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Japanese Robot Gives Backrubs, Runs Errands 85

Posted by emmett from the more-expensive-robots dept.
adamy writes "Seems that a Japanese firm is selling a robot that gives backrubs for the low low price of $47 G." Products like this make the Aibo seem like a bargain.
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Japanese Robot Gives Backrubs, Runs Errands More

Japanese Robot Gives Backrubs, Runs Errands

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  • First let me say, you earned alot of respect by replying. Secondly, good point, very good point, then how about blocking IPs? But that won't work either, dynamic ip pretty much kills that, and blocking a sub-net would piss to many people off. So then you're left with....nothing i suppose. Oh well.....finally, my question. Why did you do it in the first place?
  • or you can build this thing yourself w/ lego mindstorms. have fun; you have fifteen minutes starting...now.

  • Additional Info (Score:4)

    by Hiro ( 20938 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @07:01AM (#1347909)
    Here are some links after quick search on the net.
    Sorry, only in Japanese. But you should be able
    to check out some pics on their site.

    Tmsuk Inc. was incorporated by Thames Inc.

    Tmsuk Inc: http://www.qbiz.ne.jp/tmsuk/
    Thames Inc: http://village.infoweb.ne.jp/~thames/index.htm
    Images of robot: http://www.qbiz.ne.jp/tmsuk/image_data/tm4_04.html
    NikkeiBP's article: http://biztech.nikkeibp.co.jp/wcs/leaf?CID=onair/b iztech/prom/92259

    Additional info on this robot.

    size:
    length - 750mm
    width - 600mm
    height - 1,200mm
    weight - 100kg

    # of joints:
    head - 2, hip(?) - 1, arm - 7x2=14, hand - 3x2 = 6

    mobility:
    two individually controled wheels
    front and rear supportive wheels
    max speed 3km/h

    visual:
    250,000 pixel CCD camera, horizantal view angle, 114 degrees, 10 frames/s (w/ current PHS setup)

    voice:
    4 voice (whatever that means)

    sensors:
    # of proximety sensor - 5

    power source:
    Ni-Zn battery (1.5 hours of continuous operation)

    Controller:
    - joy stick controller for fingers (w/ force feed back) = 4 controls x2
    - arm control = 6 controls x2
    - head control = 2 controls
    - wheel control (pedal type) = 3 controls
    - network = PHS (64Kbps PIAFS 2.0)
    - display = headmount display

    Price: 5,000,000yen
  • Just because you don't know the emotion algorithm in humans doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

    That's fair enough. However, I would say that if there is an algorithm, it is certainly not an obvious one.

    Let us not confuse lack of comprehension with self-involved flattery. We are not that complex of beings.

    Here I start to disagree. I believe that we are fairly complex beings, at least for any human definition of complexity. "Complex", in common usage, translates to "Damn hard to do and/or understand." I think it's perfectly reasonable to state that the human mind is damn hard to build and/or understand. What systems do you see that are so much more complex than the body? The only ones I can think of are those in which humans are components, such as social systems.

    Everything we are is matter, and therefore we have a protocol in order to be a living being.

    I disagree with this statement, or at least with what I believe you mean by this statement. If you are saying that mind can be solely reduced to the motion of particles within the space defined by your brain, I disagree. I believe that there is such a thing as a soul. I also believe that the soul can be detected and measured, but that we do not yet know how to do so. This means that the soul is, in some sense, matter (or energy, which is the same thing), and therefore we are in fact purely material. However, in general, when someone says "All we are is matter," they mean it as a denial of the soul.

    You assume our emotions aren't predictable simply becuase we are not smart enough to be able to, yet. Our algorithm is obviously far more advanced then:

    Actually, it's a bit more than that. Let's assume for a second that you're right and that our minds are nothing more than the known matter within our brains and bodies. You cannot accurately predict what the behavior of that matter will be. The actions of the brain depend on the motions of single ions, which in turn depend on the motions of charged particles, which are fundamentally unpredictable by the Heisenberg principle. This is a good thing --- it provides an empirical proof of something approximating free will.

