GENOMICON

I’ve been down in Wellington for a bit, and I’ve hurt my finger and decided to get into the movie business so um… here’s a load of robots that have turned up recently.

The definition of “robot” seems to have broadened a fair bit since the days of R2D2 – and even he was pushing it a bit… and he looked a bit like a Dalek. Daleks actually had little men inside them. R2D2 had another little R2D2. That’s why he was a robot, while strictly speaking, Daleks weren’t.

Anyway, lets start off with one of my favourite concepts – which is robots that don’t have any apparent use, to the people who made them imagine that maybe they might be useful for search and rescue.

1) Midgital fishbot

From Technovelgy.com

Cool – in a funny sort of way. Makes you appreciate real fish though dunnit. They go like the clappers real ones – and they know where they’re going, by and large.

2) Roombacam 2000

This absolutely had to happen – in fact people (hackers) were already doing this… in fact I can see an unholy (or holy) alliance developing between the Chinese Shanzai lot, and the Western (or global… but right now it feels kindof Western) Maker Community… where the Makers invent things – and do the test-marketing… if it creates a buzz, then the guys who are really good at mass-producing stuff on the uber-cheap, pick up the thread.

But anyway – this absolutely had to happen – because a Roomba isn’t actually FOR vacuuming floors is it. Not really. I don’t know what it is for… but using a Roomba to vacuum floors is like using a cellphone to make telephone calls.

3) Antique Walkybot 2001

I’m the sort of guy where if someone mentions a band, I say “yea, I used to be into their early stuff… they’ve gone a bit commercial now though”.

I was going on about this one last September – sans vid. Mind you, I got it from someone else, who was probably a proper reporter… and who could well have been the botjunkie person to start with. I’m an echo-chamber me.

Still, never mind about that. This ones with the spiderybot legs still give me the creeps. Cool though.

4) Carhacking

Not entirely about robots… but….

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns wanking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Which is interesting from a whole load of different angles – the least of which is that there are actually remote controlled vehicle-immobilization systems for cars. Eh? Are you taking the piss? DRM for cars? Unbefuckinglievable.

Great for kidnapping though innit… and it also raises the question – “at what point does your car become a type of robot?”, because let’s face it possums, if they’ve DRMed it, it’s not yours.

The other thing of course is that if this is doable to cars, at some point it will be doable to video-enabled Roombas… so while you’re doing whatever it is you do when no one’s watching, the entire internet will be sitting there, eating popcorn, watching you.

Still no worries eh. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. Yer fecking weirdo.

5) Natural Language Understanding Quadracopter

So long as you talk like a droid.

If you say something like “WTF are you doing? Arrgghhh… don’t do that!!! WTF!!! STOP!!! NO!!!! ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!” it probably won’t understand you. Or would pretend not to.

6) Fish Condo

You can stack them up and make apartment blocks etc.

Instead of fish, you could put little R2D2s in them. They’d go about their business etc, but would actually be watching your every move and telling the internet if you did anything weird. They’ve got little men inside them you know.

7) And The Artist said “Oh I saw, pretty much what I always see”

Also via Notcot.

8) Ok, it’s not really about robots anymore. Let’s stop pretending.

The Raw Feed was wondering, “What’s this dude doing? Does anyone know the story?”

Well I’d say it’s fairly obvious. He’s made his own sensory deprivation pod to do computer stuff in. Only his screen isn’t big enough to be properly emmersive. See – this is what people want. This is what the Shanzai guys should make – meanwhile Microsoft et al are making these W.A.A.I interfaces because they’re always turning up (for dramatic effect) in Sci Fi movies – and they figure that’s what people want.

It isn’t. Only idiots want computer interfaces where they have to run about the place flapping their arms. It’s a no-brainer. Mind you Wiis seem to be quite popular. I think the human race will devolve into two separate species – one that lives in pods like off The Matrix, but instead of being asleep, they’re lying there playing video games and swapping LOLcat pictures, and the other will be daft bird-like creatures who flap about the place with brains like ping-pong balls, eating millet.

Which will you be? Hmmm? Which will you be?

Because you’re probably already a bit like that now.

9) A robot looking at stuff

It actually looks quite a lot smarter than it is. Machine intelligence is so easy to fake – they just have to look attentive – instead of sitting at the back and yawning and doodling on the desk etc.

Absolute genius

(via)

A hacked Roomba that (while it’s performing its duties) indexes your stuff.

From Sweden etc, where Logh come from, who are one of my best bands.

