This is to show the history and evolution of mechanics and how it has lead us to robotics.
Created by markie on 06/12/2009
Last updated: 07/12/09 at 02:50
Tags: robotics mechanics
he spaces shared by humans and machines, specifically robots, will continue to merge. And the South Korean government is expected to draw up a set of rules to prevent problems that may arise from this. The South Korean government recently outlined an ethical code that will protect robots and human beings in a future where both are likely to coexist. Shim Hak-Bong from Commerce, Industry & Energy Ministry said, "The government is establishing an ethical code for robots and robot users and manufacturers, and will seek for national consensus and define the technical and ethical limit for developing robots."
US scientists have created a sensor that can "feel" the texture of objects to the same degree of sensitivity as a human fingertip. The team says the tactile sensor could, in the future, aid minimally invasive surgical techniques by giving surgeons a "touch-sensation". The team were able to attain this high level of sensitivity by creating a very thin film made up of layers of metal and semiconducting nanoparticles flanked at the top and bottom by electrodes. When the film touches a surface any pressure or stress squeezes the layers of particles together. This causes the current in the film to change and light is emitted from the particles, an effect known as "electroluminescence". The visible light is then detected by a camera.
Researchers at Honda have developed a new "Brain Machine Interface" that allows robots to decode and act on brain activity in humans. Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Honda Research Institute Japan Co. announced that they developed the BMI so data can be extracted for near real-time operation of a robot without invasive incisions into the head and brain. The breakthrough, demonstrated this week in Tokyo, opens up possibilities for new interfaces between machines and people.
A robot that learns to interact with the world in a similar way to a human baby could provide researchers with fresh insights into biological intelligence. Created by roboticists from Italy, France and Switzerland, "Babybot" automatically experiments with objects nearby and learns how best to make use of them. This gives the robot an ability to develop motor skills in the same way as a human infant. The robot consists of a one-armed torso with a pair of cameras for eyes and a grasping hand. It has an in-built desire to physically experiment with objects on the table in front of it and an ability to assess different forms of interaction and learn from mistakes. If the robot fails to grasp an object securely, for example, it remembers and tries a differently strategy next time. One unbidden skill developed by Babybot was the ability to roll a bottle across its table.
researchers have spent the past 3 1/2 years creating the first prosthetic hand capable of eliciting natural sensory signals. If all goes well, researchers say this bionic hand could be implanted on human arms two years from now, its wired joints discreetly covered by a synthetic glove. Cyberhand would allow the maimed to have “the feeling of touching things,” says Paolo Dario.
Saya the cyber-receptionist is being used at the Tokyo University of Science. With voice recognition technology allowing 700 verbal responses and an almost infinite number of facial expressions from joy to despair, surprise to rage, Saya may not be biological -- but she is nobody's fool.
A South Korean professor is poised to take development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning. Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire. Robots will have their own personalities and emotion and - as films like I Robot warn - that could be very dangerous for humanity. If we can provide a robot with good - soft - chromosomes, they may not be such a threat.
the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) unveiled the world's first "networked" robot, controlled by six external computers, rather than one inside. "Existing robots have internal brains which cannot be enhanced much," says Dr. Choi Young Jin, one of the developers. "But this robot's external brain can be expanded almost indefinitely." The first model, five feet tall and 148 pounds, can recognize voices and faces, detect movements and objects, reply to greetings, shake hands and answer questions. It moves slowly (less than 1mph), however, and has yet to prove its stability outside the lab.
Researchers at Cornell University claim to have built the first self-replicating robot. The array of computerized cubes illustrates the principles of self-replication, says Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell who led the team that designed the repli-bots. Each "robot" is a small tower of computerized cubes linked by magnets. The magnets allow the cubes to link up with or detach themselves from one another. One stack of cubes puts its "head" on the table, then it picks up a new cube and sets it on this "seed." It repeats the process to build its sibling. Moreover, the new robot begins to assist the old in the building process.
Epson releases the smallest robot. Weighing 0.35 ounces (10 grams) and measuring 2.8 inches (70 millimeters) in height, the Micro Flying Robot is unveiled as the world's lightest and smallest robot helicopter. The company hopes it will be used as a "flying camera" during natural disasters. This prototype hardly flies more than a few meters though but the object is intended as a show case to what the company is capable of.