    But, you can keep believing what you want because we won't figure it out in your lifetime.

    That's a pretty bold assertion with no backup, and I suspect it of being said just to incite and inflame. How can you predict what science will do? How can you predict how long I might live? Personally, I intend to see the year 2200, and hopefully many years beyond that.

    Alik
  • if an ip looses 5 points in an hour all posts from that ip should instantly drop another point(or two)
    that would solve the problem. sure the spam would happen, but no one would see it 5 minutes after it happens.

    comments?
  • can you reproduce a human baby exactly? would you want to? maybe if people just valued individuality and life this whole 'reproducibility' thing would not matter

    That's one thing when speaking of a human life (and there are still cases when I would want to duplicate a baby), quite another when speaking of a scientific project. The Cog project is a scientific research endeavour. One of the criteria for good science is reproducibility of results. If you can't do it again, it's not a particularly big breakthrough.

    Alik
  • So, how long before we have a robot that can be rigged with a shotgun, and sent into a bank remotely? All it would need to do is pose a threat long enough to force a large wire transfer to an iranian account. After that it could simply self-destruct. I wonder how many local police forces are prepared for something like that :)

  • The high-voltage sign at the bottom is also a nice touch. Imagine the massage... Mmmmm, that spot right there, a little higher, to the left. ARRRRRRRRGH! Not the pacemaker!
  • nope, it is either because I am stupid or because I come from the Netherlands and was born in 1976. A stupid AC will probably have the answer :-)

  • A robot might not recognize how much hurts...is it a 'one-robot-massages-all' thing?

    "ahh, that's nice...ahhhhhh...AHHHH!"
  • Did it ever strike you that there might actually be _lots_ of kids around here (you know, those who "discovered" linux a couple of months ago and know they believe it's the best thing since sliced bread)

    Mikael Jacobson
  • Hehe as we say here in Amsterdam "typical Dutch" ;)

    But of course I'm not really supposed to say that cuz I'm American.. All you Dutch people love to make fun of yourselves but I don't think i oughta make fun of you too... ;) But you guys sure _do_ make it easy.

    Ah, who am I kidding. I love you crazy folk.
  • IP addresses are not always static. This might discourage the spammer (as the poster who claimed to be the spammer admitted him/her/itself), but if they were using a dialup or something, the next (innocent) person to be assigned that IP would suffer. It might be a reasonable price to pay, though. This is a difficult question. Moderation seems to be handling this case reasonably well, but I hate to see the spammer sucking up all those points that could be used for higher purposes. The more crap they have to filter here, the less crap they can filter elsewhere...
  • Now I'd pay $47K for that!!!
  • I could ties pieces of lunch meat to it, and have it and the cat battle for dominance of the apartment.

    "TauserBear vs. MechaGodzilla!"

    Smart money is on the surly siamese. :^)
  • BTW, for anyone interested there is the COG project at MIT, doing research into a humanoid robot, it is VERY impressive.

    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." --Anon of Ibid (or somebody)

    Seriously, though, while I'm not accusing Rodney Brooks & Co. of being frauds, I do think they're getting credit for a lot more than they've really done. Reactive control is wonderful for simple systems. In the MIT robot competitions, the second-place robot is generally some simple reactive design. (At Dartmouth, the first-place robot was, but the last Dartmouth robot competition had a bot construction/program time of about six weeks.)

    However, the robot that wins out is generally not using a Cog-like architecture; it's usually one of the designs that uses a more artificial method of intelligence and navigation. The problem with reactive control is that it's easy to build and debug for simple systems, but as you add more functions and layers the connections and interactions become too much for even an MIT mind to handle. Brooks even says as much in one of his early papers on subsumptionism.

