’s Mars Spirit Rover or The HRP-4C, created by The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), inspire jaw-dropping wonder. Who made that? And how on earth does it do that? Are all natural questions that come to mind in the face of these modern works. However, there’s something about animated bits of wire and metal that have intrigued humans for centuries.

The ancient Greek mathematician and engineer, Hero of Alexandria  (c.AD 10–70), was rumoured to have built robots made locomotive through the use of air pressure. Accounts of the creation of a human-like automaton even go back as far as the 10th century BC, in the ancient Chinese Lie Zi text. And since their existence, people have prophesied about what their role could be, for both good and evil. Even Aristotle had an opinion on robots. After noting Homer’s reference to them in Lliad, he speculated  that robots might one day bring world-wide human equality, ultimately ending any want for slaves.

But our fascination with machines extends far beyond robots… from the measly coffee maker to the mighty space shuttle, we’ve included many in both our daily and monumental rituals. And speaking of a monumental ritual, you may want to check out what went  at the Burning Man festival this week. Artists there put on a terrific display when they ran 3.2 billion base pairs of encoded DNA run through pattern-generating software that was projected via a 60 W Laser. Talk about blurring the line between art and science.

And speaking of art, perhaps our fascination with machines has more to do with what we gain from the process of creation itself. The famed robotocist, Masahiro Mori, stated the following in the Japan Times after founding the first nation-wide robot-building competition in Japan back in the 80′s: “When we lose ourselves in an activity, we become creative, friendly and funny. Think of how children are when they are playing. They are completely absorbed in the game; their eyes shine and they are all smiles. They’re into the game, not themselves”.

Advances in  medical technology have played a major role in increasing people’s average life expectancy.
Although a lot of new technology is costly to develop and run,  a  study by Frank R. Lichtenberg published in 2009 by the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that life expectancy increased more rapidly in states that made the most use out of top medical imaging technologies. And surprisingly, those states did not experience larger increases in medical expenditure per capita. So while new diagnostic technology may be more costly than than its older counterparts, it’s use is likely reducing the need for even more expensive medical treatment in the long-run.

When looking at how modern machines are changing medicine, let’s go beyond  technologies that merely allow doctors to see inside our bodies. What about something that could serve as working representations of our individual bodies, allowing health care providers to test medical treatments on our (sort of) virtual clones?  A recent article in The Telegraph examines the notion of human doppelgangers for all….

The article takes us back to the work of Denis Noble and his colleagues at Oxford who created a working computer model of the human heart back in 1960. Doctors are now able to use this model to test different types of treatments for all sorts of cardiac malfunction, and other advances of this nature have even given researchers new insight into blood diseases like Sickle-cell.

Naturally, it would only be a matter of time until researchers would attempt to tackle the most complex organ in the human body which is why there’s big money out there for projects aiming to map the brain. In Europe, the Human Brain Project has officially been awarded 1 billion euros to work on modelling the brain over the next 10 years. This is of course no small challenge, and the European team won’t be attempting to go it alone. They’re calling for the support of researchers around the globe in the hopes of founding an international centre for brain research much like CERN (The European Centre for Nuclear Research). The US has shown a similar commitment to this type of research through their BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) and with large-scale  projects like this underway, experts believe it won’t be long until it will be possible to simulate a full virtual human body allowing doctors to test surgeries and new drugs on a simulated patient made just for you.

If you’re interested in this, you may also want to check out an article By the BBC: Digital Medicine: Machines for Living

The robots being built around the world seem to be as diverse as the cultures they come from. While some have been engineered solely for people’s practical needs, others have been made to appeal to and keep the company of humans.

While it’s clear that cultural environments affect the way people build machines, could religion really be the key factor? This is a question that scholars and robot-lovers alike have been pondering for years. Many have focused on the huge differences in the way that two major robotics power houses have been producing machines: USA and Japan.

So how could the prominent religious beliefs of these two nations be affecting the way they’re making their robots? Though many people in Japan consider themselves non-religious, Shinto and Buddhism remain prominent institutions. Within these religions, the natural world is worshiped and humans hold a glorified position within it. The term Kami refers to the Shinto notion that our natural world is filled with sacred entities. Because humans are considered to be divine, so are the things we create. From this perspective, it only makes sense to create machines which could be natural companions to humans; hence the Japanese fascination with robots that are life-like, cute and cuddly, and made to accompany and care for people.

As a predominantly Christian nation, it’s been suggested that — from a religious perspective — development of robotics in the US has been centered on purpose and salvation. In David E. Nye’s  2004 book, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings, he makes the case that modern-day AI researchers seek a heavenly kingdom within virtual reality much the way early American settlers sought to create a second Eden on the continent. Similarly, the American/European eagerness to create a super-computer as intelligent as the human brain is conducive to the Christian concept of  immortalized human souls in resurrected bodies stripped of their earthly nature. Following Christian ideology, if robots could be a form of such resurrected bodies, they should certainly not take on overly-human characteristics, as this would be an obscene imitation of god’s creation.

So from a religious standpoint it may seem that robots in Christian cultures should be intelligent and useful while robots in Buddhist/Shinto cultures aught to be enchanting and realistic. But enough about religion affecting the development of robots, could robots themselves ever become religious? Surprisingly enough, the issue has been explored by several researchers including Edmund Furse, David Levy, Anne Foerst, and Robert Geraci. The theme has also been satirically portrayed in the Futurama episode ” Hell Is Other Robots.”

The term Singularity refers to the theory that — in conformance with the way technology has been advancing— ultra-sophisticated technology is inevitably likely to emerge. Technology so advanced, it would surpasses human intelligence and capability.

Singularity has become a common theme in pop culture and science fiction and it certainly hasn’t been ignored by academics. When it comes to the debate over whether the moment of singularity will actually arrive… the jury’s still out.

A recent article by Tony Prescott, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, takes a look at this issue.  Before presenting his personal opinion, Prescott raises an important question: How should Artificial Intelligence (AI) really be compared to human intelligence? If you ask Prescott, human intelligence encompasses much more than the raw brain power of the average individual— something that evolved to its current capacity around 100,000 years ago. For this reason, Prescott maintains that we should actually be comparing AI to our collective human intelligence. “After all, as an entity, AI can stretch across multiple machines. Likewise, the human race amounts to much more than the sum of its parts when we share our capabilities. And why strip us humans of our intelligence-enhancing artifacts?… intelligence-boosting technologies have hugely expanded our ability to apply shared knowledge and control our environment according to our goals…cultural and scientific development have led to a larger, longer-lived and better-educated human species.”

This notion of collective intelligence is something cyberneticist, Francis Heylighen, refers to as “Global Brainpower.” And according to Prescott, this communal strength makes the possibility of singularity happening far less likely. Additionaly he argues that while humans are working hard to make machines more advanced, they’re still far from being on par with many human qualities.

Humans are experts in the seemingly simply skills of acting in and understanding our world. Robots however, are not— the clumsy maneuvres at robo cup tournaments certainly highlight this fact. And in the long run, Prescott argues that there is no economic incentive for replacing this aspect of human intelligence “machines will continue to be engineered to take on the tasks we do poorly, rather than the ones we do well. Like symbiotic systems in nature, the future partnership of people with intelligent machines will be successful because its two halves complement, rather than copy, each other.”

Tony Prescott is also the Director of the Sheffield Centre for Robotics (SCentRo), Director of the Active Touch Laboratory, Co-Director of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group and a Visiting Fellow at Bristol Robotics Laboratory. You can read the full story about his take on super-intelligent machines HERE.