The Actroid is a humanoid robot with strong visual human-likeness developed by Osaka University and manufactured by Kokoro Company Ltd. Several different versions of the product have been produced, but fundimentally the appearance has not changed. Actroid is designed to work as a receptionist or emcee. The receptionist version sits in a sensor-laden booth and can answer questions in four languages, almost like a fortuneteller. Four receptionist Actroids gave directions to visitors at the 2005 Aichi Expo in Japan.
Honda's new ASIMO was the first robot that could walk independently with relatively smooth movements and could climb the stairs. In celebration of the new unit, Honda's ASIMO robot rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) clears the CyberKnife to treat tumors anywhere in the body. Good news to all patients awaiting the surgery.
Honda debuts a new humanoid robot ASIMO, the next generation of its series of humanoid robots. ASIMO is an acronym for "Advanced Step in Innovative MObility"
Tiger Electronics introduces the Furby for the Christmas toy market. It quickly becomes "the toy" to get for the season. Using a variety of sensors this "animatronic pet" can react to its environment and communicate using over 800 phrases in English and their own language "Furbish".
Scottish hotel owner Campbell Aird is fitted with the world's first bionic arm. The major advance in prosthetic limbs came when Campbell Aird was given the electronic arm developed by the Prosthetics Research and Development team at Edinburgh's Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital.
Kevin Warwick currently resies at Reading University, where he conducts research into cybernetics. The first stage of this research involved a simple RFID transmitter being implanted beneath Warwick's skin, and used to control doors, lights, heaters, and other computer-controlled devices based in his proximity. The main purpose of this experiment was said to be to test the limits of what the body would accept, and how easy it would be to receive a meaningful signal from the chip. The second stage involved a more complex neural interface which was designed and built especially for the experiment by Dr. Mark Gasson and his team at the University of Reading. This device was implanted on 14 March 2002, and interfaced directly into Warwick's nervous system. The electrode array inserted contained 100 electrodes. The experiment proved successful, and the signal produced was detailed enough that a robot arm developed by Warwick's colleague, Dr Peter Kyberd, was able to mimic the actions of Warwick's own arm. By means of the implant, Warwick's nervous system was connected onto the internet in Columbia University, New York. From there he was able to control the robot arm in the University of Reading and to obtain feedback from sensors in the finger tips. He also successfully connected ultrasonic sensors on a baseball cap and experienced a form of extra sensory input. A highly publicised extension to the experiment, in which a simpler array was implanted into Warwick's wife, with the aim of creating a form of telepathy or empathy using the Internet to communicate the signal from a distance, was also successful, resulting in the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans.
July, The Pathfinder Mission lands on Mars. Its robotic rover Sojourner, rolls down a ramp and onto Martian soil in early July. It continues to broadcast data from the Martian surface until September. NASA's Mars PathFinder mission captures the eyes and imagination of the world as PathFinder lands on Mars and the Sojourner rover robot sends back images of its travels on the distant planet. Over a few million visitors bombard the web server of NASA's per day necessitate NASA to set up mirror sites all over the world.
Computer programs, called "web bots", become widely used on the web to delve for information. Web bots are build around a core that presumably has limited intelligence, or better 'smartness', clever algorithms to decide the relevance of information against what a user has requested to search for. Webbots are autonomous agents that seek their own way on or through the Internet without human intervention. It was originally to predict stock market trends.
Honda unveils the P-2 (prototype 2), a humanoid robot that can walk, climb stairs and carry loads.
Chris Campbell and Dr. Stuart Wilkinson ( University of South Florida in Tampa, USA) turn a brewing accident into inspiration at the University of South Florida. The result is the Gastrobot, a robot that digests organic mass to produce carbon dioxide that is then used for power. They call their creation the "flatulence engine." Later a more conventional nickname is given, "Chew Chew".
Marc Thorpe starts Robot Wars at Fort Mason center in San Francsico, CA. This becomes increasingly popular and encourages ordinary people to build and maintain RC robots in a "fight to the death".
Dr. John Adler came up with the concept of the CyberKnife a robot that images the patient with x-rays to look for a tumor and delivering a pre-planned dose of radiation to the tumor when found. This concept radically changes how future surgery is conducted.