    There's also Brooks' admission in his own FAQ [mit.edu] that even the simple ant robots they've built are utterly unreproducible. IMHO, it's not that great if you can build something once but can't tell other people how to reproduce it.

    This isn't meant to be a whole bunch of doomsaying about reactive design --- I think it's appropriate in some circumstances, and I've used it myself when I needed a simple barely-effective hack. It's just that sometimes it feels like the Cog Shop and their academic relations would like people to believe that they're the ultimate solution to all of robotics, and I don't think that's going to happen. It's too hard to use their methods in a general and structured manner to build systems that have anything resembling guaranteed behavior.

    Alik

  • purpose (Score:1)

    by vipw ( 228 )
    he stated that the reason he did it was because the first poster was so stupid, and then replied twice stupidly to himself.

    in all actuallity he did it to point out a weakness though. that this can happen shows that slashdot is broken, as simple as that. personally i'm surprise that this has been so long in coming, and is as small a flood as it is. i know that alot more posts could have happened, and with a little teamwork the slashdot discussions could be terrorized to the point few would use them unless they used a +2 threshold.

    the solution, ip moderation and alot more moderators.

    of course having more moderators has its downsides as well, but there just aren't enough points in the system otherwise.
  • I'm just wondering when a robot will be on the market that gave hand jobs, as well as ran errands.
  • I made the same mistake. My first reaction was "holy ****, a $47 billion backrub ?!?" Geez if the world would just use SI we wouldn't have lost the climate orbitor.
  • But can he dissipate into a fragrant potporri when you're done with him?

    Also available in sandalwood.
  • Yeah, I did the same thing. That would kind of limit the potential market to Chief Software Architects...
  • This sudden crazy over Sorny's "Household" robots led me to do some research. Turns out that there were robots with simular levels of functionality being developed right here in the US by Quasar in the 50-60's. I am currently writing a detailed article about this that will appear in the Feb. issue of the 'Fish [fish-zine.com] with a detail of my findings, and theories of why it was stopped. If you're interested I can post some of the images of these Quasar machines... ...
  • Well said.

    I agree that I personally thing a subsymbolic AI approach should be the way forward. After all that seems to be a pretty scalable way of achieving "intelligent" behaviour, if we look at animals. Furthermore like you say, it does not require the "creator" to think of everything himself (hmm, I like that ...) :-)

    However the problem of reproduciability also exists (to an extend) with all subsymbolic AI solutions (AFAIK), after all EVERY robot is unique (sensor characteristics, motor, environment....).

    As much as it should be adressed (to make robotics are "serious" since ;-> IMHO it is part of the question, as "intelligent behaviour" has to contain some sort of randomness and unpredictability.


    Frank
  • No, 47G means '47 Grands' 47B means '47 Bucks'
  • As much as it should be adressed (to make robotics are "serious" since ;-> IMHO it is part of the question, as "intelligent behaviour" has to contain some sort of randomness and unpredictability.

    I'm not quite able to parse the first part of your sentence (especially because of an unclosed paren), but I can handle the second part, and I'm not sure I agree. I don't think intelligent behavior has to be random or unpredictable. Humans are not random. Humans are, to some degree, unpredictable. However, much of that comes down to how we're designed; another large factor is emotion.

    Our first attempts at AI and semi-intelligent robots will probably not have emotion, just because we have even less clue about how emotion works than we do vision. They may make expressions (this is something the Kismet project at MIT is apparently doing well) for cuteness factor, but I doubt they'll have anything we call "real" emotion. I believe that their intelligence will be largely algorithmic in nature, especially the motion-planning parts of it. Therefore, their movements will be totally or almost-totally predictable, as will their responses to stimuli.

    I can see an argument that some randomness will be built in because humans would be uncomfortable with something that always moved in the exact same way, but that does not imply that intelligence requires randomness.

    Alik

  • Aging Demes, Wealth and Robots (Score:3)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @08:59AM (#1347937) Homepage Journal
    Japan has a problem similar to some demes in the US:

    Aging demographics.

