Prepare to get fucked with man kind.
 

I came across this blog today to find a whole load of worrying articles. Robots that cant be pushed down, robots that work as a team, robots that seek out power sources in urban environments. Prepare to get fucked with man kind.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Toyota’s running humanoid robot

"Toyota’s most recent humanoid robot prototype (one of many partner robots the automotive giant is developing) stands 130cm tall and weighs 50Kgr. Its legs have 7 degrees of freedom and it can run at an average speed of 7 km/h. In contrast, ASIMO’s maximum speed is 6km/h. The Toyota researchers had to develop new real-time methods for balance control. These methods make it possible for the robot to remain balanced when an external force such as a push from a human is applied when in motion."

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC 2010)

"Creating a team of cooperating agents is a much more difficult task than creating a single agent; these agents have to be able to share information and workout cooperative plans that take advantage of all information available to all agents which may be difficult to communicate in certain circumstances."

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: How does the Willow Garage Personal Robot work? Watch the video to find out.

"A few days ago, the Willow Garage engineers posted a new video explaining some details about how their robot actually works. In the video below, Sachin Chitta and Melonee Wise explain how the robot uses occupancy grid maps to navigate dynamic environments, uses vision and laser information to detect door handles and power outlets, and, finally, plan its actions to satisfy its goals."

Conceptually, the idea of a machine "balancing" has been around for a while. Anyone that has taken a college course in mechanics of machines knows what I'm talking about. The only drawback is we have not had the processing power to handle the input and the feedback controls. UNTIL NOW.

In one of my college courses a few years ago I had an inverted pendulum on a wheel/track base, and using simple programming, you could push it in one direction and the pendulum would stay upright, just by controlling the speed of the base. If I could do that in college like three years ago, imagine how much control robots are going to have in the near future. With speed combined with input/outpus handling speeds and feedback manipulation, we could have robots dodging fucking bullets or catching and throwing back missiles in another decade

I hear Knight Industries is working on an Automatic Roving Robot. If it goes crazy, they can always come out with a new model, say the 2000 that would be able to fight it's evil twin brother.

(anyone?)