Droid Builders Net

I am extremely excited to break even more good news today; Pleo pre-orders started today!!

After quickly converting the dollar price to danish kroner (DKK) I immediate went to order it, BAM!!! I was hit by a brick in the head, when reading this:

We ship to addresses in the United States.

Oh no!! Pleo is hatching but he can’t swim yet, thus it would not be safe to make him swim that long way across the ocean to Europe. Now once again, ill go to sleep crying for six months.. But stay put Pleo, I’ll be waiting by the beach when you finally arrive!

UPDATE: I got this response from Ugobe support, not much — but something;

“At this time, UGOBE is only taking pre-orders for addresses in the United States. UGOBE’s distributor for Denmark is Top Toy. Please contact them for information on ordering Pleo in your country.”

• PleoWorld

Good news robotics freaks! Today NASA JPL released a version of their robotics framework for the public.

CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov.

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common robotic functionality and integrates multiple implementations of any given functionality. Examples of such capabilities include pose estimation, navigation, locomotion and planning. In addition to supporting multiple algorithms, it provides adaptations to multiple robotic platforms. CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program’s rover technology developments.

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

Primary functionality in these modules includes math infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions, and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images, camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image representations.

• CLARAty  Website
• NASA JPL Press Release

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Junior, the robot Volkswagen, passed its basic driver’s test here Thursday.Now comes the hard part: a race on mock city streets that will raise the bar for artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot here next to Google headquarters to test Stanford University’s autonomous passenger car, Junior, in what was its first big qualifying test for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA’s third Grand Challenge competition for driverless vehicles.

DARPA will make so-called “site visits” this summer to evaluate all 53 prospective Urban Challenge contestants, homing in on whether the robots can perform basic driving skills, including navigating a four-way stop with live traffic, passing a stationary car and executing a U-turn.

“It’s a steep ladder to get up to the Urban Challenge. What you saw today was the first rung of the ladder,” Norm Whitaker, program manager for DARPA, said to a crowd of people following a two-and-a-half-hour test of Stanford Racing Team’s Junior.

Read the full article:

• Stanford robot passes driving test | CNET News.com

“The New York Times is running an interesting article about how human memory works and the theorized adaptive nature of forgetfulness”.

From the article,

“Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.”

• Slashdot | Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process

“Computer scientists at the University of Southern California USC have developed DEFACTO, a training program which uses artificial intelligence AI to help firefighters practice simulated emergency situations. The system is currently used by the Los Angeles Fire Department. DEFACTO has committees of AI agents which can create disaster scenarios with images and maps seen in 3-D by the trainees. The software agents also evaluate the trainees answers and help them to take better decisions. As said one LAFD captain, You can see if youre heading toward a mistake much more quickly. Read more for additional details about this AI project and a photo of a LAFD Fire Captain using the system.”

• Slashdot | Using AI to Train Firefighters

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

“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

It’s Alive!

Say hello to Pleo. From the guy who brought you Furby, it’s a snuffling, stretching, oddly convincing robotic dinosaur. You are so going to want one.

By Clive Thompson

WHEN I FIRST MEET PLEO, the tiny dinosaur is curled up on a kitchen table, its long tail and big head pulled inward. It’s snoring quietly, emitting a strangely soothing sound, almost like the amplified purring of a guinea pig. I’m tempted to reach out and touch it – but it looks so peaceful, I can’t bring myself to disturb it. | Then I realize what I’m doing: I’m worrying about waking up a robot. | Caleb Chung seems to understand my reluctance. “It’s OK,” the toy’s inventor says, motioning to the little green lizard. “You can touch him.” But before I do, Pleo wakes up on its own, fluttering open its doelike eyes and lifting its head. There’s a barely perceptible whizzing as its 14 internal motors spring into action and it struggles upright, stretching itself to get the kinks out. “You know, all your dogs do that,” Chung says as Pleo begins to poke around the table. “They wake up in the morning and go ‘ummmm’ – just like that.” The dino lets out a long, creaky honk.

“I think he wants to play,” Chung suggests, so I tentatively stroke the nubbly rubber skin on its back. It moos happily. A laptop on the kitchen table is monitoring Pleo’s internal state. As I trigger the touch sensors embedded in the toy, its “arousal” numbers start rising: 16, 23, 27, 28. It’s like a Matrix view of Pleo’s subconscious. I poke its left leg, and it cranes its neck curiously to see what just happened. I’m impressed. This feels less like interacting with a piece of machinery and more like playing with a kitten.

Chung knows how to create emotional connections to toys. Ten years ago, the bushy-haired, hyperkinetic inventor conceived Furby, selling more than 40 million of the yammering gremlins in a worldwide craze that launched the now-booming industry of robotic pets. A string of artificial companions have since trundled off the production line: the FurReal cat, the Roboraptor, the Robosapien, the Aibo and its litter of me-too electronic pooches. Household robots have arrived – not as servants doing our laundry but as helpless, babylike things that demand we take care of them.

Read the complete article at Wired Magazine.

• Wired 15.01: It’s Alive!
• Video on YouTube of Pleo in action

Our little robot friends on mars have recieved xmas gifts too! In the form of software upgrades ;) Basically it makes them spot dust clouds, whirlwinds and other features, so it can more efficiently choose what data to send back to earth.

Press Release – December 28, 2006

NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks to Kick Off Year Four

NASA’s twin Mars rovers, nearing the third anniversary of their landings, are getting smarter as they get older.

The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.

One of the new capabilities enables spacecraft to examine images and recognize certain types of features. It is based on software developed for NASA’s Space Technology 6 “thinking spacecraft.”

Spirit has photographed dozens of dusty whirlwinds in action, and both rovers have photographed clouds. Until now, however, scientists on Earth have had to sift through many transmitted images from Mars to find those few. With the new intelligence boost, the rovers can recognize dust devils or clouds and select only the relevant parts of those images to send back to Earth. This increased efficiency will free up more communication time for additional scientific investigations.

Follow the link below to read the full Press Release at NASA JPL.

• Mars Exploration Rover Mission: NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks to Kick Off Year Four