    At some point, someone is going to have to pay for a lot of domestic servants.

    The earliest boomers, like Clinton and cohort, caught the real estate boom of the 1970s. I put the catastrophe point for birth year [urban.org] in the early 1950s, possibly as early as 1950 as speculation from the GI generation anticipated the demand from boomers. Swelling real estate values combined with inflation-depressed real wages in the 1970s and scarcity of entry-level jobs to make being born before 1950 a very shrewd business move (fixed mortgate rates hit 19 percent in 1981 and being a fresh-out of college system level programmer for a major computer company paid around $17,000 in the late 70s.).

    The earliest boomers caught this wave, built by their younger siblings, but the largest beneficiaries of all the "eat the boomers" hysteria were the GI generation real estate speculators that liquidated the savings and loan system. The largest wealth transfer in history is now occuring as dying GIs naturally favor their shrewd eldest children among the boomers. After all, they did demonstrated the business savvy, depth of character and wisdom to be born before the 50s.

    This means the Clinton/Gore cohort are going to have a big gob of money as they approach retirement.

    As they near retirement, these the earliest of boomers will be more and more interested in domestic servants. Whether they'll be able to put up with a mere machine rather than a living, breathing human to dominate is the real question. They did, after all, develop a taste for bossing around huge numbers of boomers who seemed to need it so much (so screwed up they couldn't land a job that could pay for a house and a family -- birth control pills and abortions were far more affordable, the way the GIs and earliest boomers did.

    I don't have Sony's market research division at hand.

    So, perhaps the Japanese are playing a game of offering strange toys like this "massage/errand boy" robot as a means of feeling out how much of the earliest boomer/GI-legacy gold mine they can grab with machine lackies.

    The Japanese need pervasive automation even more than the aging US population because the Japanese are less willing to import labor from other nations. Grabbing the gold with these expensive toys may be the way they finance real automation technology that they desparately need.

  • I haven't been a linux user for 'that' long, and I think it's the best thing since any bread (a whole dif. story), but you're pulling and example out of context...my message was not a msg for pro/anti linux sentiment. Did it ever strike you to think the whole message out before you latch on to one (out of context) example and fire off a retort? Actually, you're fuel for the fire; Seeing one tiny thing that even hinted anti-linux, whether that's the actual message or not, and firing off a seemingly witty response.
  • On the topic of machines taking care of the elderly in Japan, there's a very interesting Japanese movie/satire on this issue, "Roujin Z" (with script written by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame).

    http://www.suntimes.c om/ebert/ebert_reviews/1996/04/0452.html [suntimes.com]
  • AT LAST... that's what I always wanted, needed, dreamt about... a backscratchin' robot of death!!!
  • I've met Brooks, I've read his papers, and I've been out to his lab. I liked the original subsumption/insect level work. But Cog? No.

    When Brooks first proposed Cog, his presentation was along the lines of "we don't know how to do human-level AI, so we're going to build a humanoid robot, throw 30 MIT PhD theses at it, and see what happens." I thought this was bogus. I asked him, "Why not go for a lizard or a mouse brain, now that you've done insects"? His reply was "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest artificial mouse".

    And that's the problem. The goal of Cog is PR, not progress. Hence the Rod Brooks World Tour, Rod Brooks T-shirts, Rod Brooks TV specials, etc.

    More fundamentally, a major problem in AI as a field is that people keep trying to make it to human-level AI in one step, rather than clawing their way up the evolutionary ladder with ant-level AI, bee-level AI, lizard-level AI, rodent-level AI, and only then attempting higher mammals. The Big Project to Reach Human Level AI in One Big Step people have gone down in flames decade after decade: McCarthy in the 1970s, Feigenbaum in the 1980s, and Lenat in the 1990s. By now, it's clear that it's a hard problem. Many really smart people have beaten their heads against the wall on this one. Attacking it as if it were one step from solution is doomed.

