Science Article

With the relentless march of technological progress, robots and other automated systems are getting ever smarter. At the same time they are also being given greater responsibilities, driving cars, helping with childcareMovie Camera, carrying weapons, and maybe soon even pulling the trigger.

But should they be trusted to take on such tasks, and how can we be sure that they never take a decision that could cause unintended harm?

So are there things we can do to minimise the risks? Wallach and Allen take a look at six strategies that could reduce the danger from our own high-tech creations.

Keep them in low-risk situations

Make sure that all computers and robots never have to make a decision where the consequences can not be predicted in advance.

Likelihood of success: Extremely low. Engineers are already building computers and robotic systems whose actions they cannot always predict.

Do not give them weapons

Likelihood of success: Too late. Semi-autonomous robotic weapons systems, including cruise missiles and Predator drones, already exist. A few machine-gun-toting robots were sent to Iraq and photographed on a battlefield, though apparently were not deployed.

However, military planners are very interested in the development of robotic soldiers, and see them as a means of reducing deaths of human soldiers during warfare.

Give them rules like Asimov's 'Three Laws of Robotics'

Likelihood of success: Moderate. Isaac Asimov's famous rules are arranged hierarchically: most importantly robots should not harm humans or through inaction allow harm to them, of secondary importance is that they obey humans, while robotic self-preservation is the lowest priority.

However, Asimov was writing fiction, not building robots. In story after story he illustrates problems that would arise with even these simple rules, such as what the robot should do when orders from two people conflict.

Give them rules like Asimov's 'Three Laws of Robotics'

Likelihood of success: Moderate. Isaac Asimov's famous rules are arranged hierarchically: most importantly robots should not harm humans or through inaction allow harm to them, of secondary importance is that they obey humans, while robotic self-preservation is the lowest priority.

However, Asimov was writing fiction, not building robots. In story after story he illustrates problems that would arise with even these simple rules, such as what the robot should do when orders from two people conflict.

Sometimes identifying the best option under a given rule can be extremely difficult. For example, determining which course of action leads to the greatest good would require a tremendous amount of knowledge, and an understanding of the effects of actions in the world. Making such calculations would require time and a great deal of computing power.

Educate robots like children

Machines that learn as they "grow up" could develop sensitivity to the actions that people consider to be right and wrong.

Likelihood of success: Promising, although this strategy requires a few technological breakthroughs. While researchers have created robots able to learn in similar ways to humansMovie Camera, the tools presently available are very limited.

Make machines master emotion

Human-like faculties such as empathy, emotions, and the capacity to read non-verbal social cues should give robots much greater ability to interact with humans. Work has already started on equipping domestic robots with such faculties.

Likelihood of success: Developing emotionally sensitive robots would certainly help implement the previous three solutions discussed. Most of the information we use to make choices and cooperate with others derives from our emotions, as well as our capacity to read gestures and intentions and imagine things from another person's point of view.

Site reference : http://www.newscientist.com/

AT FIRST it's just noise: a stream of incoherent sounds, burbling away. But, after a few minutes, a fully formed word suddenly emerges: "red". Then another: "box". In this way, a babbling robot learns to speak its first real words, just by chatting with a human.

Ba, ba, ba, brick (Image: Pete Stevens)

Seeing this developmental leap in a machine may lead to robots that speak in a more natural, human-like way, and help uncover how children first start to make sense of language.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 months children move from babbling strings of syllables to uttering actual words. It's a necessary step en route to acquiring full language. Once a few "anchor" words have been established, they provide clues as to where words may start and finish and so it becomes easier for a child to learn to speak.

Inspired by this process, a team led by computer scientist Caroline Lyon at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, programmed their iCub humanoid robot, called DeeChee, with almost all the syllables that exist in English – around 40,000 in total. This allowed it to babble rather like a baby, by arbitrarily stringing syllables together.

The researchers also enlisted 34 people to act as teachers, who were told to treat DeeChee as if it were a child. DeeChee took part in an 8-minute dialogue with each teacher. Between each session, its memory was saved, wiped and reset, so that the experiment started anew with each teacher. At the outset of each dialogue, each of the syllables in DeeChee's lexicon had an identical score.

This learning by imitation was then reinforced by encouraging remarks from the teacher when DeeChee spoke a recognisable word. DeeChee was programmed to detect these comments and give extra points to the syllables that preceded the teacher's approval. Inevitably, some nonsense syllables would get extra points too. But as this process was repeated, only those syllables that made up words would keep showing up in strings that gained approval.

Though the robot was still uttering nonsense syllables, towards the end of the 8 minutes, real words kept popping up more often than if DeeChee were still selecting syllables at random.

