In a recent re-running of the Milgram experiment, a German researcher replaced the human subjects on the other side of the switch with a robot and discovered that humans assigned to switch the robot off have qualms about doing so when the robot, in a sense, pleads for its life. The experiment follows another staged [...]
RethinkRobots has the right idea: an anthropomorphic robot that is easy to train and can be bought for $22,000. Check out this video from Spectrum. And, they didn’t name him Robby…
As my daughter gets older, she gets closer and closer to that moment when I get to try to convince her to be as fascinated with robots as I am. Lego Mindstorms already purchased for seven year old? Check. Bin full of old electrical motors and gears ready for spontaneous robot making? Check. Robot events? [...]
The possibility for robotics at home just got a lot more interesting. I have been following the development of the Pi Raspberry board, which promises the ability to have a basic computer for something like $25. (I imagine building a custom home file server with something like that, or even re-wiring an old laptop!) It [...]
Wired has a nice write-up on the new Arduino project boards which have graduated from 8-bit to 32-bit and are now ARM based. I am looking forward to having the time one day soon for me and Lily to play with robots of our own making.
It’s hard to say which is more interesting right now: Lego Mindstorms or the Arduino stuff. Once the book is done, I want to spend more time exploring both before deciding to invest in one — and they do represent an investment of money and time. I definitely want not only to play and learn [...]
At last week’s I/O Conference, Google had a variety of announcements, but the one that caught my attention was that they are releasing a developer’s kit to allow Android devices to interact with the Arduino platform. Long-time readers of Make magazine know about Arduino: it’s an open source hardware platform. Think of it as the [...]
In the process of wondering in a recent issue of Asimov’s about what kinds of litigation robots will spawn in the near future, Robert Silverberg provides a terrific, brief history of fictional robots, from Gelula’s “Automaton” of 1931 to AT&T’s Zippy. I began looking around for more histories of robots, and of computers, too, and [...]