The Risk Factor

I don't know how I missed it, but the Humane Society of the United Sates has been extremely successful at getting states, and now it looks like the Federal government, to outlaw Internet hunting via H.R. 2711, the Computer-Assisted Remote Hunting Act.

According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required), the Humane Society has been mailing people "an urgent message, underlined and in bold type":

Such horrific cruelty must stop and stop now.

No debate there - except, as the WSJ article points out, no one is actually hunting using the Net, even though the Humane Society's site implies that it is rampant.

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

Today's Washington Post has an interesting article and some neat video on the new class of insect-sized robotic spy cameras, some looking like dragonflies. The CIA tried this 30 years ago, according to the article, but gave up: seems the insectothopter couldn't be controlled in a cross-wind.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems Project, which "is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis."

Some protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York claim they saw what looked like a dragonfly-like object suspiciously hovering as if spying on them. Law enforcement claims to know nothing about it, and an entomologist says that it was probably just a dragonfly.

However, the entomologist also says dragonflies don't fly in packs. So, if you see a bunch of dragonflies just kind of hanging around ...

The London Guardian has a short video of two-legged robots battling out for the Robo-One grand championship at Tokyo's convention center. I particularly liked Mr. Balloon-head.

As first reported yesterday in the Register and then picked up today by ComputerWorld, Microsoft has had to pull the plug on its on-line "artificial-intelligence Santa bot" that was meant to talk to children about what they wanted for Christmas. Seems that the bot, as ComputerWorld put it, "wandered off topic" when certain words - like pizza - were used.

According to ComputerWorld, "Microsoft recently added the artificial Santa as a bot that Windows Live Messenger users could insert into their IM buddy list as northpole@live.com."

You can read about the bot in a Microsoft press release I found from last year titled: For a Jolly Good Time, Chat With Santa on Windows Live Messenger. A line in it is: "Filling Santa in on Christmas wishes and asking all about how the reindeer are doing or what’s new at the North Pole are a few of the things kids can talk to Santa about. Santa can even tell kids where they stand on his list: naughty or nice."

I guess the press release forgot to mention that Santa would be informing the kids about whether he was naughty or nice this year.

Microsoft said in a statement posted on the Register site: "Yesterday we received reports that the automated Santa Claus agent in Windows Live Messenger used inappropriate language. As soon as we were alerted, we took steps to mitigate the issue, including the removal of language from the agent’s automated script."

"We were not completely satisfied with the result of these actions, and have decided to discontinue the automated Santa Claus agent. We apologise for any offence or upset caused by this disturbing incident."

I guess Microsoft tested this year's Santa bot using the same strategy it does on most of its products - let the users find the bugs.

According to the London Telegraph, "flirting robots" are invading Russian dating websites with the aim of gaining personal information from unsuspecting victims. CyberLover is one such robot that masquerades as a person seeking love on-line, according to the story. It interacts with a potential victim asking questions like, "When's your birthday? Where can I send you a Valentine's Day card?" and so on. The fear is that these robo-lovers could soon be invading popular social networks phishing for information.

I wonder what happens when one robo-lover encounters another on-line? Do they exchange code words so they know that the other is one of their own? Or do they just keep chatting one another up forever?

In this morning's Washington Post, there is an interesting story on Japan's declining population. According to the Post, "population shrinkage began [in Japan] three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone. That would leave Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, with about 42 million people."

Rather than open its doors to immigrants or encourage larger families, the Japanese government in partnership with industry has decided to turn to robots.

According to the Post's story, Japanese engineers say it's "service robots" that can "bail out Japan, which has the world's largest proportion of residents over 65 and smallest proportion of children under 15. One such gizmo, on display at the [Great Robot Exhibition in Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science], can spoon-feed the elderly. Others are being designed to hoist them onto a toilet and phone a nurse when they won't take their pills."

Some critics in Japan, however, call the "robot cure for an aging society as little more than high-tech quackery."

I wonder if the future Japanese population demographics include the wide-spread creation of sex robots?

Government Computer News had a nice little story on the ethics of robot warriors a short time ago. It talked about the work of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Mobile Robot Laboratory professor Ronald Arkin and his attempts to define algorithms to define ethical behavior in machines that can follow norms like the Geneva Convention. This is from the abstract of his paper Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot:

"This article provides the basis, motivation, theory, and design recommendations for the implementation of an ethical control and reasoning system potentially suitable for constraining lethal actions in an autonomous robotic system so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement."

Dr. Arkin's 117-paper is a bit much to digest in one sitting, but I have taken a quick read and find it interesting in its approach and very thorough, at least from my perspective. In an AFP news story, Dr. Arkin is quoted last month as saying, "Robotics systems may have the potential to out-perform humans from a perspective of the laws of war and the rules of engagement," since with robots "there are no emotions that can cloud judgment, such as anger."

Arkin's work has direct relevance to another robot story in this week's London Telegraph and the aforementioned AFP story about University of Sheffield's Department of Computer Science professor Noel Sharkey's belief that the major powers are "sleepwalking" into an international robot arms race, and predicted "that it is only a matter of time before robots become a standard terrorist weapon, replacing suicide bombers."

