Whether driving on the highway or walking down the street, we pick up on both deliberate signals and unconscious cues to predict what other people are going to do and act accordingly. But robots have trouble following each other around, for example, when a leader turns a corner and disappears from sight. Researchers at UC Davis have come up with a control system that allows a robot to pick up on cues that the leader is about to turn, predict where it is going and follow it.

“The following problem is a quite fundamental problem in robotics,” said Sanjay Joshi, associate professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at UC Davis. Robots that are better at following could be easier for people to work with, he said. A hospital robot could follow a doctor around the wards.

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There are big changes ahead in social interactions, robotics and improvements in the ability of computer to sense the real world, according to Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel Corporation.

Rattner explained: “The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago. There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not so distant future.”

In his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Rattner looked at how technology is xpected to bring man an machine closer together by 2050.

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A new tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), is being used by British troops to patrol the skies of the Upper Sangin Valley in southern Afghanistan, helping to identify enemy threats and protect soldiers as they go about there work.

The Desert Hawk III is one of many assets that are employed to help seek out enemy fighters and one of the newest UAVs that the Royal Artillery use. The UAV provides an over-watch capability for soldiers patrolling from Forward Operating Base (FOB) Inkerman near Sangin.

Lance Bombardier Ricky Talbot, explained: “It’s a mini UAV; it provides reconnaissance for the FOB and over looks patrols. If the FOB wants us to check any vulnerable points or firing points we can easily check them with the Dessert Hawk.”

The Desert Hawk can be launched by just throwing it into the wind, but the gunners have learnt that for the best take off it is beat to gain speed before launching and so they launch it from the back of a quad bike. The UAV flies itself by inputting a route onto a digital map and a GPS within the aircraft follows that route. An operator can also fly the UAV using a simple games console hand controller.

At the end of the flight, the reconnaissance vehicle lands itself and, when it hits the ground, intentionally breaks into nine parts to minimise the stress on the aircraft. Different payloads can be bolted onto the UAV which gives the user alternative cameras and views to look at. The footage can be viewed live on the screen of a conventional laptop and also recorded to allow playback for commanders.

OC Robotics has developed a snake-arm robot that is only 12.5mm in diameter. The arm is the smallest snake-arm robot to date and uncoils out of a briefcase-sized box where it is stowed.

The arm is 610mm in length, with longer arms under development, and was designed for the US Department of Defense who needed a way of inspecting and working inside confined or cluttered spaces.

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Like a deep-sea bloodhound, Sentry, the newest in an elite group of unmanned submersibles able to operate on their own in demanding and rugged environments, has helped scientists pinpoint optimal locations for two observation sites of a pioneering seafloor laboratory being planned off Washington and Oregon.

Successful selection of the two sites is a crucial step in developing an extensive sensor network above and below the seafloor on the Juan de Fuca Plate, according to John Delaney, University of Washington oceanographer and chief scientist for a two-week mapping expedition.

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A robot controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons has been developed by a team at the University of Reading.

This cutting edge research is the first step to examine how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data. The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stoke and brain injury.

The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.

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Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, are set to explore the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes and find out what lives in a ‘lost world’ five kilometres beneath the Caribbean, using the UK’s newest research ship, RRS James Cook. From the ship, the team will send the remotely-operated vehicle Isis, and new robot submarine, Autosub6000 into the abyss.

In two expeditions over three years, the researchers will look for new geological features and new species of marine life in the rift on the seafloor.

Team leader, Dr. Jon Copely explained: “The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on our plant, so we need to understand its patterns of life.

“Deep-sea exploration has also given us new cancer treatment and better fibre-optic cables for the internet, both thanks to deep sea creatures.”

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a robotic surgical assistant with tiny adhesive hands, which will allow doctors to see what’s going on in a particular area inside the body of a patient.

Pill bots are not new. For many years doctors have used tiny machines, often attached to a camera, to see what is going on inside a patient, however, it is the adhesive hands which make this product unique.

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War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though, it is Packbot from the iRobot Corporation.

Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis’s Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the Army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020. Of course, they aren’t envisioning robotic soldiers from movies like “Star Wars” and “I, Robot.”

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A puppet with robotic features, Heart Robot is covered with sensors that respond to movement and touch. It responds to loud noises and agitation by appearing to become more anxious – it tenses up and its heart beats faster, while as its environment becomes less worrying, it relaxes and calms down.

The Heart Robot project has brought together researchers from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of West England (UWE), circus performers, artists, model makers, puppeteers and experts in animatronics.

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Dr Tony Belpaeme has been awarded £165,000 by the EPSRC to study how robots can learn concepts from humans, and how that knowledge can be passed on to other robots.

Researchers at the University of Plymouth, are to build two robots that will learn the meanings of words through interacting with people, much in the same way that young children learn conceptual knowledge from hearing adults speak to them about objects, relations and actions.

It takes children three years to master a few hundred words and related concepts – the duration of this project, however, the researchers hope to speed up this process of word-concept learning by using training more than one robot, and so reducing the training time needed, and then downloading the missing knowledge from one robot to the other. Such ‘telepathic’ access to concepts is impossible for humans: we need to resort to pointing out examples of concepts and speaking about them, but direct transfer should be easy to arrange for robots. However, just copying information from one robot to another will almost certainly upset the conceptual knowledge already present in the receiving robot. To avoid this, direct transfer of conceptual knowledge needs to proceed with care in order to not disturb already present knowledge.

The project has two main aims.

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Engineers at the University of Kitakyushu, have developed ‘Tai-robot-kun’, a 7kg robotic sea bream covered with realistic-looking hand-painted scales.

The robotic fish features a propulsion system that allows it to move its tail and drift silently through the water like a real fish. It can swim for an hour on a full battery charge, and relies on a ballast system, similar to that used in a submarine, to adjust its depth and buoyancy.

According to University of Kitakyushu professor Ikuo Yamamoto, the robot can easily be mass produced, fitted with various cameras and sensors, and released into the sea to perform a range of oceanographic survey tasks, without alarming sea life.

Scientists hope to launch specialised space robots with the ability to think for themselves by 2020.

Currently all of the machines and rovers on Mars and around space are controlled by humans sending them instructions. Virtually everything is a command which must be given. This project, led by Wolfgang Fink, senior researcher, California Institute of Technology, aims to turn over a lot of the decision making to the robots. It would allow NASA to use their workforce more effectively, and speed up the process of researching space.

The robots could also reduce the necessity of humans in dangerous space missions that require on the spot reactions, and could ultimately eliminate the need for humans in space.