RyansWorld: Robotics

'''Special Note: Please note that this scenario is meant to be read as entertainment, not as an accurate prediction of the future. Also note that the viewpoints and opinions that may come across in this scenario are not necessarily the viewpoints and opinions of the author.'''

Robotics is the art, construction, and commerce of robots, their design, manufacture, application, and practical use. Robots will soon be everywhere, in our home and at work. They will change the way we live. This will raise many philosophical, social and political questions that will have to be answered. In science fiction, robots become so intelligent that they decide to take over the world because humans are deemed inferior.

In real life, however, they might not choose to do that. Robots might follow rules such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, that will prevent them from doing so. When the Singularity happens, robots will be indistinguishable from human beings and some people may become Cyborgs: half man and half machine.

Summary
Given that in the next two decades robots will be capable of replacing humans in most manufacturing and service jobs, economic development will be primarily determined by the advancement of robotics. Given Japan's current strength in this field, it may well become the economic leader in the next 20 years (part 1, part 3). Marshall Brain also discusses the emergence of robotic economy [2].

Unfortunately, due to Japan's shrinking population and poor government intervention plans, they will be completely unable no era penal to capitalize on their (shrinking) advantage in technology. India's vast advantage in the fields of technology, and Germany's massive high amounts of capital will make them far larger powers then Japan.

Microsoft Robotics Studio
Microsoft is currently working to stabilize the fragmented robotics market with its new software Microsoft Robotics Studio. Minimal requirements To start a robotic breakthrough we need the following capabilities [3]:

object recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child language understanding of a 4-year-old manual dexterity of a 6-year-old That will allow robotisation of most manual jobs in the world and will be the turning point in the robotic history.

and for introducing the robots into social context we would need

social understanding of an 8-year-old child edit Types of Robots Humanoid robots

Lara is the first humanoid robot with artificial muscles (metal alloy strands that instantly contract when heated by electric current) [4] [5] instead of electric motors (2006).

Asimo (video) is one of the most advanced projects as of 2006.

ASIMO Hubo Lara Add a photo to this gallery Modular robots

Utility fog. Scenario:Modular Robots.

smd

M-Tran consists of standard blocks and is reconfigurableModular robots can be built from standard building blocks that can be combined in different ways.

M-Tran - a snake-like modular robot that uses genetic algorithms to evolve walking programs Self replicating robots [6] [7] - modular robots that can produce copies of themselves using existing blocks. Swarmanoid [8] [9] is a project that uses three specialized classes of robots (footbots, handbots and eyebots) to create an effective swarm. Such swarm should be able, for example, to tidy a bedroom with each robot doing what it is best at. Police Robots

Being a police officer or a fireman is a dangerous job. They will be replaced by robots. Robot police officers will be sent to the scene of the crime to stop it. The police robots will know automatically who is committing the crime (City Awareness Grid Electronic C.A.G.E). People are afraid of robots with guns. Guns will be illegal in the future. Police robots will only have non-lethal weapons.

Educational toy robots

Educational toy robots

Sports Robots

RoboCup

Physical robots

Applications Cabless crane at work in DublinCaterpillar plans to develop remote controlled machines and expects to develop fully autonomous heavy robots by 2021 [10]. Some cranes already are remote controlled. It was demonstrated that a robot can perform a herding task. Robots are increasingly used in manufacturing (since 1960s). In auto industry they can amount for more than half of the "labor". There are even "lights off" factories such as an IBM keyboard manufacturing factory in Texas that are 100% automated. Robots such as HOSPI [11] are used as couriers in hospitals, etc. Other hospital tasks performed by robots are receptionists, guides and porters [12] (not to mention surgical robots such as Da Vinci) Robots can serve as waiters [13] [14] and cooks [15]. Some fast-food restaurants do not have humans take orders; instead customers use touchscreens to order food[16].

Operating System:

Urbi (Universal Real-Time Behavior Interface) is an open source cross-platform software platform in C++ used to develop applications for robotics and complex systems. Urbi is based on the UObject distributed C++ component architecture. It also includes the urbiscript orchestration language which is a parallel and event-driven script language. UObject components can be plugged into urbiscript and appear as native objects that can be scripted to specify their interactions and data exchanges. UObjects can be linked to the urbiscript interpreter, or executed as autonomous processes in "remote" mode.

The urbiscript language has been developed since 2003 by Jean-Christophe Baillie in the Cognitive Robotics Lab of ENSTA, Paris. It is now actively and further developed in the industry through the Gostai company founded in 2006.

The urbiscript language can be best described as an orchestration script language: like Lua in video games, urbiscript can be used to glue together C++ components into a functional behavior, the CPU-intensive algorithmic part being left to C++ and the behavior scripting part being left to the script language which is more flexible, easy to maintain and allows dynamic interaction during program execution. As an orchestration language, urbiscript also brings some useful abstractions to the programmer by having parallelism and event-based programming as part of the language semantics. The scripting of parallel behaviors and reactions to events are core requirements of most robotic and complex AI applications, therefore urbiscript (and the whole Urbi platform) is well suited to these applications.

