Look who’s roaming the red carpet
The paparazzi bots are five autonomous robots, each standing at the height of an average human. These robots won’t vacuum your floor or take out your trash but they will play on your lust for the limelight, provided you catch their interest.
Check out this group on Vimeo to see some videos featured in a Robot Film Festival held in New York City on July 16th and 17th, 2011
The annual festival doesn’t just aim to showcase awesome robots, it also aims to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration by providing an opportunity for researchers to translate their work to the general population and help explore the ethical and sociological issues everyday robots could have on society
The Multimodal Brain Orchestra
Visual art, music and dance allow people to express their emotional experiences and put them on display for others. By using their bodies people produce masterpiece paintings, play glorious symphonies or put on amazing dance recitals but what would happen if we took our bodies out of the equation? This is what the Multimodal Brain Orchestra created by the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona wanted to investigate.
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Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster (1931)
Our apprehension to artificial beings
The term robot was originally used in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots). However, the concept of a being or machine akin to today’s conception of a robot is something that goes back much further.
The notion of artificial beings is present throughout history in diverse methodologies. In some they are portrayed as human servants, in others as divine creatures. How are robots portrayed today?
Science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced the three rules of robotics in his 1942 short story Runaround.
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