This latter theme was reiterated by others at the UK robotics conference titled The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems where Sharkey spoke. For instance, UK Rear Adm. Chris Parry spoke about the terrorists using remotely piloted planes as weapons such as Hezbollah's use of pilotless aircraft against Israel in 2006.

BTW, I wrote some about the US military's planned use of UAVs for warfare in the November 2007 issue of Spectrum article. As I wrote, "Back in 2001, Congress mandated, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, that by 2010, one-third of the operating deep-strike aircraft of the Armed Forces are unmanned, and by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned.” Currently, there are approximately 4,000 robots and 1,000 UAVs of varying types being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by US forces.

Today's London Telegraph has a story on the new European Union funded open-source, open-hardware Symbrion project that aims to create, according to the website, "super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form."

"When it is advantageous to do so, these swarm robots can dynamically aggregate into one or many symbiotic organisms and collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators."

The project, which involves researchers from a "swarm" of ten universities, hopes to develop applications that support search and rescue missions, space exploration and medicine.

Prof. Alan Winfield from the University of the West of England, Bristol, is quoted in the Telegraph story as saying:

"A swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake. They could form themselves into teams searching for survivors or to lift rubble off stranded people. Some robots might form a chain allowing rescue workers to communicate with survivors while others assemble themselves into a ‘medicine bot' to give first aid. The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires. The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionally."

Shades of transformers!

The project is set to complete in 2013.

Speaking of transformers, check out this Toshiba-Softbank model 815T PB transformer cell phone.

Maybe the Symbrion folks and they can get together and create a cell phone swarm for who knows what - any suggestions out there?

The Canadian Space Agency's Dextre (Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator) robot apparently needs a software patch to fix a timing problem that is preventing Dextre from fully powering up.

According to CSA's website, "Dextre is an essential tool for maintaining and servicing the space station. With its dual-arm design providing added flexibility, Dextre will remove and replace smaller components on the Station’s exterior, where precise handling is required. It will be equipped with lights, video equipment, a tool platform and four tool holders."

"Dextre is a complex robot designed to perform intricate maintenance and servicing tasks on the outside of the ISS. Dextre will carry out delicate work that, so far, could only be accomplished by astronauts during spacewalk activities. In other words, Dextre will provide an alternative to astronauts, considerably reducing the amount of time that they have to venture out of the ISS to perform demanding spacewalks and providing more time for them to perform science on the ISS."

Engineers are "confident" that the patch will fix the problem (I noticed they didn't say software programmers were confident, though).

I wonder if the engineers are as confident as I am during every Microsoft Patch and Pray Tuesday?

Update: At the end of the day, it wasn't a software problem as first thought. The patch was uploaded, but nothing happen. Engineers next thought it was a faulty cable. This was by-passed, and power was restored. You can read more about it here at ComputerWorld.

There was an interesting little Associated Press story over the weekend about researchers at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts using a robot squirrel named appropriately "Rocky" to help "decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts."

The researchers use a computer and a set of binoculars to control the home-made robotic squirrel as it infiltrates the local gray squirrel population. The squirrel is equipped with appropriate squirrel sound recordings to "speak" to the other squirrels in attempts to get their attention.

The researchers are trying to figure out whether squirrels "react more strongly to Rocky's noises or movements or a combination."

The story also mentions the use of fake lizards and sage grouse by researchers to gain more insights into animal behaviors.

What I would really like is a robo-hawk or owl to help keep the hyper-active squirrels around my house who think it is their house away.

There was an AP story last week on the Army's "exoskeleton" robotic suit being developed by Sarcos Inc (now owned by Raytheon) that potentially will "multiply a person's strength and endurance as many as 20 times."

"Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army’s Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations," according to the story.

The suit is still not practical: it is very expensive, and the suit’s battery life currently lasts only 30 minutes.

I got a little more insight into some of the military mission drivers behind this suit last week when I was at the third annual iRobot payload conference. Ellen Purdy, Director - Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise, US Department of Defense, gave the keynote address describing some of the robotic efforts the DoD is supporting.

In one example, Mrs. Purdy spoke about the problems involved in developing "robotic convoy" capabilities. It's one thing to say I want an autonomous convoy capability, it is quite another to implement it, she said. On top of the detailed technical issues of actually developing an autonomous vehicle, there are a number of mission issues that immediately arise as well.

For instance, how many vehicles does one designate autonomous versus being manned to ensure there is adequate security for the convoy? How far should each vehicle be separated from one another to maintain safety margins, especially if it is at night or in bad weather? Does every vehicle also need to be able to be driven manually if the convoy is attacked or if a vehicle breaks down?

The robotic suit comes into play in that, say you have an autonomous convoy showing up that has few if any soldiers accompanying it, who is going to unload it? A small number of soldiers, each wearing a suit, will be able to do the work of many more than otherwise would be needed for that task, Mrs. Purdy said.

What Mrs. Purdy pointed out was that each decision to use robots has other implications that are not always obvious and need to be thought through. As she remarked, "The Army doesn't know what it doesn't know about robots."

Over the week, I'll write up a bit more about what I heard at the conference, which for me not being a "robot guy," I found pretty interesting.