Droid Builders Net

coondoggie writes “Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity. According to Dave Buster, product marketing manager for the Cisco Global Government Solutions Group, the robots can follow a user almost anywhere to maintain connectivity. Published reports said the robots were part of Cisco’s “Information on the move” initiative — a wide ranging plan to secure all things wireless. Whether or not the systems has an enterprise application, it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority.”

•  Slashdot | Cisco Develops Mobile Robots for Wireless Nets

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007. It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research. “The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future,” the ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.

• BBC NEWS | Technology | Robotic age poses ethical dilemma

“Diodes can be made to ‘swim’ through salt water by hitting them with an alternating electric field. The applied field induces a current that sets up a field between the diode’s electrical contacts and creates a propulsive force. The abstract of the paper in Nature Materials is freely available. New Scientist has videos of the swimming diodes in action.”

• Slashdot | Diodes Could Drive Swimming Micro-robots

“Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he’s been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta’s goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins’ 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta’s website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it.”

• Slashdot | Jeff Hawkins’ Cortex Sim Platform Available

I’m not sure about the validity of the actual methods they use, but it sure sounds like something that could be used with great benefit in the A.I. industry, as well as law enforcement of course ;)

An anonymous slashdot reader writes to tell us German scientists claim to have the means of predicting decisions of high level mental activity. “In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people’s decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity — in this case, adding versus subtracting.”

• Slashdot | Scientists Predicting Intentions