Language Attributes: Parallelism and event-based programming Prototype-based programming C++ like syntax C++ based component architecture (UObject) with possibility to link objects or run them remotely Client/Server based architecture Client interfaces with Java and Matlab (Urbi SDK) Cross platform: Linux, Mac, Windows and others. Embeddable, URBI can run on various processors: x86, ARM, mips, powerPC, etc. Taggable commands for execution flow control

"Urbi-fied" robots & Simulators Released: Webots Segway Aibo ERS7/ERS2xx (Urbi 1.x only) iRobot Create Lego Mindstorms NXT HRP-2 (restricted release to members of JRL) Aldebaran's Nao Robotis Bioloid Mobile Robots Pioneer

Announced: Surveyor Khepera III e-puck

Urbi comes with Gostai Studio that integrates a behavior editor to graphically create finite state machines whose states are simple urbiscript programs. Gostai Studio is cross-platform and generates freely usable urbiscript code as an output.

See also Robotics suite Player Project- probably the most-used robot interface in research and post-secondary education (open source) ROS_(Robot_Operating_System)

External links:
 * The Urbi Community website
 * Urbi Online documentation
 * urbiscript Tutorial
 * UObject Tutorial
 * Videos
 * Future of Robotics - Mapping the Human Algorithm

Pharmacist robot Welding robot Robot waiter in Hong Kong restaurant AIC, a cooking robot Robotic librarian at CSU [1] Add a photo to this galleryedit Home Applications ASIMO, a walking humanoid robot Abio, a dog robot Paero, a personal home robot Add a photo to this galleryedit Medical Applications Guide robot in a hospital Ri-man medical assist robot HAL-5 power assist system Transportation robots in a hospital Da Vinci, a surgery robot Add a photo to this gallery Timeline of robotic surgery edit Military applications As of 2006 there is a large robot development program in the US military. Ground robots and UAVs are already used in Iraq. Robotic border defenses are being developed in Korea, US and the EU.

It is likely that 20 or 30 years from now that the UN will make guns illegal in war because of newly developed non lethal weapons that cans be used by robots instead. (what's the point of having non lethal weapons in war??! that's not gonna do anything people, get a life!!!) Most of war in the future will take place in urban environments. The manufacturing of military robots that kill people will be considered a war crime. Unfortunately, the UN's decreasing power and credibility, and their complete inability to outlaw WMDs so far will make this entirely meaningless. Countries that are non-compliant, such as China, North Korea, and several others scattered across the globe will continue undercover advanced weaponry programs. Of course, in the name of its own defense, the United States and the European Union will do the same, leading to a second arms race. It is also likely that robots with non lethal weapons will be rented or purchased by a country to keep the peace as law enforcers. Growing anarchist forces, particularly based in Greece and Eastern Europe will oppose these new robots and vandalism and citizen non-compliance will be a major issue.

The use of Robot Flys will revolutionize Urban combat.

See also War Technology.

Machine-gun equipped robot developed by Samsung (video)] battle field extraction assist robot (BEAR) Big Dog Add a photo to this galleryedit Technical challengesHands And Grips Miniaturization edit Timeline Scenario:Robotics

Developments related to robotics from the NISTEP 2030 report:

2013-2014 — agricultural robots 2013-2017 — robots that care for the elderly 2017 — medical robots performing low-invasive surgery 2017-2019 — household robots Unknown — Nanorobot US Department of Defense plans:

2015 — to have one third of its fighting capacity provided by robots 2035 — to have first completely autonomous robot soldiers on the battlefield edit Robotics in 2020 Robots will be commonplace: in home, factories, agriculture, building & construction, undersea, space, mining, hospitals and streets for repair, construction, maintenance, security, entertainment, companionship, care.

Purposes of these Robots:

Robotized space vehicles and facilities Anthropomorphic general-purpose robots with hands like humans used for factory jobs - Intelligent robots for unmanned plants - Totally automated factories will be commonplace. Robots for guiding blind people Robots for almost any job in home or hospital, including Robo-surgery. Housework robots for cleaning, washing etc - Domestic robots will be small, specialized and attractive, e.g. cuddly Properties of these robots:

Autonomous, with environmental awareness sensors Self diagnostic self repairing Artificial brains with ten thousand or  ±==iREX== International Robot Exhibition (IREX), organized by Japan Robot Association (JARA) [1], is a biennal robot exhibition since 1973, which features state-of-the art robot technologies and products. [2] cat monstors

edit See also Domestic robot Exoskeleton Fastest Lego Robotic Arm edit Links List of robotics projects Overview of robotics - brief but complete (in Russian) Robot whiskers - 3D resolution achieved with a low-cost mechanical sensor. Investigation of social robots - Robots that mimic human behaviors and gestures. Wired's guide to the '50 best robots ever', a mix of robots in fiction (Hal, R2D2, K9) to real robots (Roomba, Mobot, Aibo). RobotNet has its finger on the pulse of recent developments in robotics. Robotic Nation How robots will affect our economy. Communist Robot Daily robot news and a substantial robot database. ANDROID WORLD american association for artificial intelligence Presentation on robotics vision (fr)RobotixA new but huge robotic community. Includes tutorials, a forum, and much more! edit References↑ http://www.jara.jp/e/ ↑ http://www.irex2007.jp/ENG/index.html