First, a fruit fly is tethered to a rod with a cylindrical LED display around it. The display shows geometric patterns that are known to make a fruit fly move left or right - a kind of virtual reality simulator for flies. Since the fly is tethered, it can't actually move, but it tries to anyway. "The fly's pretty dumb," says roboticist Brad Nelson, who created the "flyborg" with colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
The patterns on the display are triggered by images transmitted from a camera mounted on a miniature robotic car. If the car approaches an obstacle, the display shows the appropriate pattern and the fly reacts accordingly. As it does so, another camera detects minute changes in the movements of its wings. "We measure the lift force and kinematics in real time," says Nelson.
The goal is to figure out how the fly makes decisions about movement so that those decisions can be replicated by a computer.
It looks like humans are just as capable of forming bonds with robots as they are with dogs. Perhaps the robot dogs will comfort us while we propagate memes for our machine overlords.
Swiveling frenetically, they analyzed digital images of items scattered randomly on a swiftly moving conveyor belt and picked up the items using suction cups that blow air in and out at their tips. They then worked together to place line up the items in rows inside boxes.
On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, robots are fast becoming part of the US military family. "The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane." (via cd)
Ken Graney's Roomba has broken the three laws of Roombotics. "The first law states that the device 'must not suck up jewelry or other valuables, or through inaction, allow valuables to be sucked up.' The second law prescribes that Roomba 'must obey vacuuming orders given to it by humans except when such orders would conflict with the first law.' The third and final law authorizes a Roomba to 'protect its own ability to suction dust and debris as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.'"
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