Right now, DeeChee's speech is a far cry from full-blown language, but starting from babble could be the best way to create robots that speak naturally.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038236

Site reference : http://www.newscientist.com/

The European Space Agency is continuing to prepare for the launch of its Gaia spacecraft set for 2013. Gaia's mission will see it creating a 3D map of a billion stars in the Milky Way using a 1.5-gigapixel camera.

In this photo, taken at the EADS CASA test facility in Madrid, Spain, checks are being made on Gaia's 1.5-metre-wide antenna panel to ensure data will reach Earth safely. The foam spikes on the walls of the test room block radio signals to simulate space. Electronic steering will ensure the antenna is always directed towards its target while the spacecraft rotates in space as it maps the stars, asteroids, extrasolar planets and other objects.

After launch, Gaia will take up an orbit around the sun 1.5 million kilometres beyond, but in pace with, Earth's to minimise the distance the weak signal has to travel. During its initial five-year mission, Gaia will send an estimated 200 terabytes of data to radio dishes in Spain and Australia. A working antenna is obviously central to downloading this data safely.

What's special?

Gaia will rely on the proven principles of ESA’s Hipparcos mission to create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a thousand million stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. Gaia will also map the motions of stars, which encode their origins and evolution. Gaia will provide the detailed physical properties of each star observed, revealing luminosity, temperature, gravity and composition. This huge stellar census will provide the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.

Gaia will achieve its goals by repeatedly measuring the positions of all objects down to magnitude 20 (about 400 000 times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye). Onboard object detection will ensure that variable stars, supernovae, other transient celestial events and minor planets will all be detected and catalogued to this faint limit. For all objects brighter than magnitude 15 (4000 times fainter than the naked eye limit), Gaia will measure their positions to an accuracy of 24 microarcseconds. This is comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 km. It will allow the nearest stars to have their distances measured to the extraordinary accuracy of 0.001%. Even stars near the Galactic centre, some 30 000 light-years away, will have their distances measured to within an accuracy of 20%.

Journey

Gaia will map the stars from an orbit around the Sun, at a distance of 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit. This special location, known as the L2 Lagrangian point, keeps pace with Earth as we orbit the Sun.

L2 offers a stable thermal environment, a clear view of the Universe because the Sun, Earth and Moon are always outside the instruments’ fields of view, and a moderate radiation environment. An operational lifetime of five years is planned.
 

Site reference : http://www.esa.int/, http://www.newscientist.com/

The first concepts of Nanotechnology

The first use of the concepts in 'nano-technology' (but predating use of that name) was in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959.

Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important, etc. This basic idea appears plausible, and exponential assembly enhances it with parallelism to produce a useful quantity of end products.

Today, in the young field of nanotechnology, scientists and engineers are taking control of atoms and molecules individually, manipulating them and putting them to use with an extraordinary degree of precision. Word of the promise of nanotechnology is spreading rapidly, and the air is thick with news of nanotech breakthroughs.

One of the most exciting technological advance in the world today is in the field of nanotechnology. Governments and bussines are investing billions of dollars in it. Public awareness of nanotech is clearly on the rise, too, partly because references to it are becoming more common in popular culture-with mentions in movies, books, video games, and television.

What is nanotechnology and how is it useful to us?

Some uses of nantechnology include :

China sent its first female astronaut into space on a mission to manually dock the Shenzhou- 9 spacecraft with an orbiting laboratory as part of the country’s plan to build a space station by 2020.

More than 50 female astronauts from seven countries have gone into space to date. The longest space flight by a female astronaut lasted 188 days. All countries that have completed manned space missions have attached great significance to their respective first female astronauts' maiden space flights, including the former Soviet Union's first female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman astrianut in space, and Iranian-American Anousheh Ansari, the first private-sector female space explorer. Now the name of Liu Yang will be added to space history books.

Liu Yang, 33, is a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force major. She was a veteran pilot with 1,680 hours of flying experience and the deputy head of a flight unit of the PLA's Air Force before being recruited as a potential taikonaut in May 2010. Air-force pilot Liu Yang and two male astronauts blasted off at 6:37 p.m. Beijing time yesterday from Jiuquan in the northwestern Gansu province, according to a live broadcast on China’s Central Television. 

China will launch its Shenzhou-9 manned spacecraft at 6:37 p.m. Saturday (6:37 a.m. in Washington), if the launch preperations continue on schedule. The three-member taikonaut for the Shenzhou 9 mission is Jing Haipeng, Liu Wang and Liu Yang.

They will complete an automated docking with the Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace,” laboratory module in two days and will then attempt a manual docking that is considered a major step in the space station program, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

Chinese state media have lauded Liu’s accomplishments during the past week, framing her selection as part of the country’s broader push to expand its space program while other nations cut back. China aims to put a person on the moon by 2020 as well as operate a permanent manned space station.