I think that possibly the… killer-component of this thing is the software/sensor combo. Because let’s face it, most of your stuff doesn’t actually live on the floor – it’s up on top of things. So you’ll probably want a little helicopter, or your own CCTV system – or even just the ability to use your iphone to photograph a room when you want it indexed.

Why do you want it indexed?

Control.

You. Just. Want. To. Be. In. Control.

So apparently the open-source robot people who made that fairly remarkable thing that wanders about the place plugging itself into wall-points…

… are giving away a load of them, to people who can come up with the best ideas for what they might actually be used for.

So what does this tell you?

A while back I started collecting examples of ‘Search and Rescue‘ robots – which are basically cool machines that people have made, but once they’ve made them, can’t think of anything to use them for other than spying on people or finding them when they’re lost.

Here are a recent-ish example:

The $2.1 million robot that will save your life

If you get lost. When was the last time you got lost? The last time I got lost was in a department store when I was 3. Sleep-walking doesn’t count. You’re only lost if you know you’re lost.

Anyway, here we are, hell-bent, racing forward at a phenomenal pace, creating this revolution… which we know we want, but we don’t know what for. So we make stuff like this:

(via)

Which is fair enough I suppose. A kid’s toy. Hopefully.

A kid’s toy with 18 servos and gyroscopes and more smarts than it took to land a man on the moon back in the 60s (ok, massive exaggeration, but you get the point).

But what are these things actually for? What did C3P0 actually do? He was a translator… yea, there’s an iPhone app for that. R2D2? A cross between an upturned dustbin and… an iPhone… with script-kiddie-level hacking software… a rootkit bot. R2D2 had viruses.

I know that industrial robots have gotten to be so advanced that they could probably make themselves from scratch… but they’re not the ones getting all the attention. The ones that aren’t terribly good for anything are.

So. My theory. The (or at least A) killer-app of robotics is…

… drum roll…

… the ability to make us think we’re flying.

I’ve never seen a gadget generate so much twitter excitement as this thing:

A little quadro-copter that you control with your iphone… and crucially, you see what it sees.

These have been around for a while in various guises, but this was the first one to really make a splash. There’s a variant here:

Which is scarier looking, but tough enough to carry a hi-def camera

Here’s another one with build instructions/BOM etc

Clocking in at around $415 – although you can probably add a bit to that. Still… no worries, the prices of these things are plummeting.

So anyway, the ability to fly is a real killer-app in my opinion… and in a lot of ways, being able to do it remotely is an advantage – ie: you don’t die. This design from Nasa for example looks great, but your head is inches away from 4 blades that are spinning fast enough to turn you into salami.

And it’s 5 metres wide, and will absolutely kill anything that gets in its way.

There was some discussion recently about what a real physics-obedient space-fighter would be like… and one of the things said was that there wouldn’t be windows because of the disorientation created by flipping about in zero-g, and the massive glare/darkness created by nearby stars/the void etc. So instead you’d have screens that showed (via camera) what was outside.

Well if you’re going to do that, you may as well not be in the spaceship at all. You might as well be in a flotation tank somewhere – allowing your spaceship to withstand g-forces, temperature, radiation etc etc that you couldn’t deal with yourself.

But I digress… I think that first-person, remote controlled microcopters are going to be a killer-app of the robotics revolution – not for search and rescue, but because everyone wants to be able to fly… and first-personism allows you to feel like you are, without risk of injury. Unless you crash into your own face or something.

• You could use them for meetings… fly off to your office, and sit around in a circle with the other gyrocopters all going “heh heh heh heh”.
• You could send them off to the shops to get crisps, beer, fags etc, so you wouldn’t have to get out of your flotation tank.
• You could set them up so when another gyrocopter sees you, augmented reality kicks in so it sees you, “at your best” when you’ve tidied yourself up a bit, and not as you really are… a little black helicopter, or someone lying starkers in a flotation tank, surrounded by spilled crisps, empty beer bottles and fag-ends.

Brilliant.

Industrial robots from Japan. They’re only doing this stuff because that bloke is watching them.

Still that aside… I stare at these things and wonder what it is exactly I’m looking at here. Is this the future? Because to me it’s very clearly just an interim phase… if that. A machine-generation in a succession of accelerating machine-generations.

I wonder how many of their own parts they could make. Given the right tools etc.

I quite like this:

(from)

It looks like a cross between Stanly Kubrick Sci-Fi (and a whole lot of THX1138) and the daddy-long-legs that hang out in the ceiling over the shower at my place, trying to telepathically pry into my mind etc. They give me the creeps these things. Robots that look a bit like spiders I mean.