    There's hope, though. Game AI developers are struggling to build characters that can survive in tough environments. They're getting better at it. Work in the game AI field is getting to be better than academic AI; the gamers have a real problem and a real market.

  • Shoot.. I'll come and rub your back for that price..
  • But then again. i wouldn't mind not having to go to class either.. =-)

    Kenny

  • See, yet again another use for the FORCEFEEDBACK tag. Go to www.swedishmassage.com and lie on your ThrustMaster Pro.
  • The funny thing is.. someone still has to rub your back remotely.. oh well..

    Kenny

  • A picture of the thing.... (Score:3)

    by blogan ( 84463 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @05:25AM (#1347949)
    It's too bad the article didn't have a picture, so here's a link [mixed-media.net] to one. Just imagine those arms massaging your back....mmmmm.....
  • With some of the discussion about the boards at /., people have gone against harsh rules. That's fair enough. However basic filtering is required to prevent post such as the one seen today.

    This "script kiddie" has stuffed a story. A time where most people are sleeping, no-one around to moderate. Fortunatly it hasn't happened on a big story, like "2.2.4 released" :)

    At least this shows a hole in the system, that could probably be simply repaired with a "delete if same thing posted 100's of times script" in Slash. There's something to do, Cmdr.

    This sucks how one little fuck (sorry, couldn't hold back anymore) can ruin something for thousands. The posting rules need to get stronger!

    Ontopic: That robot sounds pretty crap. I mean, $40k for something that costs less for you to hire someone to do for a year?

    And a real person would be better ;)
  • But you forget that there is always the chance the cat is going to do something unexpected like ignore the huge robot even with the pieces of lunch meat. My money is on MechaGodzilla. =)
  • Ya know, I have a feeling that if this Happened to a M$ discussion board, or RIAA, or *.gov that this would have been fine. Hacks and general annoyances can't be expected to always be with the flow of /. tastes. This reminds me of the anti-linux = crap sentiments that seem to overwhelm /. at times. Geez, it's like little kids here sometimes. I can poke you, but if you poke back, I'll cry.
  • Look like those fifties things...

    "Danger Will Robinson" didn't hint you to what they are really suppose to be?

  • CmdrTaco should give some users (such as Slashdot crew) the ability to instantly change posts to -2 score. Of course, give it to the wrong people and it would be abused. Only use it for posts like Q.
  • Ahem, the sentence was supposed to read:
    "As much as it [the problem of repeatability] should be adressed (to make robotics a "serious" science ;-> , IMHO .....".


    "...but that does not imply that intelligence requires randomness."

    I like to think it is one of the necesseties for intelligence, especially for low level intelligence.

    Yes, humans might be that advanced as to come up with new ideas, by contemplating a problem long enough, but even for us (limited) random behaviour can bring unexpected rewards. I don't think the first people to discover burned (i.e. roasted) meat tastes pleasant or the primate noticing that using rocks as hammers opens things, did so by reasoning.

    I believe acts of randomness lead to unexpected results, which can then be learned and potentially be understood due to intelligence. Hence IMHO they make up a big part of intelligence,- DISCOVERING and acquiring NEW behaviours.


    The same applies to robots. If a robot, due to the unpredictability of the sensors, i.e. a freak perception, or due to an intentional random element in its behaviour "discovers" a "new" behaviour which leads to high rewards, the associative structures might be able to reproduce it; the robot seems to behave intelligent.

    Hence, I believe that a random and unpredictable element SHOULD be part of any attempt to produce "intelligent" machines.


    Frank


  • Its the year 2000. I thought that by now a robot would be mixing my drinks!

    Indeed, it seems that software and information are the big winners for research and development at present with AI being the only discipline we can't quite master/apply. When we do perhaps things will move into the age of automation, and this is already very close.

    PC's can do marvellous things but when the hardware is such that the computer will branch out from being an information device to a physically able one then we will see the real benefits shining through.

