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The Umbilical Link of Man to Robot
WORCESTER, Mass. — Atlas doesn’t shrug. But he teeters, loses his grip, stutters and staggers.
His task one afternoon is to clear a debris field. After many agonizing moments, in a set of abrupt and jerky movements, he crouches and with painstaking precision manages to grasp a two-by-four board and then drop it to his right. At the rate he is moving, completing the chore might take days.
Atlas in this case is an imposing, six-foot-tall humanoid robot that evokes the bipedal “Star Wars” robot C-3PO. It stands in a cluttered robotics laboratory here at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where a team of students, engineers and software hackers are training the 330-pound bundle of sensors, computers, metal struts, joints and cables.
Seven teams are working with Atlas robots, manufactured by Boston Dynamics, a small military-funded research firm based in Waltham, Mass. Like the others, the Worcester team is preparing for a December contest held by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The contest is meant to accelerate work in the field of robotics by prototyping machines that can work effectively and autonomously in extreme emergencies, like the failure of a nuclear power plant.
The vision evokes decades of sci-fi movies like “I, Robot” in which self-directed walking machines glide through the world with grace and precision. At the moment the gap between that dream and reality is daunting.
The immensity of the challenge is underscored by the fact that, here in the lab, Atlas remains tethered — “on belay,” in the mountain climbing sense. Like a toddler learning to walk, it wears a safety harness, and whenever it moves, its human operators, equipped with safety glasses, position themselves behind a transparent plastic enclosure.
The care is warranted. If the robot did keel over, it would not be like a human football player hitting the turf. It would be more like a car crash.
And with each Atlas valued at roughly $2 million, the roboticists are going to elaborate lengths to make sure that doesn’t happen.
While there are smaller and lighter autonomous robots like Honda’s Asimo, or the South Korean Hubo, that do move around unaided, it is nearly certain that Atlas will never wander freely among humans. Each of its arms weighs dozens of pounds and feels like a metal baseball bat.
And when Atlas works, it howls. A hydraulic compressor screams at a decibel level just below Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety limits.
“It scares me,” said Matt DeDonato, the 26-year-old engineering leader of the W.P.I. team. “I don’t get close to it when it is operating.”
One member of the team holds the belay rope, and another stands guard by a large red emergency stop button, while the robot controller sits in front of a large computer screen. It displays a 3-D image, called a “point cloud,” that is generated by the robot’s laser range finder, which measures distance and maps objects.
With a keyboard and a mouse, the operator can issue commands to the robot, from walking to more incremental movements like opening and closing the three fingers of the machine’s hand.
To temper expectations for Atlas, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is describing the first event to be held in December at Homestead-Miami Speedway as a “preliminary” trial. Teams will compete on a set of separate tasks like driving, closing a valve, crossing a rubble field and climbing a staircase. A year later they will compete at more complex tasks for a $2 million prize.
The teams will have the option of either controlling their robots manually or programming some of their actions to operate autonomously. Teams that choose to control their robots entirely by hand will be penalized, however, because the contest judges will intermittently limit the amount of wireless network bandwidth, occasionally blurring the controller’s view of what the robot is up to.
With just two months until the first competition, the teams are racing to program the robots just to complete the tasks, much less do them quickly.
“We’ve only had two or three months to play with our toys,” said Chris Atkeson, a professor in the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, a partner of W.P.I. “A graduate student usually has five years to do these things.”
The teams’ success will be determined largely by how well they program autonomous skills in the robots in the coming months. Mr. DeDonato, for example, said he was envious of another campus team, which in cooperation with Drexel University is programming a Hubo robot. That team has a sophisticated algorithm designed by the W.P.I. roboticistDmitry Berenson, making it possible for the robot to use both arms simultaneously to close a valve.
“I wish we had that code,” Mr. DeDonato said.
For its part, Atlas would probably shrug — if only it could. But it can’t. Suspended in the lab and awaiting its controller’s digital commands, it is also missing the shoulder joint necessary for that motion.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/science/robot-games-a-challenge-for-the-machines-and-the-controllers.html
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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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