They’re getting to be bloody fast as well… and I’m not fooled for a second by the fact that the one in the video above seems to be holding hands with itself… it could break free and skitter about the place any time it wanted.

There have been a couple of videos of this thing turn up this year – mostly doing things like arranging pancakes (as you do) and whatnot. Does make me wonder though… it’s creating this future where the only jobs will be white-collar. I mean that’s good in a way – crap jobs are crap… but who’s going to buy the pancakes? Not the general public that’s for sure. I’ve met them. They’re idiots.

It’s a simple fact I think that the nerd takeover is pushing inexorably towards some future that we can’t quite see, but we’re pushing, pushing, pushing to get there regardless… and it’s a world in which a hell of a lot of people simply aren’t adapted to exist. Don’t believe me about the pushing? Check this out. A lego Kubrickesque Ceiling-Spider pancake-sorter:

People want this stuff even though they don’t really know why. “Because we can”. “Because it’s a cool thing to do, and it will gain me kudos in the Nerdosphere”.

But who’s going to buy the pancakes hmmm? Who’s going to buy the pancakes?

We really need to radically redesign our life-support systems I think.

(ps: THX 1138 : a grim distopian vision from back when nothing was invented yet)

I used to be a van-driver – occasionally delivered to an Oxfordshire nuclear research facility… it was really cool – they never threw anything away. The corridors were lined with the sort of computer gear that’s in the video above… and come to think of it, that IS about the base tech-level of our current nuclear plants.

That is why nuke is such a bad idea. It takes 10 years to build, then you’re stuck with it for 50. It’s a bleak dystopian scenario where everything is permanently stuck in some wrong-turn vision of what someone though the future might have been like back when everything had dials.

The current crop of British Nuke stations coming offline were built at the same time that this was made:

True. Actually, literally true.

One day people from the future are going to be looking down a similar time-tunnel at us, wondering what the fuck we were thinking by building… well, any piece of technology that couldn’t be rapidly and easily replaced.

So that’s my thought for the day.

Sorry. Once I’d thought of that title I couldn’t not use it, even though it’s crap… but go on, say it out loud. I dare you. You know I’m right.

I’m talking about this:

Which is a pollution-monitoring fish. It “watches”. See? See what I did there?

I found this interesting because they’ve developed a new type of muscle - current->movement, though I’m not sure how fast or efficient it is. Quiet, fast, strong robotic muscles are a missing link.

There’s going to come a point not to far off, where the bulk of the traffic whizzing round the internet isn’t porn, or one massive idiot-driven flame war… but is actually machine generated. And most of it (alas) probably won’t be anything useful like environmental-monitoring, but will be people looking at themselves (or other people) for the most banal reasons. London double-decker buses now have about 20 CCTV cameras… on the downstairs floor alone (I know, because I counted them when I was in one last year). Who watches this stuff?

Robots, that’s who.

But back to the fishbots… why stop at monitoring? Why not get them to eat the stuff? I mean do you know how much of it there is?

There’s a plastic-slick twice the size of Texas in the Northern Pacific.

Really, the only way to tackle this is with something that breeds… something who’s numbers increase exponentially, and that’s a way off… but in the meantime, it would be cool to have a competition or something… like Robot Wars, to invent robo-fish that can eat the stuff.

And then at some point (I suppose) they’d learn to eat each other… force to really, as the oceanic pollution diminishes… big fish, eat smaller fish and so on.

And then one day, an aircraft carrier disappears.

Youtube recommended this video for me:

I think the stages of robotic adoption will be:

1) WTF? How could that possibly be useful?
2) LOL A sissy bot… still, at least it doesn’t look like a flea that’s dying for a piss
3) WOW it looks like a dog or something
4) OMG, We’re fucked.

Even walking is a type of communication. The robots in the vids are using Robert What’sisname from Ted (a talk on engineering designs inspired by nature) where all the smarts are built into the architecture of the legs… rather than trying to micro-manage the programming, you just make them springy sticks.

It is a kindof mincy way of walking though. Especially for a dog.

“Search and Rescue” in robotics is a euphemism for “We don’t know what to do with it, but it might be useful as a weapon… but we don’t want to be seen to be making weapons”.

It’s a euphemism for “we’ve invented this really cool thing, but we don’t know what it’s for, LOL”

But they don’t want to say that so they say “search and rescue?”