    There is another issue however when you think about 'Robots' - Is it better to build of robot that is designed to a particular task, OR should robotics focus on building that monolithic multi purpose bot .. much like ourselves. I beleive the former is already beginning as our appliances become smarter and dreams of a 'robot slave' will only come to fruition when the awkward attempts at making them 'humanlike' are superceded by a design that is simply better, less expensive and useful.

    IMHO a robot that is controlled completetly by RC is not a very good one. It must be capable of independant movement and exploration, problem solving (anyone that knows anything about nueral nets or AI knows it does involve randomness and a margin for error that accomodates learning), and communication with humans that can 'command' the robot in simple terms. A simple command like 'Come Here' is to be solved by the robot, not spoonfed via RC.

    Yes, robots will become more prevalent in our lives the same way computers did. And we wont have to pay upwards for 40,000 dollars either. But the AI experts have hurdles to cross, the robot hardware gurus have better designs to conceive and the consumer has a lot to accept in terms of robots doing human jobs.

    Indeed, robots should make our lives easier, at the cost of human jobs, the world will have to rethink its idea of the worker, and also rethink its idea of the human.

    iRobot [csu.edu.au]

  • Thats exactly right. Good Point. This theme has been explored in the Australian movie 'Malcom' where he rigs a toy car and a vid cam to rob a bank. It works until the money bag falls off when the robot scuttles into the sewers.

    NOW you see that a real/good robot would be able to navigate the bank by itself, identify the tellers and speech synthesise its demands.

    For those of you that are interesting in remote bank robbery An Aussie Shop [robotics.com.au] includes the Intruder bot on its price list for 40,000 dollars which is designed for use by bomb squads, military etc. And lets face it, 40,000 is a drop in the ocean if you can rob a bank successfully. Maybe you could find a bank to finance the venture for you... ;)

    iRobot [csu.edu.au]

  • Maybe we need a (small) set of omnipotent moderators, each *committed* to reading the front page at a certain time of day, to clean up messes like this. Either that, or a email account frequently checked by high-powered moderators, to which people could mail emergency moderation requests...

    When I logged on today, I found three last "Q" posts, which I quashed with the last of my moderator points. It looks like it took 3 hours (from the first "Q" post) to quash them all.


    --

  • Of course, by posting to this discussion, I seem to have forced the undoing of my previous moderation... so now there's three "Q"s at score 0 again :(

    sorry folks... somebody go quash those, pls?

    schmeel.
    --

  • Yes, humans might be that advanced as to come up with new ideas, by contemplating a problem long enough, but even for us (limited) random behaviour can bring unexpected rewards. I don't think the first people to discover burned (i.e. roasted) meat tastes pleasant or the primate noticing that using rocks as hammers opens things, did so by reasoning.

    I agree, but I wouldn't define such things as random behavior. I would define them more as accidental discoveries. For example, cooking probably didn't come about because a human randomly decided to throw meat into a fire; it more likely occured by accidentally dropping meat into the fire, or by finding an animal which had somehow been caught in a fire. The randomness is on the part of the world, not of the agent.

    Intentional random behavior in the hopes of discovering something new and interesting seems to be to be the basic principle behind genetic algorithms. GAs are neat, but personally I find the stuff they produce to be pretty ugly and non-robust. (Of course, so were some early robot programs.) GAs are another technology that I think gets a bit too much hype; I can see a bitstring evolving into "Hello, world!", but I can't see one evolving into a stable Mozilla.