(continued)

 

Precision surgeons

Operating on the human body requires high skill but also great control, something robots can provide. The idea of robotic surgery prompted early fears of unsupervised robots let loose to operate, but the reality is that robots now assist surgeons to perform precision procedures. The most successful of these is arguably the da Vinci robotic surgical system, which is used for keyhole surgery, to operate on anything from gall bladder removals and brain surgery to heart bypasses.

Similarly, tiny, wireless and robotic camera-capsules have been used diagnostically, by allowing them to pass through a patient's digestive system. Others have been designed to move about by remote control in the abdominal cavity, beaming images back to the surgeon, or even taking biopsy samples. Robot hands have even been developed to scan for breast cancer.

Actuators and sensors

But despite all the successes, there are still many challenges in robotics. These include producing better actuators (which control how robots move), sensors (which allow them to detect their environment) and ultimately making bots much smarter. Current motors, and hydraulic or pneumatic actuators, are either too weak, or too bulky and noisy. 

Bipedal and humanoid robots have proved a particular problem. Robots on wheels, or those that move like insects, have found it much easier to balance and get around.

And while much early research in robotics focused on using sonar sensors because they were cheap and easy to use, the focus today is on the more challenging, yet richer, vision-based navigation systems.

Similarly, while there is much research on making robotic arms and hands, the difficulty lies in making electronic skin sensitive enough to detect fragile or slippery objects by touch alone. A robot that mimics human speech is also under development.

The ultimate test perhaps is robot soccer. This is driving development in just about every area of robotics from the ability to run and kick a ball to communicating and demonstrating teamwork. The grand aim is to have a team of humanoid robots that can beat the best human soccer team in the world by 2050.

LIKE PCs, robots may soon become a key part of our everyday lives, but they present unique communication challenges that PCs do not. So roboticists are turning to people who have already solved many of these problems - actors, animators and dancers. 

Old Robot

The Merriam Webster Dictionary, 1998, defines robotics as “technology dealing with the design, construction, and operation of robots”.

Robotics encompasses such diverse areas of technology as mechanical, electrical, and electronic systems; computer hardware; and computer software. 

Ever since the Czech writer Karel Èapek first coined the term "robot" in 1921, there has been an expectation that robots would some day deliver us from the drudgery of hard work. The word - from the Czech "robota", for hard labour and servitude - described intelligent machines used as slaves in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

Today, over one million household robots, and a further 1.1 million industrial robots, are operating worldwide. Robots are used to perform tasks that require great levels of precision or are simply repetitive and boring. Many also do jobs that are hazardous to people, such as exploring shipwrecks, helping out after disasters, studying other planets and defusing bombs or mines.

Domestic invasion

Despite the longevity of the robot concept, robotic butlers that roam our homes and relieve us from housework still seemed far from reality until very recently. Instead, the vast majority of robots worked in factories performing the industrial functions of brainless machines.

However, a combination of increased computing power and advances made in the field of artificial intelligence, or AI, have now made software smart enough to make robots considerably more useful.

Suddenly people were happy to pay for robots that had no specific functional value. Instead these bots, such as Sony's Aibo robotic dog and its robo-pups served as robo-pets and companions, rather than slaves.

 
Movers and shakers

Nao Robot

And while we often think of robots being humanoid, such as Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrio, there is as much interest, if not more, in emulating other creatures like insects, lobsters, orang-utans, alligators, snakes and fish. A robot guard dragon has even been created.

Whether they have two legs, many legs, or no legs at all, considerable advances have been made in robot locomotion, including bipedal walking, rambling, crawling, rock-climbing, bouncing, slithering and swimming.

Robot wars

One area where even more advances in autonomy have been made is the development of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. These are essentially remotely-controlled spy planes that are capable of flying themselves if they lose contact with their pilot. These planes can also be used to monitor forest fires. Some robots have even learnt to fly of their own accord.

Mars Rover robot

The Pentagon has started arming some UAVs, making them capable of responding with firepower against aggressive attacks - so-called unmanned combat vehicles, or UCVs. Robots that act as battlefield spies have also been designed.

In addition, NASA has already sent robotic rovers to Mars, developed robotic dirt scoopers, "flying eyes" and probes for interplanetary exploration and even sent droids off to try to explore asteroids. Space probes such as Huygens (which landed on Titan) and Russia's Venera 9 (which landed on Venus) are sometimes considered robots too. A robotic rover has even been used to explore Egyptian pyramids.

A military reconnaissance robot being developed at a British lab can keep moving even if it gets damaged on the battlefield. When any of the snake-like robot's "muscle" segments are damaged, clever software "evolves" a different way for it to wriggle across any terrain. The serpentine spy is a research project funded by aerospace company BAE Systems to make a low-cost military robot that can be dropped out of helicopters to carry out reconnaissance missions. 