And who knows. Maybe they will actually come in handy for searching and rescuing… I’m sure they will, but there’s no way that the number of them being made is justified by the number of people that actually get lost. Besides, we saw after Katrina what happens when there’s a really major disaster – people wealthy enough to have cars fuck off, and the poor are left behind to die. The Free-Market in action. After three days, the stragglers are herded what is essentially an open, ad-hoc concentration camp governed by the law of the jungle. Then when the water has receded, the corporate-owned state use it as an excuse to privatise the schools, and “relocate” the poor away from neighbourhoods with too much redevelopment potential.

It’s said somewhere that all human drama boils down to two basic problems: People who won’t leave, and people who won’t stay.

We’ve got a major lie at the heart of many of our institutions… pretending to look after the latter when they’re really more interested in exercising the former… and vice versa. This is the conflict at heart of the “immigration” issue: “We’re racist, but we like paying sub-minimum-wage wages”. Searchbots dance a two-step along this line… spying and rescue. All the money is in spying, but public sympathy is in rescue.

But anyway. Cynicism aside,

This is a page that will be re-edited over time… a compilation of search and rescue robots (which are (more often than not) not actually robots, but remote controlled gadgets)

1) Seedpod

From the University of Maryland. A military rocket-powered variant here… which hints at search and rescue by talking about Police and Fire departments… but doesn’t come right out and say it. It’s been canned now anyway – probably because of the whole “utterly fucking insane” wrinkle that proved to be a tricky one to iron out.

2) A ball bot

3) cool hovery thing from a couple of days ago.

4) Scary looking Cephalic thing

4) An interesting three legged wheely thing from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Distributed Robotics.

it can go up stairs… which is cool if you get lost upstairs.

5) There are a lot that look a bit like this:

And they do appear, at least partly to have been designed specifically with search and rescue in mind… rather than making a cool toy and then trying to justify it afterwards (you don’t have to. Cool toys are cool)

6) LOL Ecofriend

Ecofriend is a website that specialises in “green” solutions that are basically just digital renderings/drawings of things that won’t ever be made. The thing above has been made though – it’s a bendy toy/sculture from www.slobots.com… you can buy them on Etsy for a couple of hundred quid… and yea, they’re quite neat…. but ecofriend reports it as though it’s an actual green, search and rescue robot – rather than an 8 inch tall plastic toy. Eco-snakeoil salesmen.

7) and to be fair, some of them are real

This one being interesting because (apparently) there’s a mother bot and lots of little babybots that go off doing the searching. Used after 9/11 apparently – though I’m kindof over 9/11 now. It’s turned into Godwin’s Law style justification for really damaging “conservative” decisions.

8) Whole mass of them here

Some of these are really cool actually. Animal tanks.

Anyway. That’s enough for now. I’ll add more as I find them… which is usually a couple a week.

Well it doesn’t have that andriodal-xenophobia thing like so many of them do, but I still wouldn’t trust it.

Meka S1 Head montage from Meka Robotics on Vimeo.

It looks like it’s doing that Japanese Opera thing… all stylised moves and bows and whatnot. And then when you’re not looking it will eviscerate you with a razor-tipped fan. They can move really fast these things. They’re deceptive.

via

That’s pretty cool… though to me, the first thing that springs to mind isn’t mosaics, but moveable type. And although it’s state of the art, it still looks like an early version of something. Like this did once:

(and speaking of which, there’s a nice collection of them here)

In a funny sort of way, it’s the same machine… or part of the same machine, and the First Guttenburg Shift is the same revolution as the Second – the one we’re in now. 500 years isn’t that long… not when we’re talking about the scale of things that we’re talking about… evolution. It’s the ‘B’ of the Bang.

I get this feeling when I’m programming sometimes… that coding isn’t about architecture, it’s about archeology. It feels like brushing away at the surface to reveal something that already (as a potential) exists. This is part of the reason why I’m violently (yes violently) opposed to software-patents. They’re trying to ringfence fundamental rules of mathmatics and reality. It’s fundamentally immoral. It’s cheating future generations of the shoulders that we were given to stand on when we were still small.

But anyway… brushing away at this great big… thing… this hidden machine-city. FOR loops are a fundmental law of nature. Object Orientated Programming, Relational Databases, MVC. They will have their day, be superceded, reinvented – but I can’t help but feel that in a very real sense, they weren’t ‘architected’, they were discovered. Uncovered.

Which kind of begs the question… what exactly is it that we’re building here?

Because that robot video above… is OBVIOUSLY just the beginning.