So, just when exactly are the T-800s and the WALL-Es going to be running around ?
(hopefully for us, the T-800s no time soon)
I remember taking a robotics course back during my studies in the early 2000′s, and the autonomous specific-purpose line-following 4-wheeled Number 5 ancestor that resulted from putting together a PCB, a servo, some amateur welding, some sloppy microprogramming and a lot of enthusiasm, was quite far away from David.
Nevertheless, the strong willed sheldons of the world continue to close the gap between science fiction and reality, and every once in a while, some results popup which certainly raise my eyebrows.
I recently stumbled upon the Space & Robots lecture given at the singularity university by NASA astronaut Dan Barry.
The entire presentation does a great job on briefly discussing adaptiveness, robotics and A.I., but what caught my eye were the various examples of current-day efforts in robotics, and specially these two:
Kiva Systems
What is probably the most interesting fact about this legion of intelligent orange agents controlled by a central brain is that this is a real system being used in real production environments.
Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse on spectrum.ieee.org gives a little insight on how it works:
"The robots ... navigate the warehouse by pointing cameras at the floor that read two-dimensional bar-coded stickers laid out by hand 1 meter from each other, in a grid. The robots relay the encoded information wirelessly to a computer cluster that functions both as a dispatcher and a traffic controller. It instructs, for instance, robot No. 1051 to bring rack No. 308 to worker No. 12--without colliding with robot No. 1433, which is crossing its path." "Instead of relying on a single piece of software that centralizes all the decisions, they envisioned software agents that could run on the central computer, on the robots, and on PCs at the picking stations. The agents would exchange information but act independently, each trying to optimize its own tasks. They also adopted heuristic methods, like greedy algorithms that can make good--but not always the best--decisions to perform tasks such as assigning racks to stations."
“BigDog”
Just seeing this “beast” walking on ice is scary and thrilling at the same time.
As Dr. Barry, I too believe BigDog certainly does a better job than I do walking on ice…
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Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Singularity University