A self-healing robot has long been a dream of robotics engineers, not least because the machines are notoriously unreliable and absolutely terrible at dealing with unforeseen circumstances. The snakebot is made up of modular vertebral units that "snap" together to form a snake-like body (see picture). 

Shape-memory Alloy

Each unit contains three separate "muscles" running down its length. The muscles are made out of wires of a shape-memory alloy called nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium whose crystal structure shrinks when an electric current is applied to it. Usefully, it regains its original shape and length once the current is removed.

To make the snakebot move in a particular direction, a current is applied to certain wires. When the current is removed, the wires spring back and the robot will jump forward.

The software for making a robot wriggle like a snake is fairly straightforward. But ensuring that the snake will keep moving even if a segment is damaged is trickier, and relies on different segments taking over from the damaged ones.

Genetic Algorithm

The program starts off with a population of 20 digital chromosomes, with each consisting of an initially random binary digit that corresponds to a muscle wire - where a 1 represents its activation and a 0 its deactivation. Each of these chromosomes forms the basis of a series of movements in the robot.

The two best chromosomes are then saved, the remainder are mixed up or randomly mutated and the process is repeated. After a number of generations, the amount of improvement finally tends to taper off.

Bentley and his colleague Siavash Haroun Mahdavi at University College London borrowed a trick from evolution to allow their robot to adaptive ability and so tend to give up the ghost when circumstances change.

So, they make a bot like snake, thr name of is SNAKEBOT.

Your DNA contains a set of instructions for "building" a human. These instructions are inscribed in the structure of the DNA molecule through a genetic code. DNA has no reason to feel special. For decades it seemed that only a handful of molecules could store genetic information and pass it on. But now synthetic biologists have discovered that six others can pull off the same trick, and there may be many more to find.

A host of alternative nucleic acids have been made in labs over the years, but no one has made them work like DNA.

This problem has now been cracked. "This unique ability of DNA and RNA to encode information can be implemented in other backbones," says Philipp Holliger of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.

Evolving XNA

Holliger's team focused on six XNAs (xeno-nucleic acids). DNA and RNA are made of a sugar, a phosphate and a base. The XNAs had different sugars, and in some of them the sugars are replaced with completely different molecules.

A key hurdle for the team was to create enzymes that could copy a gene from a DNA molecule to an XNA molecule, and other enzymes that could copy it back into DNA.

They started with enzymes that do this in DNA only. Over the years the team made incremental tweaks until they produced enzymes that could work on XNAs.

Once they had created these enzymes, they were able to store information in each of the XNAs, copy it to DNA, and copy it back into a new XNA. In effect, the first XNA passed its information on to the new one – albeit in a roundabout way.

This is the first time artificial molecules have been made to pass genes on to their descendants. Because the XNAs can do this, they are capable of evolution.

Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1217622

Tiny carbon nuggets in meteorites from Mars were formed by cooling magma, not left by ancient alien microbes. That's both good news and bad news for astrobiologists.

The 1996 discovery of carbonate structures in meteorite ALH-84001 – which travelled to Earth from Mars more than 13,000 years ago – was hailed at the time as evidence that alien microbes once lived on the red planet. However, subsequent studies of both the carbonate structures and tiny nuggets of macromolecular carbon (MMC) in the meteorite cast doubt on the claims.

Paradoxically, the find actually boosts prospects for finding signs of ancient life in Martian rocks. The carbon in MMC was originally chemically reduced – meaning it carries extra electrons and is quick to react. Such readily available and reactive carbon could have joined with other elements to create complex chemical molecules, perhaps even life.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) were planning a pair of joint missions to Mars that could have made important strides in the search for past or present life.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which was to launch in 2016, would have followed up on hints of methane discovered in the Martian atmosphere by previous missions. The gas is of particular interest as it is commonly produced by microbes on Earth.

ExoMars ( Mars Rover)

The ExoMars rover, which had been slated for launch in 2018, would have drilled beneath the Martian surface to get samples of pristine material, possibly including complex carbon-based molecules that could have provided clues to past Martian life.

The Mars budget was slashed as a result, with NASA's contribution to the flagship ExoMars mission the main casualty.

NASA still hopes to mount a less costly mission to Mars in 2018, but it might not land on the surface. The agency has not specified exactly where it would go, but orbiters tend to be less expensive than rovers.

The proposed budget also confirms that NASA plans to continue building the James Webb Space Telescope with a launch targeted for 2018, and continue payments to private space companies like SpaceX to help them develop space taxis that could take crew to the International Space Station.

NASA wants $830 million for space taxi development in 2013. It asked for a similar amount in 2012, but Congress cut it by more than half, to about $400 million.