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12-Year-Old Developer Is a Robot-Building Genius
Rohan Agrawal builds robots — and he's not even a teenager yet. While most kids his age likely spent their summer playing video games or on the monkey bars, the 12-year-old wunderkind tinkered away at an internship making robots from scratch.
The pre-teen spent the last few months at OLogic, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company known for designing robots for Google and Disney. While there, Agrawal built a device capable of autonomously delivering bags of potato chips throughout the office.
"I'm self taught," says Agrawal, who started programming at age 4, and tells Mashable his first language was HTML. "My mom showed me Google once and I was really fascinated by it. I asked her how it works and she told me you use this thing called HTML."
He started studying coding, and by age 5 built his first basic website. Soon thereafter, a trip to Cuptertino's electronic flea market sparked his interest in hardware.
His parents, both engineers, bought him a digital circuit book and a kit, and he started tinkering. He says he built all of the examples in the book, hoping not to blow anything up. But he was only 6 years old at this point, and there were some accidents. Luckily, no one got hurt.
The young Agrawal refined his skills by attending a robotics club. At age 9 he got a ham radio (a small, experimental communication device) license for his birthday. This led him to learn about Arduino boards, the programmable mini computer controllers he would use to create basic robots. Soon he was building devices like a small robot capable of finding an object on a table, and pushing it to a shoe box goal at the end of the table. Simple creations, but light years ahead of metal erector sets or Legos.
At the age of 10 he joined the creative group Hacker Dojo, where he worked with a team whose goal was to build robots for under $500; a challenge, considering how expensive parts and hardware can be.
Sensing his son needed more stimulus, Agrawal's father reached out to OLogic through the Hacker Dojo, and asked if young Rohan could attend a summer internship. The company accepted.
While at OLogic, Agrawal built a variation of the roomba, the iRobot-made autonomous navigation device used for sweeping and vacuuming. Agrawal's machine is a play on that — but instead of cleaning room-to-room, it goes into offices and delivers snacks.
"That's how I got the idea for the autonomous chip robots," he says. "All you have to do is type in a command and it runs a program so it will automatically drive around and randomly select an audience. I'm working on getting it to see if there's anybody in the room. If there isn't, it will leave and won't wait."
The machine works through an existing program called SLAM, which stands for simultaneous location and mapping. It allows sensors on the device to create maps that see and avoid obstacles.
OLogic's vice president of engineering, Mike Thompson, who worked one-on-one with Agrawal, said having such a young intern was "kind of an experiment on our part." But the young developer "absolutely stunned us with what he knew."
"He has an insatiable curiosity about everything robotics," Thompson says. "The challenge for us was keeping one to two steps ahead of him and keeping him busy."
OLogic couldn't pay him because of his age, and instead bought him lunch everyday. Thompson says he would hire Agrawal if given the chance. Here's a video of Agrawal in action at OLogic:
With the internship over, Agrawal is back at work in his mini-studio, a converted garage with a soldering iron and scattered electronics.
The rest of the time he's at the hacker dojo, where he mentors other kids, most of whom are older .
Agrawal, who says he's never seen the classic robot apocalypse films Terminator or Blade Runner, says he's looking forward to coming innovations, especially Google's driverless cars. He says he wants a robot "that can cook so he can make snacks." A robot like that would cost at least $100,000, he says, and the machine "would need highly dexterous arms with super precision."
Still years from college, he says he wants to pursue robotics professionally — or computer programming.
Agrawal's advice to other young, creative minds? "If you're interested in something, don't be scared to get into it."
Image: Vivek Agrawal
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/09/12/robot-developer/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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