TED session 1 was called “Reboot” and session 2 was “Reframe” – but a strong theme throughout these was “Robot”. At Broadstuff it seems we’ve covered nearly all the robotic areas that were brought up today so we have a finger on the pulse (or a pulse at any rate - see here for all the Broadstuff posts on robotics), with 2 exceptions – stickybots and human augmented intelligence – so we’ll cover these here:
Stickybots (see video above)
From the IEEE - Wall-climbing bots could scale buildings or creep up windows, secretly spying for hours. They could also be used for search-and-rescue operations. More benignly, they could inspect and repair the hard-to-reach parts of airplanes, spacecraft, and bridges.
Cutkosky and his doctoral student Sangbae Kim get their inspiration from geckos. The bottom of a gecko's foot is covered with billions of fibers with 200-nanometer-wide tips. The lizards can stick to any surface because of a weak intermolecular attraction known as Van der Waals force, which acts between the fiber tips and the surface the gecko is climbing. The adhesion is directional: the fibers stick only when the toes drag downward, and they release in the opposite direction.
To emulate the gecko's dry adhesive, the researchers created polymer patches covered with tiny stalks about 30-micrometers wide. The stalks are angled and have oblique tops, which give them directional stickiness. The patches go on the toe pads of a robot that Cutkosky and Kim have endowed with a gecko's gait, curling toes, and other details. The original version, built two years ago, crawled up smooth surfaces such as glass and glazed tile at a speed of 4 centimeters per second
Update - on day two the Stanford team demonstrated the Stickybot, had a good chat re the adhesives and the use of balancing tail. The most advanced adhesive can hold about 5 pounds (2.2 kg) per square inch of surface.
Augmented Intelligence –
Patti Maes presented the work of an MIT Media Lab team in the use of wearable devices to augment intelligence – they combined web cam, mobile phone and projector devices to give a wearable multimedia system that could read data, send it out for server side processing, and also project it. An interesting application was tracking a sort of man-machine “sign language” – using coloured bands on each index and forefinger one can make common signs, like a “frame” gesture to take a picture for example, and the device tracks your hands, understands the gesture, and the webcam takes a picture. Similar signs exist for writing via projection on surfaces, and even typing on the palm of your hand.. It was quite interesting to see how this has come on, having seen stuff like this several years ago in the British Telecom labs – in essence the gear has become lighter and cheaper, but the real difference is the level of onboard processing now available as well as the server side activity possible via broadband.
There was also an interesting/sobering presentation by a US military analyst (P W Singer) on the rapid escalation in the use of robots of all types – especially bomb clearance and aerial drones – in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his projections of their use going forward. As we’ve shown before, today robots and drones are almost pro-am devices, so the concern is that robots will be used by all sorts of people as proxy soldiers in future – as he put it, you don’t have to promise a robot 700 virgins to get it to blow itself up.
On a related note, Tim Berners Lee presented on a proposed architecture of data recognition on the Web, and called for all to release their “Raw Data Now”. He showed a type of “DatabaseWiki” and the resultant searches which were very interesting and showcased the Art of the Possible. Very stirring stuff, but as we’ve explained here, pretty unlikely in today’s walled garden Freeconomics. Still, TED is more about change than status quo, so lets see….
The emoting head technology has also moved on a tad, in that the one demonstrated here has got more complex and looked like Einstein – and I got to see it in the flubber (the synthetic material of choice for flesh that today’s androids wear).
Update - on Day 2, mo' Robotics - surgical robots from Catherine Mohr, the micromachine robotic arms, light and cameras are contained in a tube that is inserted via keyhole, so it can then do microsurgery.