    Alik
  • Game AI developers are struggling to build characters that can survive in tough environments. They're getting better at it. Work in the game AI field is getting to be better than academic AI; the gamers have a real problem and a real market.
    As someone who has done some work in game development and more work in "academic AI," (I currently work at NASA, applying AI to space missions), I disagree with this statement. The goal of game developers is to write fun games, with a focus on playability. Developing intelligent adversaries has some value, but a truly intelligent adversary would be no fun to play against because it would always win -- it has the advantage of speed and infinite patience, so it needs to be a little weaker in terms of strategy. Add to this the fact that most computer players cheat (e.g. have access to information a human player doesn't) and the fact that many games consist of a single human against a buttload of AIs, and it becomes clear that the AIs can be as dumb as bricks and still make for a great game. I'm not saying that a lot of clever work doesn't go into designing the AIs, just that it's not the perfect problem domain that one would think. Also, from the game developers I've talked to, I don't get the sense that there's much cutting edge AI research going on, though I'm sure there's some I'm not aware of.
  • I think you're quite right about Brooks' current goals and motivations, and I'm equally annoyed by them. I guess it gets more people all fired up about AI/robots, which is nice, but it also tries to tell them that all the problems have simple solutions which don't involve nasty math, which is incorrect.

    More fundamentally, a major problem in AI as a field is that people keep trying to make it to human-level AI in one step, rather than clawing their way up the evolutionary ladder with ant-level AI, bee-level AI, lizard-level AI, rodent-level AI, and only then attempting higher mammals.

    Why should we do that, though? Logically, all important aspects of intelligent behavior are contained within humanity; therefore, it's easiest to stick to that model. Furthermore, if we work with the lower animals, there's a problem in that they have different sensory modalities, different motion needs, different connection pathways, and so on. (At least, there is if you're doing AI by trying to reverse-engineer the brain, which is my personal favorite method.)

    Moreover, what would bee-level or rodent-level or lizard-level mean? I don't actually see a distinction between those levels --- if you have a general solution to the problems of motion planning, target location, and self-preservation, then you can build pretty much any animal you want. (For some animals you'd also need to have manipulation routines in your motion-planning.)

    Motion planning et al. aren't really in the critical path for intelligent systems, unless you buy Brooks' thesis that intelligence only exists in embodied form. (I don't. If you made Helen Keller into a quadriplegic, she'd still be intelligent, she'd just go insane.) They are in the critical path for robots, which are generally lumped together with AI because we want AI so we can build bots with it, but the two domains can be separated. Of course, this thread was originally about robots, where such things are very necessary; strangely enough, many robot folks are working on copying the lower animals.

    It's certainly not "one step from solution", but at the same time, I think humans are the right level to be working at for the "intelligence" part of things. We have to break the human into subsystems and parcel out the subsystems to different researchers (all of whom will say that their problem would be easy if the other guys would just get theirs solved), but I don't see that we need to solve rats first.

    There's hope, though. Game AI developers are struggling to build characters that can survive in tough environments. They're getting better at it. Work in the game AI field is getting to be better than academic AI; the gamers have a real problem and a real market.

    I wouldn't go so far as to say that game AI is better. I agree with the previous poster that the game folks haven't exactly made new breakthroughs. They mainly seem to take advantage of the fact that they've got abitrarily perfect sensing, motion, aiming, communication, coordination, and so on. Beyond that, game AI still seems to mostly be preprogrammed formations and decision trees. (On the other hand, many real soldiers work that way.) Even Deep Blue wasn't a particular breakthrough in technique --- they took the standard search tree chess algorithm, tuned it for Kasparov's playing style, and threw Moore's Law at the problem. Blue Gene will be something similar for the protein-folding problem. (Not that I care --- protein-folding has to be figured out somehow, and whatever works benefits everyone.)

    I think a good goal for game AI is just-too-hard AI: a system which is always a little bit better than you, and thus keeps forcing you to improve on your own. Especially for things like chess, a system like that (with skill implemented as a limit on search tree depth and possibly multiple search algorithms) would make an excellent trainer. Sadly, I doubt it could teach me to play good Quake, because as far as I can see human Quake players don't follow patterns.