At MIT Rodney Brooks and A. M. Flynn publish the paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System" in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The paper changes rover research from building the one, big, expensive robot to building lots of little cheap ones. The paper also makes the idea of building a robot somewhat more accessible to the average person. Academics start to concentrate on small, smart useful robots rather than simulated people.
A walking robot named Genghis is unveiled by the Mobile Robots Group at MIT. It becomes known for the way it walks, popularly referred to as the "Genghis gait".
Honda begins a robot research program that's starts with the premise that the robot "should coexist and cooperate with human beings, by doing what a person cannot do and by cultivating a new dimension in mobility to ultimately benefit society."
"A new life awaits you on the Off-World colonies." Blade Runner is released. This Ridley Scott film is based on the Philip K. Dick story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and starred Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard a retired Blade Runner that hunted Replicants, which are illegal mutinous androids.
Takeo Kanade builds the direct drive arm. It is the first to have motors installed directly into the joints of the arm. This development makes joins faster and much more accurate than previous robotic arms.
t the Waseda university in Japan the Wabot-1 is built. This is the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot built in the world. It consists of a limb control system, a vision system, and a conversation system. The Wabot-1 is able to communicate with a person in Japanese and to measure distances and directions to the objects using external receptors, artificial ears and eyes, and an artificial mouth. The Wabot-1 walkes with his lower limbs and is able to grip and transport objects with hands that used tactile sensors.
Victor Scheinman, a Mechanical Engineering student working in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) creates the Stanford Arm. The arm's design becomes a standard and is still influencing the design of robot arms today. Victor Scheinman´s Stanford Arm made a breakthrough as the first successful electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm. By 1974, the Stanford Arm could assemble a Ford Model T water pump, guiding itself with optical and contact sensors. The Stanford Arm led directly to commercial production. Scheinman went on to design the PUMA series of industrial robots for Unimation, robots used for automobile assembly and other industrial tasks.
The octopus-like wall mounted tentacle Arm is developed by Marvin Minsky. Its twelve joints enabled the arm to go around corners. A PDP-6 computer controls the arm, powered by hydraulic fluids. The arm could lift the weight of a person.
Stanley Kubrick makes Arthur C. Clark's, 2001: A Space Odyssey into a movie. It features HAL, an onboard computer that decides it doesn't need its human counterparts any longer. HAL portrays a robotic entity giving off frankenstein syndrome, which has been apparent throught the course of mechanical history.
Richard Greenblatt writes, MacHack, a program that plays chess. In response to a recent article written by Hurbert Dreyfus where he suggests, as a critique to efforts in artificial intelligence, that a computer program could never beat him in a game of chess. When the program is finished and Dreyfus is invited to play the computer he leads for most of the game but ultimately loses in the end in a close match. Greenblatt's program would be the foundation for many future chess programs, ultimately culminating in Big Blue the chess program that beats chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov.
An artificial intelligence program named ELIZA is created at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA functions as a computer psychologist that manipulates its users statements to form questions. ELIZA might respond to "My head hurts" with "Why do you say your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" would be "Who else in your family hates you?" ELIZA was implemented using simple pattern matching techniques, but was taken seriously by several of its users, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked. Weizenbaum is disturbed at how quickly people put faith in his little program.
The Stanford Research Institute creates Shakey. The first mobile robot that can reason about its surroundings. Five years later, funding is cancelled when the shortcomings of the machine become apparent. Shakey has had a substantial legacy and influence on present-day artificial intelligence and robotics. Shakey had a TV camera, a triangulating range finder, and bump sensors, and was connected to DEC PDP-10 and PDP-15 computers via radio and video links. Shakey used programs for perception, world-modeling, and acting. Low-level action routines took care of simple moving, turning, and route planning.
The first Unimate robot is shipped from Danbury, Connecticut and installed in a plant of General Motors in Trenton, New Jersey. The assembly line robot Unimate is controlled step-by-step by commands stored on a magnetic drum, the 4,000-pound arm sequenced and stacked hot pieces of die-cast metal. Unimate is the brainchild of Joe Engelberger and George Devol, and originally automated the manufacture of TV picture tubes.
Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT demonstrates one of the first practical application to computer-assisted manufacturing. The lab developed a specific language for this tool called: "Automatically Programmed Tools" (APT). This language is used to instruct milling machine operations. While demonstrating the language the machine produced an ashtray for each visitor.
Squee, the electronic robot squirrel. It has two phototubes or "eyes" located at the top of the steering post. It also has a scoop which opens and closes, or "hands", is at the front. Squee, named after a squirrel, is an electronic robot squirrel. It contains four sense organs (two phototubes, two contact switches), three acting organs (a drive motor, a steering motor, and a motor which opens and closes the scoop), and a small brain of half a dozen relays. It will hunt for a "nut". The "nut" is a tennis ball designated by a member of the audience who steadily holds a flashlight above the ball, pointing the light at Squee. Then Squee approaches, picks up the "nut" in the scoop, stops paying attention to the steady light, sees in stead a light that goes on and off 120 times a second shining over its "nest", takes the "nut" to its "nest", there leaves the nuts, and then returns to hunting more "nuts".
Alan Newell and Herbert Simon create the Logic Theorist, the first "expert system". It is used to help solve difficult math problems. The computer program was writted to deliberately mimic he problem solving skills of a human being and has been called "the first artificial intelligence program".
George Devol and Joe Engleberger design the first programmable robot "arm" and uses the term Universal Automation for the first time. Thus planting the seed for the name of his future company - Unimation. Approximately five million dollars was spent to develop the first Unimate. In 1966, after many years of market surveys and field tests, full scale production began in Connecticut. Unimation's first robot was a materials handling robot and was soon followed by robots for welding and other applications
In France, Raymond Goertz designs the first teleoperated articulated arm for the Atomic Energy Commission. The design is based entirely on mechanical coupling between the master and slave arms (using steel cables and pulleys). Derivatives of this design are still seen in places where handling of small nuclear samples is required.
Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which he proposes a test to determine whether or not a machine has gained the power to think for itself. It becomes known as the "Turing Test". Since then each year a contest is held between various software developers to determine how close they have come to the true Turing Machine. The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination.
British robotics pioneer William Grey Walter creates autonomous machines called Elmer and Elsie that mimic lifelike behavior with very simple circuitry. These tortoise shaped robots 'taught us' about the secrets of organisation and life. The three-wheeled tortoise robots were capable of phototaxis, by which they could find their way to a recharging station when they ran low on battery power.
Norbert Wiener, a professor at M.I.T., publishes Cybernetics or "Control and Communication in the Animal', a book which describes the concept of communications and control in electronic, mechanical, and biological systems. Cybernetics is based on common relationships between humans and machines.
Concept of a stored program and generic re-programmability of computers. The first general-purpose digital computer, dubbed Whirlwind, solves its first problem at M.I.T. It was decided that a digital computer would be required, rather than an analog computer as originally envisioned. The program to build the digital computer, called the Whirlwind, was officially launched. Project Whirlwind was sponsored by the Special Devices Division of the Office of Research and Inventions of the U.S. Navy. The plans called for using the Whirlwind to investigate the problems associated with aircraft stability and control using flight simulation.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts do pioneering work on neural networks that can learn about the world in much the same way that we do. This is the fundimental research that contributed to the cybernetics theories and technologies that are being developed today.
Isaac Asimov produces a series of short stories about robots starting with "A Strange Playfellow" for Super Science Stories magazine. The story is about a robot and its affection for a child that it is bound to protect. Over the next 10 years he produces more stories about robots that are eventually recompiled into the volume "I, Robot" in 1950. Isaac Asimov's most important contribution to the history of the robot is the creation of his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Asimov later adds a "zeroth law" to the list: 0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
The first programmable paint-spraying mechanism is designed by Americans Willard Pollard and Harold Roselund for the DeVilbiss Company. In the parallel kinematics community, Pollard's parallel robot is well known as the first industrial parallel robot design.
Psychologists Clark Hull amd Thomas Ross, develop the Hypothetico-Deductive System, in an attempt to design learning robots.
Alan Turing introduces the concept of a theoretical computer called the Turing Machine. It is a fundamental advance in computer logic and also spawns new schools in Mathematics. He completes his seminal paper On Computable Numbers, which paves the way for modern computers.
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