Robots: Bringing Intelligent Machines to Life

by Ruth Aylett

Can we build a robot with humanlike intelligence? What technology is needed to produce the perfect blueprint for the ideal "living" robot? What part will robots play in the future of humanity? Are we... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764155415
• ISBN13: 9780764155413
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: B.E.S. Publishing
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 9.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

RoboCup - The ultimate challenge too develop an team of humanoid robots capabe of defeating the huma

1. P2 robot was developed over 10 years at a cost of $100 million. Its successor is Asimo with the ability to walk, run, turn, greet, and deliver a coffee tray. 2. The Marsokhod rover has six wheels on movable axles allow it to climb over rocks 1.5 times the height of its deeply ridged conically shaped wheels. 3. In the USA, Sandia National Laboratories has a hopper in a plastic shell the size of a grapefruit. Using a built-in compass and a gimbal mechanism with a moveable weight, it cal roll around to right itself after each jump. A small internal combustion engine with enough fuel for about 4,000 hops drives a piston into the ground, generating a leap three fee and six feet forward. 4. The Nagoya brachiator has 14 motors controlling a fully articulated body. A separate stereo-canera setup connected to a computer determines where the brachiator's arms are, updated 60 times per second. Using basic equations for swinging and knowledge of distance between handholds the Brachiators is able to swing between branches. 5. Alan DiPietro of iRobot has created robot gecko feet allowing the robot to walk up a wall. The German MAKRO Project of 1997-2000 developed a multisegment robot to inspect the interior of sewerage pipes. The snake-like robot could travel down the pipe autonomously and was seen as a cheaper and much more effective way of carrying out inspections. Shigeo Hirose built a simple snakebot with serpentine motion by placing wheels under each modular section. Snakebot II developed by Mark Yim incorporated some autonomous behavior. 6. David Barret, in 1995, built a robot tuna. Controlled by six servo motors each rated at 2 horsepower, it had force sensors at various locations along the path of its controlling tendons. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built a robotic sea bream, in which the tail fin and two pectoral fins and controlled by desktop computer giving the robotic fish a top speed of 0.82 feet per second. 7. iRobot is interested in creating a legged robot that can scuttle along the bed of a river or lake, a robotic crab with possible uses for detecting mine detection. 8. Lucy by Steve Grand does have a lot of knowledge, but the designer of the robot claims it has the ability to mimic, "Many people still think of the brain as a passive receptor of information. I think of perception as a much more active process. As conscious beings, we don't live in a real-world-we live in a virtual world inside our heads. Most of the time this internal world is closely synchronized to the external world-our model matches reality, tracks it, and predicts it. When we dream or when we image things, we disconnect from the real world and let the model run on its own. Although the same mechanism are at work in both cases, the synchronization with reality is missing when we dream or think. The model is the crucial thing: perception is an active process, in which we use this model to predict, hypothesize about, and correct data fed in by our senses-fil

A really fun book

Research into artificial intelligence has been undergoing a roller coaster ride in the past four decades. Promises were made, but were never fulfilled as to the building of intelligent machines. Both the military and industry were interested in robotics, and industry got what it needed at the time, in the context of manufacturing, but these robots were by no means intelligent. Lately a new wave of optimism in artificial intelligence has appeared, and one will naturally wonder if this optimism is justified. Highly advanced intelligent machines have been predicted to arise in the next two decades, but it remains to be seen if the research in artificial intelligence will allow this to come to fruition. This brief but insightful book is about the ongoing efforts to build intelligent robots. It gives though a healthy dose of skepticism, and that serves to remind the reader that a lot of hard work is ahead if these types of machines are to be built. The author emphasizes the viewpoint that basing intelligence on the human model as was done in the last thirty years has not resulted in advances in artificial intelligence. Therefore, the author looks to other more simple forms of life to obtain a model of intelligence. Indeed, in the book one finds robots based on snakes, monkeys, flies, cockroaches, grasshoppers, crabs, pikes, birds, orangutans, tortoises, lobsters, crickets, lampreys, dogs, and platypuses. It remains to be seen if this approach will lead to the rise of intelligent machines, but the book does give a highly interesting overview of what has been accomplished to date using this approach. The acceptance of robots and their practical use could perhaps be done best by introducing them as objects we are familiar with. Pet robots or robots that perform useful but restricted functions as already begun in the marketplace, with impressive results. The author discusses some interesting work on just how to employ robots in the field so that they are able to function and obtain energy autonomously. Anyone who has owned a pet robot understands the aggravation of the frequent need to recharge batteries. The author gives the example of the "SlugBot", which captures real slugs, drops them into a methane-producing biomass generator, which produces electricity for the robot. The engineering difficulties of this approach are enormous of course, and the author is careful to point this out. Farmers though, would appreciate the assistance of these slug-exterminator robots. Other strategies that deal with the "recharging" problem are discussed, such as the one of building "robot ecosystems". The author also includes a very brief discussion on "robot cars", pointing out that autonomous cars are already a reality. The legal environment though is the only real impediment to their being put into production, as the author points out. This and human factors, such as the trust that an individual must feel in permitting the car to deliver him safely to the destin