Termites are some of nature’s most magnificent architects that can easily build complex mounds that exceed their own size by several orders of magnitude – occasionally reaching up to nine meters in height. Paradoxically enough, each of these tiny insects does not have even a remote idea of what kind of structure it is building, nor does it receive orders from any termite authority. In fact, the termites’ architectural prowess makes no sense except in the context of swarm intelligence.

This unusual approach to construction inspired researchers at Harvard University’s TERMES project to build little robots that mimic the behaviour of termites. Similarly to individual termites, each of these zealous robots is an autonomous unit that can carry out the required work independently from its siblings. And although it may not seem intuitive – given the modern context of interconnectivity – the robots have no wireless communication or localisation capabilities, but rely exclusively on information available from their immediate surroundings.

In other words, the robots’ behaviour is based on the concept of stigmergy, which implies that complex self-organisation may arise from a very simple mechanism, in this case allowing each independent robot to be stimulated by traces left in the environment by its own previous activity or that of other robots.

Thus, the robots have no clue as to the state of the structure they are building or what other robots are up to; they just do what seems right according to the established traffic rules (which vary depending on the structure). Basically, the number of robots in the swarm can be increased or decreased at any moment without affecting the outcome: the remaining robots will continue working until the job is done.

This bio-inspired approach can flourish in hazardous construction scenarios such as in disaster areas or extraterrestrial environments. The research can also shed new light on the very subject of swarm construction, which is not yet fully understood by science.

You can also learn about other research projects carried out by Harvard’s Self-organising Systems Research Group HERE.

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

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.”

Running this year from September 2nd to September 13th, BCBT will provide students with the unique opportunity to attend lectures by prominent scientists in the fields of cognitive science and technology, as well participate in hands-on tutorials while working towards their own final project.

BCBT is organized and supported by the European project CSN (Convergent Science Network of Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems) and this year is also supported by Goal Leaders (biologically-constrained architectures for the next generation of adaptive robots). You can find out more about the previous editions of BCBT HERE.

Don’t miss your chance to sign up now — see you there!

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.

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.  2) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Are these laws sufficient? And if so, do we as a society trust that they will be obeyed? In Colin McGin’s 1993 essay  Apes, Humans, Aliens, Vampires and Robots he attributes our angst on these issues to the fear that ¨artifacts (will) rise up and exert domination over us, bringing untold havoc and misery to our species. And here the contingency is merely the level of technological advancement of our machines. If we are not careful, the message goes, our technology will come back to oppress us¨. Does this common fear only pertain to the development of robots or does it apply to technology at large?

If you’re interested in how technology evolves and shapes us and our world, check out a book review by NewScientist’s Timothy Taylor on Kevin Kelly’s 2010 What Technology Wants or,  Kelly’s 1994 Out of Control which he has made fully available online.

You may also be interested in John Horgan’s 1996 The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age