    Alik
  • From the way we see things going, I think a talking maid-bot like Rosie in the Jetsons will be here in the next 15 years.
    Of course with that comes the more scary stuff, such as rebot revolt..
    But if the developers are smart enough to not add combat intelligence in robots we'll be fine..
    I think.
  • The InterNet's arguably most widespread application
    is likely to extend to robots too.

  • Future of Robotics ? (Score:3)

    by FrankW ( 26453 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @05:36AM (#1347976)
    According to the pressrelease the robots is mainly controlled via a remote control (or PC).

    This demonstartes one of the major problems of robotics to date :

    Robot Navigation in umodified environments.

    Lots of research goes into the area, but self localisation in an umodified home environment, where lots of obstacles exist, some of which keep moving around (i.e. humans, small furniture pieces, etc) is still a big problem.

    The same goes for the use of robotics vision. Yes there are some clever schemes to use stereo cameras(to estimate distance) for object detection and avoidance and some help in landmark recognition, but it takes a lot of processing power and is only mildly reliable.
    Identifying specific people without major constraints (i.e. person has to face the robot from a certain angle without moving) is AFAIK also not reliably possible.

    This are the rasons why at the moment all "proper" (i.e. learning, and not remote controlled or having hardwired complex behaviour) commercial robots are toys. If your AIBO moves in the wrong direction, runs into you, or doesn't manage to fetch its pink ball, nobody will complain it doesn't work properly, people will enjoy it, and find it highly amusing.


    Reliable, intelligent, robot servants are still a long way off, but my guess is that they surely will exist in 20 years or so and most likely they won't look anything like humanoid at all...

    BTW, for anyone interested there is the COG project at MIT, doing research into a humanoid robot, it is VERY impressive.

    Take a look at some of the videos to see what they are already capable of. Especially the head demos are impressive.

    http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/cog/video_index.htm l


    Frank
  • This robot is a little pathetic really, all that's new is that you can control it from a distance using a mobile phone link so you still need your resident slave to operate for you. Otherwise this is just the same as all the military bomb disposal robots but with less armour.

    Could have great potential for new internet 'dodgy old man' services but until they can make a robot which can control itself this just isn't worth it.

    Of course, if a robot could scratch your back, would you be obliged to scratch its back too?
  • Has anyone noticed the decline of general manners on the net? I'm not talking about Flames, et al. I'm talking about simple disregard for other people in general. Now, the net was never a clean place, but at least, in general, it was /mature/. And then i see this, someone with waaaay to much time on their hands. Who is, i pray that they are, a prepubesent script kiddie with NOTHING but time on their hands. I use to go on the net to get a mature, intellectual point of view ( I myself am only 20 ), and specifically to slashdot, i lurk here and there, ocassionally posting a relevant tid-bit of information. And then i come here, I'm working on a Saturday for chrissakes, so my day is already shot, and then i have to deal with pages of "Q"s, with a subject of "faqs"? I hope that that person isn't over 14, because if he/she/it is, then we in for some serious trouble. People might say i'm taking this a little too...seriously, but this IS where it starts. Do away with Anonymous Coward for non-registered people please. At least thing the Ops could trace it back to whoever it was and REVOKE thier privlage to post, if only for a short time. and for GOD'S SAKE, someONE moderate that trival down.


    *out*

    If i don't look at the sig it won't eat me, don't look at the sig
  • I think you mean 47K. I read "47G" as "47 gig." (hey, this is a geek site). Approx. 5 x 10^10 dollars is a lot of money for a robot!

  • People seem to be forgetting that the thing might actually give really damn good backrubs.

    $47k, for a lifetime of wicked backrubs sounds okay to me.. Only problem would be tinking with my Robie Jr. until he could handle the thing on its own.

    ------

  • BTW, so i'm not totally moderated off topic, anyone have a REAL pic of these things? And maybe a link to the manafacturer?
  • hmm, the moderator that voted this to be interesting probably couldn't find the "Funny" button. :-) Though I must say those robots are cool. Look like those fifties things... "SCARY BOTS FROM SPACE" :-)

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