Can autonomous vehicles navigate the law? This year has been full of big news about the progress of self-driving cars. They are currently street legal in three states and Google says that on a given day, they have a dozen autonomous cars on the road. This August, they passed 300,000 driver-hours. In Spain this summer, Volvo drove a convoy of three cars through 200 kilometers of desert highway with just one driver and a police escort. Cadillac's newest models park themselves. The writing, one might think, is on the wall. But objects in the media may be farther off than they appear.
posted by modernnomad
on Dec 14, 2012 -
83 comments
In 2005, the Discovery Channel aired
Alien Worlds, a fictional documentary based on Wayne Douglas Barlowe's graphic novel,
Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV." Depicting mankind's first robotic mission to an extrasolar planet that could support life, the show drew from NASA's
Origins Program, the NASA/JPL
PlanetQuest Mission, and ESA's
Darwin Project. It was primarily presented through CGI, but included interviews from a variety of NASA scientists and other experts, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, John Craig Venter and Jack Horner. Oh, and George Lucas, too.
Official site.
Previously on MeFi. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 21, 2012 -
12 comments
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less known is the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.(via) [more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Mar 30, 2012 -
66 comments
Soft robotics are inspired by animals which don't have hard internal skeletons, like squid, worms, and starfish. Developed at Harvard, with funding from DARPA,
this particular soft robot, "not only walks, it knows several different gaits and can deflate to stuff itself through tiny little gaps."
Another design here,
and another (
also),
and another. In addition to movement, soft robotics can also be used
for grip. More information about the Harvard lab is available
here (
with a student describing the research here).
posted by codacorolla
on Nov 29, 2011 -
26 comments
Dancing babies and robot squirrrels (YT) Gustav Hoegen is an animatronics and prosthetics technician - perhaps his most immediately recognisable work to a MetaFilter audience being the spider-centaur (and quite possibly queen of Mars) Rachnos from Doctor Who's
The Runaway Bride, along with the clockwork robots which menaced Madame de Pompadour in
The Girl in the Fireplace. He has also contributed to
Hellboy and
Clash of the Titans.
[more inside]
posted by running order squabble fest
on Nov 1, 2011 -
13 comments
PossessedHand is ostensibly a training system for students of stringed musical instruments. It teaches fingering positions by means of electrodes that stimulate muscles in the forearm, forcing the hand into the correct configuration.
posted by contraption
on Jun 27, 2011 -
31 comments
Valentino Braitenberg's 1984 book,
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology was a seminal work for its discussion of how one might design a system (biological or otherwise) in order to generate behavior like that seen in beings with brains. He embarks on a series of thought experiments in which he creates thirteen
"vehicles" through simple components that (arguably) display intelligent behavior, evolving in a Darwinian fashion to demonstrate what appears to be high-level cognition.
[more inside]
posted by emilyd22222
on Jan 17, 2010 -
16 comments
Cyberdyne. Works on robotic systems that shouldn't kill you unless you are named John Connor. And, maybe not then.
Cyberdyne. Works on robotic systems that could actually
help you walk.
Does it help any that they named it HAL?
posted by dwivian
on Oct 8, 2008 -
26 comments
The
Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) "...is a
generic mission architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, addressable components
forming structures. The components/structures have wide spatial distribution and multi-level organization. This ‘swarm’
behavior is inspired by the success of social insect colonies...."
ANTS may one day
teem through the solar
system....
(last two links large QT files) [more inside]
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Sep 14, 2008 -
14 comments
Science Hack is a unique search engine for science videos focusing on Physics, Chemistry, and Space. For example,
things to do with
sulfur hexafluoride. Still growing, the editors are presently indexing other scientific fields of study including Geology, Psychology, Robotics and Computers. Ever wonder
why things go bang?
posted by netbros
on Aug 7, 2008 -
6 comments
"I began to realize that "robots"-- in all their various forms-- can really be seen as a symbol of a larger relationship between people and technology." In 1988,
Frederick Schodt wrote about the Japanese fascination and use of robots in his book
Inside the Robot Kingdom, curious by the disparities between American and Japanese manufacturing processes . In 1988, the American public wasn't ready for the book, or for robots.
Today, Japan still has embraced
robotic automation in a way that arguably no other country has. For more similar topics,
Mangobot is a column that reports on Asian futurism.
posted by artifarce
on Jun 22, 2008 -
22 comments
